Liquid Tension Experiment was nothing more or less than Dream Theater's instrumentalists, with Tony Levin rather than John Myung on bass (if you're going to replace John Myung, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather have). While these instrumentals hang together only very loosely as "songs", they certainly display a technical deftness and understanding of what fans of the musicians want. Of the two releases, no song displays this better - blisteringly fast guitar and keyboard solos; Mike Portnoy's drumming was never better; Tony Levin somehow manages to keep up with it all, and show these young whippersnappers what an old guy can do - than "Another Dimension". While the Italianesque middle section - an accordion? - is a bit over-the-top, the song itself returns to its roots for an ending that will leave listeners ears bleeding.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
David Broder Likes Democrats Who Hate Democratic Policies
It's that simple.
What is "the vital center"? Broder never tells us. Is it the large majority of the American people who favor a public option on health care? Is it the large majority who has elected Barack Obama President in the belief that he really was different, that he was a leader, that change we could believe in would come? Is the vital center the 60% and more of the American people who detested George W. Bush and the Republicans so much they stripped the party of any power in 2006 and 2008?
I have defended the bill and the process that led to it, and the President's role in that process, throughout the entire health care reform debate. That job has been easier because the right went off the deep end this summer with the Tea Party/Birther movement, while the left showed a surprising lack of sympathy for the limits of Presidential power and influence. The former, for some reason, think Obama is a fledgling dictator, while the latter want him to be and decry his relative silence during much of the debate in Congress.
While the health care debate, for all the crazies and ignorant folk on the extremes seemed to dominate in the press, was actually an important civics lesson for those ignoring the screeching and paying attention to the details, we have ended up with the President battered, the Democratic base turning away, in particular, from the Congressional party, and the prospects of financial industry regulation far dimmer than they might have been. If Obama shows the same inability to enter the debate at strategic points, and display a willingness to act in support of legislative measures he supports (as he did with the public option), my guess is the "vital center" will not be the Democratic Party's main concern going in to next autumn's elections, but the liberals, activists, and particularly bloggers who make up the activist and publicist base of the part who may just vote with their butts.
Broder's political instincts have been bad for years; he famously wrote a column in 2007 in which he predicted that then-Pres. Bush, whose approval ratings had not been above 40% since the previous summer, was "poised for a comeback". He seemed oblivious to the palpable public anger at George W. Bush in particular and the Republican Party in general for its gross malfeasance while in power. He lectured Democrats not to be too liberal, to be Republicans while they governed (which, if the example had been followed, would have meant not doing much, and what they did do they did very badly), and lamenting the passing of an old guard that had a record of corruption and maladministration little matched in American history.
I think it safe to say the Democrats can ignore the advice of David Broder. Indeed, like Bill Kristol, a safe bet would be to do the opposite; Kristol is the only pundit operating today with a worse record of advice and prediction than Broder. What they cannot do is ignore the rising tide of frustration and even anger among the Democratic base at the Congressional, particularly Senate, Democrats for the way they handled health care reform. If this is the way Harry Reid's tenure as majority leader is to continue, it might be wise to consider getting more and better Democrats in power, so that a change of leadership can come.
Don't listen to Bill Daley. Don't listen to David Broder. Listen to the people who actually voted for the Party and what they want in their elected representatives, what policies they want. That's the key to victory. No one elected either one of these folks to positions of authority. They can be ignored easily enough.
What is "the vital center"? Broder never tells us. Is it the large majority of the American people who favor a public option on health care? Is it the large majority who has elected Barack Obama President in the belief that he really was different, that he was a leader, that change we could believe in would come? Is the vital center the 60% and more of the American people who detested George W. Bush and the Republicans so much they stripped the party of any power in 2006 and 2008?
I have defended the bill and the process that led to it, and the President's role in that process, throughout the entire health care reform debate. That job has been easier because the right went off the deep end this summer with the Tea Party/Birther movement, while the left showed a surprising lack of sympathy for the limits of Presidential power and influence. The former, for some reason, think Obama is a fledgling dictator, while the latter want him to be and decry his relative silence during much of the debate in Congress.
While the health care debate, for all the crazies and ignorant folk on the extremes seemed to dominate in the press, was actually an important civics lesson for those ignoring the screeching and paying attention to the details, we have ended up with the President battered, the Democratic base turning away, in particular, from the Congressional party, and the prospects of financial industry regulation far dimmer than they might have been. If Obama shows the same inability to enter the debate at strategic points, and display a willingness to act in support of legislative measures he supports (as he did with the public option), my guess is the "vital center" will not be the Democratic Party's main concern going in to next autumn's elections, but the liberals, activists, and particularly bloggers who make up the activist and publicist base of the part who may just vote with their butts.
Broder's political instincts have been bad for years; he famously wrote a column in 2007 in which he predicted that then-Pres. Bush, whose approval ratings had not been above 40% since the previous summer, was "poised for a comeback". He seemed oblivious to the palpable public anger at George W. Bush in particular and the Republican Party in general for its gross malfeasance while in power. He lectured Democrats not to be too liberal, to be Republicans while they governed (which, if the example had been followed, would have meant not doing much, and what they did do they did very badly), and lamenting the passing of an old guard that had a record of corruption and maladministration little matched in American history.
I think it safe to say the Democrats can ignore the advice of David Broder. Indeed, like Bill Kristol, a safe bet would be to do the opposite; Kristol is the only pundit operating today with a worse record of advice and prediction than Broder. What they cannot do is ignore the rising tide of frustration and even anger among the Democratic base at the Congressional, particularly Senate, Democrats for the way they handled health care reform. If this is the way Harry Reid's tenure as majority leader is to continue, it might be wise to consider getting more and better Democrats in power, so that a change of leadership can come.
Don't listen to Bill Daley. Don't listen to David Broder. Listen to the people who actually voted for the Party and what they want in their elected representatives, what policies they want. That's the key to victory. No one elected either one of these folks to positions of authority. They can be ignored easily enough.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Hilarious
It is this post and the ensuing comment thread that make me refuse the label "intellectual".
These people need to seriously lighten up. What a bunch of doofuses.
For the record, Frank Herbert wrote Dune for a penny and a half a word as an ongoing serial in one of the pulp science fiction magazines. Anything else was just froth.
Don't even get me started on the very first comment. When someone takes themselves this seriously, all others should do is point and laugh.
These people need to seriously lighten up. What a bunch of doofuses.
For the record, Frank Herbert wrote Dune for a penny and a half a word as an ongoing serial in one of the pulp science fiction magazines. Anything else was just froth.
Don't even get me started on the very first comment. When someone takes themselves this seriously, all others should do is point and laugh.
My Mother's Evangelistic Outreach - Christmas, 1978
Because my mother is an exceedingly polite person, she tolerated a Jehovah's Witness coming around to bring The Watchtower to our house. Her patience, and that of the rest of us, was tested one year when the woman came to our house on Christmas Day one year. Perhaps on purpose, perhaps without thinking, this woman brought her daughter, no more than eight or nine years old.
Now, for those who may not know, Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas, considering all the trappings a form of idolatry. In to the midst of our pretty typical Christmas - a bunch of people sitting around on the floor in their pajamas with gifts overflowing - entered this woman to preach the Gospel of the impending demise of the Earth, offering us a place on the Witness' lifeboat.
My mother took one look at the expression on the child's face as she looked around at our house and did the unthinkable - she offered the young girl a present.
What happened next I do not know, because overwhelmed with embarrassment, I decided I had to go to the bathroom.
I do know we stopped getting The Watchtower after that.
In retrospect, however, I am proud of my mother. While gift giving isn't the essence of the season, it is a part of a certain approach to Christmas, a reflection of our own sense of thankfulness for the abundance with which we are blessed by a good God and the bounteous love that takes us out of ourselves and allows us to consider the feelings and thoughts of others. My mother saw this young girl looking upon us - not just the gifts, I would like to think, but the togetherness of us all gathered in our living room, just enjoying the pleasure of one another's company - and offered her a place in our celebration, in our circle of acceptance. Nothing could be more Christian.
May we all reach out to those outside our circle of love and community and invite them in, offer them a place to sit, a gift with no strings, and the sacrament of selfless giving. When you do so, remember Virginia Safford when you do, and her thoughtful offer to a young child one Christmas thirty years ago.
Now, for those who may not know, Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas, considering all the trappings a form of idolatry. In to the midst of our pretty typical Christmas - a bunch of people sitting around on the floor in their pajamas with gifts overflowing - entered this woman to preach the Gospel of the impending demise of the Earth, offering us a place on the Witness' lifeboat.
My mother took one look at the expression on the child's face as she looked around at our house and did the unthinkable - she offered the young girl a present.
What happened next I do not know, because overwhelmed with embarrassment, I decided I had to go to the bathroom.
I do know we stopped getting The Watchtower after that.
In retrospect, however, I am proud of my mother. While gift giving isn't the essence of the season, it is a part of a certain approach to Christmas, a reflection of our own sense of thankfulness for the abundance with which we are blessed by a good God and the bounteous love that takes us out of ourselves and allows us to consider the feelings and thoughts of others. My mother saw this young girl looking upon us - not just the gifts, I would like to think, but the togetherness of us all gathered in our living room, just enjoying the pleasure of one another's company - and offered her a place in our celebration, in our circle of acceptance. Nothing could be more Christian.
May we all reach out to those outside our circle of love and community and invite them in, offer them a place to sit, a gift with no strings, and the sacrament of selfless giving. When you do so, remember Virginia Safford when you do, and her thoughtful offer to a young child one Christmas thirty years ago.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Christmas
And there were in that same country shepherd . . .
As Linus says, that's what Christmas is all about - simple folk getting the word that something world-changing is happening even now, and they are both the witnesses and first heralds of something that will shake the foundations of the earth.
Simple folk. Shepherds and a country carpenter and his fiancee far from their home. An old man who was promised life until the arrival of the Messiah; an old prophetess who sees the baby and rejoices. A mother who takes all these wonders and signs and holds them to herself.
The joy of the season is in simplicity - the simplicity of the fact of God's presence; the simplicity of those who are the first to hear the Good News; the simplicity of that message of love and presence.
May God's presence be with all of you, not just in this season in which we rejoice, but all through the year as we celebrate Jesus' life, and ministry, and death and resurrection. May your day tomorrow be filled with happiness and laughter and song.
As Linus says, that's what Christmas is all about - simple folk getting the word that something world-changing is happening even now, and they are both the witnesses and first heralds of something that will shake the foundations of the earth.
Simple folk. Shepherds and a country carpenter and his fiancee far from their home. An old man who was promised life until the arrival of the Messiah; an old prophetess who sees the baby and rejoices. A mother who takes all these wonders and signs and holds them to herself.
The joy of the season is in simplicity - the simplicity of the fact of God's presence; the simplicity of those who are the first to hear the Good News; the simplicity of that message of love and presence.
May God's presence be with all of you, not just in this season in which we rejoice, but all through the year as we celebrate Jesus' life, and ministry, and death and resurrection. May your day tomorrow be filled with happiness and laughter and song.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Ethical Uprightness And Liberalism
I can't believe I'm jumping on this particular bandwagon. . .
Someone at NRO wrote something about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and all sorts of people are writing about it. A point missed - and it was a near thing, he almost got there - by Matt Yglesias concerns the question of the character of the Captain, Jean-Luc Picard. Now, I do not believe that the character traits of fictional persons, especially characters on on-going television series, are particularly interesting. Yet, since the subject is broached, I thought it might be important to note that I disagree almost entirely with Yglesias' characterization of Picard:
While I agree that Picard is an ethical individual, it precisely because he is a typical liberal type that he spends quite a bit of time in many, many episodes engaged in a kind of weird philosophical scrutiny of his own, and by extension the UFP's, various actions.
Just one example of many: In the episode "I, Borg", Picard is confronted with the ethical dilemma of a captured Borg. His hatred and fear of the Borg, and by extension his sense of duty in the face of a mortal threat to the UFP creates a conflict when this Borg, Third of Five, discovers, among other things, that he is an "I" (some of the hokiest, and really stupid smarmy liberalism crops up in this episode, with Dr. Crusher gushing about how the Borg is "lonely"; that kind of sentimental anthropomorphism makes me cringe). Picard struggles with the decision of whether or not to return "Hugh" (his adopted name) to the collective with what amounts to a computer virus that would render the Borg unable to operate. As Hugh insists he does not wish to return, yet this is an opportunity to destroy the biggest threat the Federation has faced, what is Picard to do?
With Hugh deciding that, in fact, he will return, with the addition of his own discovered individuality as the new virus the conflict ceases to an extent. In the wake of eight years of Bush Administration conservative foreign policy, however, Picard's mental self-abuse on the entire issue of what to do with a problem like Hugh reveals that he is not, in fact, a conservative at all. A characteristically conservative individual would have sensed no conflict between his duty to the Federation and his duty to the abstract proposition that all individuals of whatever type are of intrinsic moral worth, to be protected and honored at all times. Shoot, Dick Cheney would have shot Hugh in the face and hopes some of that experience would spread through the collective. Instead of that, Picard struggles with the contradictory mandates, ethical to their core, of his sense of duty as a military officer serving a democratic government and his sense of duty to the individual the Borg has become. The resolution, while interesting, lets Picard off the hook of responsibility.
Conservatism betrayed itself during the eight years of the Bush Administration by revealing that, at its core, it has no ethical sense at all, at least as that has been defined for the past 250 years or so. For Bush-style conservatives, one's duty is defined as a duty to authority, pure and simple, without recourse to the kind of namby-pamby self-analysis that Picard goes through frequently. There is a hierarchy of values, clear and definable, and conservatives easily enough figure out how to rank a sense of duty to them. In Picard, we have a kind of liberal pluralist, someone with an understanding of the more-than-occasional incommensurability of various ethical demands, and reveals through various episodes of the show that there is no final resolution, that each decision creates both new opportunities and problems (something Picard and the Enterprise crew discover in a two-part episode the next season, in which the newly-individuated Borg suddenly become an even greater threat through the intervention of Data's "brother", Lor). In light of the way events unfolded, was Picard's decision "correct"? While it might be possible to say, "No" - and there is a bit of that kind of thing in the midst of the two-part episode - my own sense is that Picard's original decision, ethically compromised as it was, was a good ethical compromise; neither he nor anyone else (except perhaps the writers on the show) could have predicted the results of the individuation of part of the Borg collective.
In any event, yes, Picard is a hard-ass, and a kind of ethically upright person we all wish we could be. Yet, he is both characteristically and temperamentally liberal.
Someone at NRO wrote something about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and all sorts of people are writing about it. A point missed - and it was a near thing, he almost got there - by Matt Yglesias concerns the question of the character of the Captain, Jean-Luc Picard. Now, I do not believe that the character traits of fictional persons, especially characters on on-going television series, are particularly interesting. Yet, since the subject is broached, I thought it might be important to note that I disagree almost entirely with Yglesias' characterization of Picard:
I think the right way to say this is that Picard is a conservative person living in a liberal socialist utopia. That’s not to say that he’s a closet version of an early 21st century American right-winger, someone who secretly yearns for the reintroduction of capitalism, religion, and the routine use of lethal violence. Instead, he’s a characterological conservative, someone who believes deeply in authority and tradition and who’s not inclined to subject the basic political values of the Federation to a lot of scrutiny.
While I agree that Picard is an ethical individual, it precisely because he is a typical liberal type that he spends quite a bit of time in many, many episodes engaged in a kind of weird philosophical scrutiny of his own, and by extension the UFP's, various actions.
Just one example of many: In the episode "I, Borg", Picard is confronted with the ethical dilemma of a captured Borg. His hatred and fear of the Borg, and by extension his sense of duty in the face of a mortal threat to the UFP creates a conflict when this Borg, Third of Five, discovers, among other things, that he is an "I" (some of the hokiest, and really stupid smarmy liberalism crops up in this episode, with Dr. Crusher gushing about how the Borg is "lonely"; that kind of sentimental anthropomorphism makes me cringe). Picard struggles with the decision of whether or not to return "Hugh" (his adopted name) to the collective with what amounts to a computer virus that would render the Borg unable to operate. As Hugh insists he does not wish to return, yet this is an opportunity to destroy the biggest threat the Federation has faced, what is Picard to do?
With Hugh deciding that, in fact, he will return, with the addition of his own discovered individuality as the new virus the conflict ceases to an extent. In the wake of eight years of Bush Administration conservative foreign policy, however, Picard's mental self-abuse on the entire issue of what to do with a problem like Hugh reveals that he is not, in fact, a conservative at all. A characteristically conservative individual would have sensed no conflict between his duty to the Federation and his duty to the abstract proposition that all individuals of whatever type are of intrinsic moral worth, to be protected and honored at all times. Shoot, Dick Cheney would have shot Hugh in the face and hopes some of that experience would spread through the collective. Instead of that, Picard struggles with the contradictory mandates, ethical to their core, of his sense of duty as a military officer serving a democratic government and his sense of duty to the individual the Borg has become. The resolution, while interesting, lets Picard off the hook of responsibility.
Conservatism betrayed itself during the eight years of the Bush Administration by revealing that, at its core, it has no ethical sense at all, at least as that has been defined for the past 250 years or so. For Bush-style conservatives, one's duty is defined as a duty to authority, pure and simple, without recourse to the kind of namby-pamby self-analysis that Picard goes through frequently. There is a hierarchy of values, clear and definable, and conservatives easily enough figure out how to rank a sense of duty to them. In Picard, we have a kind of liberal pluralist, someone with an understanding of the more-than-occasional incommensurability of various ethical demands, and reveals through various episodes of the show that there is no final resolution, that each decision creates both new opportunities and problems (something Picard and the Enterprise crew discover in a two-part episode the next season, in which the newly-individuated Borg suddenly become an even greater threat through the intervention of Data's "brother", Lor). In light of the way events unfolded, was Picard's decision "correct"? While it might be possible to say, "No" - and there is a bit of that kind of thing in the midst of the two-part episode - my own sense is that Picard's original decision, ethically compromised as it was, was a good ethical compromise; neither he nor anyone else (except perhaps the writers on the show) could have predicted the results of the individuation of part of the Borg collective.
In any event, yes, Picard is a hard-ass, and a kind of ethically upright person we all wish we could be. Yet, he is both characteristically and temperamentally liberal.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
When God Answers Prayer In Surprising Ways
The Senate vote on health care reform has raised, among other things, an interesting theological issue. What happens when God answers prayer, but in ways one neither expects nor desires?
Well, apparently, it was his fellow Oklahoman, James Inhofe whose absence seemed to fit the Divine plan quite nicely.
I should note that the Think Progress piece claims that Coburn prayed that a member of the Democratic caucus would not show up. The prayer, however, is pretty straightforward - Coburn just wants people to make sure someone doesn't make it. I think Inhofe's absence fits quite well.
[Sen. Tom] COBURN [R-OK]: What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray.
Well, apparently, it was his fellow Oklahoman, James Inhofe whose absence seemed to fit the Divine plan quite nicely.
I should note that the Think Progress piece claims that Coburn prayed that a member of the Democratic caucus would not show up. The prayer, however, is pretty straightforward - Coburn just wants people to make sure someone doesn't make it. I think Inhofe's absence fits quite well.
Monday, December 21, 2009
"This President just doesn't have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don't want to do"
Read the whole thing.
The passive-aggressive President for our time. It would be nice if he showed some kind of anatomical part that provided strength.
Mr. President - grow a pair.
The passive-aggressive President for our time. It would be nice if he showed some kind of anatomical part that provided strength.
Mr. President - grow a pair.
Christmas Music For Your Monday
John Rutter is a great composer of sacred music. Here are some samplings.
"Christmas Lullaby"
"Angels Carol"
OK, this is more an Advent Carol . . . A setting for the Magnificat:
"Christmas Lullaby"
"Angels Carol"
OK, this is more an Advent Carol . . . A setting for the Magnificat:
With A Mixture Of Joy And Envy . . .
I want anyone with more than one brain cell to read this fantastic piece on Oral Roberts by Phil Nugent. It is one of the best pieces of writing of any kind I have read in a very long time.
It is by turns, funny:
Brutal:
And always scrupulously honest about who, in fact, Roberts was:
It ends with an acknowledgment that, in his own peculiar way, Oral Roberts was more true to my own vision of what it means to be a Christian (which is both frightening and comforting):
It is by turns, funny:
As a Pentecostal, Oral spoke in tongues, praying every day with his wife in a mysterious, divinely inspired language that was half Captain Beefheart, half Teletubbies, usually delivered in the lyrical tones of someone who's just caught his dick in his zipper.
Brutal:
Oral, who wrote autobiographies like Li'l Wayne drops mixtapes, was given to reminiscing about the many times that he resurrected dead people at his live shows. You might wonder what the dead people were doing there, but it seems that, perhaps because of his awesome charisma, adults and children had a startling tendency to breathe their last while he was onstage. Oral once explained that he hated to show off like that but that having someone drop dead in the middle of a show can be very distracting and that he found it necessary to resurrect them so that he could continue to deliver the Lord's word.
And always scrupulously honest about who, in fact, Roberts was:
[I]t makes [Roberts] sound as if he could be neatly bracketed in the same category as Falwell and Jim and Tammy and the others who used the TV pulpit to cash in or reach for political power starting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Oral actually came from, and always kept one foot in, an older tent show tradition, and though he went into TV and used it as a money-raising tool with a vengeance, he was always a lot weirder, and, I suspect, considerably more sincere in his beliefs than people like the bullying demagogue Falwell or Jim and Tammy when they were on their crusade to make everything nice-nice.
It ends with an acknowledgment that, in his own peculiar way, Oral Roberts was more true to my own vision of what it means to be a Christian (which is both frightening and comforting):
[A]t least he could die with the knowledge that he was perhaps the last person in his profession who recognized the obvious truth that a man of God, rather than fitting in too cozily with the most well-heeled and respectable members of society, ought to be something of a lunatic. Babble us out of here, Oral!
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Christmas Memories - 1993
Do not neglect to show hospitality; by doing this, some have entertained angels unawares. Hebrews 13:2
Lisa came home from work on Christmas Eve and told me a story that has remained with me. She worked part time at Wagshal's Delicatessen. For those who may not have heard of it, it has a long, illustrious history in Washington,DC, serving Presidents and diplomats, Senators and journalists, students and local residents with the finest foods, the best sandwiches, and the most expensive smoked salmon that is worth every penny. I have always felt privileged that Lisa worked there, because it is a landmark of a sorts.
On that Christmas Eve, it was cold, but not bitter. It had been snowing off and on all day, as I recall, but not a whole lot of accumulation. In the midst of the hustle and bustle of extremely wealthy, important people getting deli platters and wines, marzipan and bagels, or just a sandwich to tide them over, a homeless man walked in to the deli. It was obvious to all that he had not cleaned himself recently. There was dried vomit and urine on his clothes. He might even not have known what kind of business he was entering; he might just have wanted to get warm for a few minutes.
The son of one of the owners, along with Lisa, saw this man, and the reaction of the shoppers in the small, crowded space, and acted. Mike came from around the counter, spoke to the man, and led him out the back door to the kitchen. Lisa made him a couple small sandwiches which she paid for. Mike took the man's coat, and offered him his own much nicer, finer coat. It was warmer, it was clean, and it was dry. The sandwiches were offered with some hot chocolate. The man thanked Mike and Lisa, and went out back on the stoop to eat. Mike came back in, and with this very busy delicatessen, crowded with last-minute shoppers getting things together for Christmas dinners and parties in some of the finest houses and for some of the most important folk in the most powerful city in the country, and wept because not one of these people had done anything other than turn away in disgust.
Of all the events that first Christmas we were a married couple - Lisa waking up with a fever; the small, Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree we somehow managed to get from Lowe's to our little apartment despite the ice, laughing all the way; our meager offerings to one another; the smallness of the day, as it was just us and no one else - the tale of Mike and Lisa helping out that man has remained with me. As the Biblical epigram should make clear, I have wondered, off and on over the years, about that man. I asked Lisa if he looked familiar; for all that the neighborhood we lived in was filled with the wealthy and powerful, there were a few homeless men and women, and those of us who had lived there for more than a few months recognized them. She said, no, he wasn't familiar at all.
Why was this man, this dirty, hungry man, perhaps suffering from alcohol poisoning, his clothes stiff with stale vomit and days of urinating on himself, suddenly in this place, a wealthy deli? Why was this man taken in, offered not just food and drink and warmth, but a coat, some rest and respite from the never-ending search for both that is the lot of those who have no place to call their own? Why did none of those last minute shoppers, many of whom certainly considered themselves Christian, perhaps, willing to give time and money to a good cause, offer this man so much as a smile as he weaved his way through the packed crowd?
As we come to the end of Advent, as our time of preparation comes to a close and we welcome the birth of Jesus, I would ask that we remember that Christmas, for all my memories seem to revolve around my feelings, my memories, and my sense that a Christmas is either good or not based on some weird alchemy of familial communion, gifts, good will, and the weather, has nothing to do with me. In fact, it has nothing to do with those things I just mentioned that seem to make Christmas, well, Christmas. Rather, it is about a young couple turned away from an inn, forced to spend the night in a stable. A young couple who, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the crowds gathered in many towns around Judea, Samaria, and Galilee to sign up for the census and tax, gave birth to their first child in a barn. This event took place even as many, like the crowd in Wagshal's that night, looked on, their noses up-turned at an unwed couple, a poor, Galilean carpenter and his fiancee desperately searching for a comfortable bed, some hot food, and a clean, warm, dry place for the young lady to have her baby.
May all of you, as the day comes in all the busyness of family and gifts, of fellowship and food not forget that it was precisely this busyness that God seeks to interrupt, indeed to disrupt. Our attention needs to be focused not on all the cultural trappings that would make December 25th somehow different than other days. It needs to hear the cry of a newborn baby, a cry coming from some forgotten corner of a town far too busy celebrating to remember that even here, right here, God is doing something we might need to stop, listen, and talk about.
Lisa came home from work on Christmas Eve and told me a story that has remained with me. She worked part time at Wagshal's Delicatessen. For those who may not have heard of it, it has a long, illustrious history in Washington,DC, serving Presidents and diplomats, Senators and journalists, students and local residents with the finest foods, the best sandwiches, and the most expensive smoked salmon that is worth every penny. I have always felt privileged that Lisa worked there, because it is a landmark of a sorts.
On that Christmas Eve, it was cold, but not bitter. It had been snowing off and on all day, as I recall, but not a whole lot of accumulation. In the midst of the hustle and bustle of extremely wealthy, important people getting deli platters and wines, marzipan and bagels, or just a sandwich to tide them over, a homeless man walked in to the deli. It was obvious to all that he had not cleaned himself recently. There was dried vomit and urine on his clothes. He might even not have known what kind of business he was entering; he might just have wanted to get warm for a few minutes.
The son of one of the owners, along with Lisa, saw this man, and the reaction of the shoppers in the small, crowded space, and acted. Mike came from around the counter, spoke to the man, and led him out the back door to the kitchen. Lisa made him a couple small sandwiches which she paid for. Mike took the man's coat, and offered him his own much nicer, finer coat. It was warmer, it was clean, and it was dry. The sandwiches were offered with some hot chocolate. The man thanked Mike and Lisa, and went out back on the stoop to eat. Mike came back in, and with this very busy delicatessen, crowded with last-minute shoppers getting things together for Christmas dinners and parties in some of the finest houses and for some of the most important folk in the most powerful city in the country, and wept because not one of these people had done anything other than turn away in disgust.
Of all the events that first Christmas we were a married couple - Lisa waking up with a fever; the small, Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree we somehow managed to get from Lowe's to our little apartment despite the ice, laughing all the way; our meager offerings to one another; the smallness of the day, as it was just us and no one else - the tale of Mike and Lisa helping out that man has remained with me. As the Biblical epigram should make clear, I have wondered, off and on over the years, about that man. I asked Lisa if he looked familiar; for all that the neighborhood we lived in was filled with the wealthy and powerful, there were a few homeless men and women, and those of us who had lived there for more than a few months recognized them. She said, no, he wasn't familiar at all.
Why was this man, this dirty, hungry man, perhaps suffering from alcohol poisoning, his clothes stiff with stale vomit and days of urinating on himself, suddenly in this place, a wealthy deli? Why was this man taken in, offered not just food and drink and warmth, but a coat, some rest and respite from the never-ending search for both that is the lot of those who have no place to call their own? Why did none of those last minute shoppers, many of whom certainly considered themselves Christian, perhaps, willing to give time and money to a good cause, offer this man so much as a smile as he weaved his way through the packed crowd?
As we come to the end of Advent, as our time of preparation comes to a close and we welcome the birth of Jesus, I would ask that we remember that Christmas, for all my memories seem to revolve around my feelings, my memories, and my sense that a Christmas is either good or not based on some weird alchemy of familial communion, gifts, good will, and the weather, has nothing to do with me. In fact, it has nothing to do with those things I just mentioned that seem to make Christmas, well, Christmas. Rather, it is about a young couple turned away from an inn, forced to spend the night in a stable. A young couple who, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the crowds gathered in many towns around Judea, Samaria, and Galilee to sign up for the census and tax, gave birth to their first child in a barn. This event took place even as many, like the crowd in Wagshal's that night, looked on, their noses up-turned at an unwed couple, a poor, Galilean carpenter and his fiancee desperately searching for a comfortable bed, some hot food, and a clean, warm, dry place for the young lady to have her baby.
May all of you, as the day comes in all the busyness of family and gifts, of fellowship and food not forget that it was precisely this busyness that God seeks to interrupt, indeed to disrupt. Our attention needs to be focused not on all the cultural trappings that would make December 25th somehow different than other days. It needs to hear the cry of a newborn baby, a cry coming from some forgotten corner of a town far too busy celebrating to remember that even here, right here, God is doing something we might need to stop, listen, and talk about.
Right-Wing Christmas Thoughts
Via Thers at Eschaton and Instaputz, all I can say, in the spirit of the season, is "Oy vey!":
The first sentence is just . . . ah, God, it's just awful. Christmas is nothing more or less than celebrating the birth of Jesus. All the other stuff - the month long spending orgy, the repetitious "White Christmas"'s, the lights, the parties, even the family stuff - has little to nothing to do with the meaning of the day itself. While certainly inseparable from a cultural perspective, that isn't what Christmas is about as far as the day itself is concerned. Indeed, for most of Christian history, the day itself was little remarked and regarded.
As for Christmas being "anti-government", since there are political elements, textual and sub-textual, in the two Gospel narratives that deal with Jesus' birth, this, too, is wrong. There are taxes and social outcasts and murdering Quisling imperial toadies and the effects of poverty and an unwed mother with her much-older betrothed. Just mentioning these few bits is enough to get anyone started thinking about all sorts of things that have to do with politics and social justice.
Then, of course, there is the declaration that the one whose birth we celebrate is The Prince of Peace. Apparently, however, this is a non-governmental, non-political peace.
I love the attempted dig at Bernie Sanders - "couldn't get elected mayor anywhere", yet acknowledging that he is a US Senator - and the fact that someone somewhere preempted A Charlie Brown Christmas. Treasonous!
What stupid, horrible people we have writing about politics in this country.
Christmas is anti-government. It is all about faith and family, tradition and, for the most part, the setting aside of politics and work to celebrate life.
But here are the president, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in our faces every day and every night, and their global party is going 24/7 in Copenhagen. Now the House Democrats have just moved to spend another $174 billion the country doesn't have on more government and more give aways, and then left town, with many heading off to Europe to get in a little more speechifying and some skiing no doubt.
Stateside, Al Gore is doing poetry --in a William Shatner/Rod McKuen kind of way-- with Harry Smith on the Early Show, and Harry Reid is hold marathon secret meetings on a secret bill --Obamacare 9.0-- and we are being lectured by Bernie Sanders who couldn't get elected mayor anywhere in America except he's a senator from Vermont. President B is threatening "fat cat bankers" on Sunday night and warning us of national bankruptcy on Wednesday night (after his party votes to spends $174 billion we don't have).
And he preempted A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The first sentence is just . . . ah, God, it's just awful. Christmas is nothing more or less than celebrating the birth of Jesus. All the other stuff - the month long spending orgy, the repetitious "White Christmas"'s, the lights, the parties, even the family stuff - has little to nothing to do with the meaning of the day itself. While certainly inseparable from a cultural perspective, that isn't what Christmas is about as far as the day itself is concerned. Indeed, for most of Christian history, the day itself was little remarked and regarded.
As for Christmas being "anti-government", since there are political elements, textual and sub-textual, in the two Gospel narratives that deal with Jesus' birth, this, too, is wrong. There are taxes and social outcasts and murdering Quisling imperial toadies and the effects of poverty and an unwed mother with her much-older betrothed. Just mentioning these few bits is enough to get anyone started thinking about all sorts of things that have to do with politics and social justice.
Then, of course, there is the declaration that the one whose birth we celebrate is The Prince of Peace. Apparently, however, this is a non-governmental, non-political peace.
I love the attempted dig at Bernie Sanders - "couldn't get elected mayor anywhere", yet acknowledging that he is a US Senator - and the fact that someone somewhere preempted A Charlie Brown Christmas. Treasonous!
What stupid, horrible people we have writing about politics in this country.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Treating A Senator With The Respect He Deserves
This is awesome.
The real "truth squad" is suddenly . . . a reporter from Der Speigel. So much for the vaunted American press.
Inhofe did travel to Copenhagen however — with a single staffer and when he got there, all he could muster was an “impromptu” press conference and spent a grand total of two hours in the Danish capital. But even during the press conference, few reporters showed up and the Oklahoma senator wasn’t very well received by the ones who did:A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”
“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”
One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”
The real "truth squad" is suddenly . . . a reporter from Der Speigel. So much for the vaunted American press.
Saturday Christmas Rock Show (Sort Of)
Jon Anderson of Yes released a Christmas album back in the 1980's. These folks synchronized the nearly 5000 lights of their house to "I Saw Three Ships" - which shows they had far too much time on their hands.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Ben Nelson Doesn't Care About People
It's really that simple, and Matt Yglesias gets to the heart of it.
Now, I won't pretend this isn't a passionate issue for some people; there are those who sincerely believe that abortion is by far the greatest horror besetting the United States. For those people, discussing the issue dispassionately and with any kind of distance is impossible.
Yet, quite simply put, Ben Nelson, Bart Stupak, and most other "pro-life" politicians couldn't give a fart in a hurricane about ending abortion. If they did, they had plenty of opportunities during the Bush Administration to do so. That they did not proves to me, and quite a few other on-lookers, that they enjoy keeping the issue alive in order to do things like this - use it as a bludgeon against women and minorities. The fetus doesn't enter their calculations as a real thing, needing (among other things) a healthy woman to bring it to full term.
By attempting to hold health care reform hostage to the continued existence of the fetus, as a theoretical proposition, is not "pro-life", but stupid, purblind politics of the most horrible sort. No "life" of any consequence is saved by this.
Providing prenatal services to pregnant women is a pro-life gesture by any stretch of the imagination. As is providing health insurance to young children. As we saw the other day, uninsured children are over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than are commercially insured children, even after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type.
But Nelson won’t let those lives be saved unless the bill is modified in an insulting and discriminatory way. And part of the insanity of it is that the actual impact on the number of abortions in America is going to be tiny. Middle-class women will be able to pay for abortions out of pocket, and the “Hyde Amendment” status quo already screws poor women. But it’s a nice symbolic dig at pro-choice America, and a further means of stigmatizing reproductive health services as somehow not real health care. And Nelson, Bart Stupack, and various bishops love the idea of holding the whole package hostage to this point, since I guess the dead kids with trauma injuries will go to heaven anyway or something.
Now, I won't pretend this isn't a passionate issue for some people; there are those who sincerely believe that abortion is by far the greatest horror besetting the United States. For those people, discussing the issue dispassionately and with any kind of distance is impossible.
Yet, quite simply put, Ben Nelson, Bart Stupak, and most other "pro-life" politicians couldn't give a fart in a hurricane about ending abortion. If they did, they had plenty of opportunities during the Bush Administration to do so. That they did not proves to me, and quite a few other on-lookers, that they enjoy keeping the issue alive in order to do things like this - use it as a bludgeon against women and minorities. The fetus doesn't enter their calculations as a real thing, needing (among other things) a healthy woman to bring it to full term.
By attempting to hold health care reform hostage to the continued existence of the fetus, as a theoretical proposition, is not "pro-life", but stupid, purblind politics of the most horrible sort. No "life" of any consequence is saved by this.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Irresponsible
While I understand why there are quite a few liberals who are all put out by the politics of health care reform, at the end of every argument over principles and every rant about what an idiot Joe Lieberman or Olympia Snowe is, the entire issue isn't about being right or wrong, but about people who are desperate. At the end of all the pontificating and breast-beating, we need to remember that people are quite literally dying as we dither over who is more right on the question of health care.
Is the bill perfect? Anyone who thought that we Americans would manage to craft even a bill even moderately acceptable to liberals doesn't understand how things work. Abandoning health care reform when we are so close to actually accomplishing something would be the height not just of folly but of social irresponsibility. If you don't believe me, read this:
Again, the bill is not perfect. It might not even be marginally acceptable. Liberals, at least those most vocal folks on the internet, are sounding more and more like the right when it was in power, disdainful of politics and revolted by the legislative process, disgusted by the shallowness and vanity of politicians. Some, I think, wish that Democrats behaved as Republicans did when the latter were in power. Rather than have an actual debate and include the minority in the process, just steamroll over everyone. Yes, the Republicans can and are stonewalling - but that is the way the process works.
While I am quite sure there are people who could point to this or that provision of the bills before Congress that fail to address the concerns expressed in the above, I find that kind of thing meaningless. The bill may not be what we want in details; in principle, however, it will be established that Congress can set the ground rules for health care coverage. As this generation of politicians passes in to history, more will become accustomed to the reality that health care is an issue over which Congress has control. It isn't a pretty, or easy, process. In the end, though, health care will be like Social Security, a third, or perhaps fourth, rail.
Is the bill perfect? Anyone who thought that we Americans would manage to craft even a bill even moderately acceptable to liberals doesn't understand how things work. Abandoning health care reform when we are so close to actually accomplishing something would be the height not just of folly but of social irresponsibility. If you don't believe me, read this:
If I feel abandoned, it's not by Obama and the Democratic party, it's by those on the left advocating to kill the bill.
I am unemployed and have a pre-existing condition that requires daily medicines, quarterly doctors visits and an annual test. I am on COBRA, which runs out mid-2010, when I will have to find new health insurance. I will need to purchase some kind of health insurance, assuming I can find provider who will insure me
I don't pretend to understand all the intricacies of the health care reform bill, but I do read a lot. From what I can glean, if the bill passed, I would be able to find health insurance because I could not to be turned down due to my pre-exisiting condition. And based on my income at the moment, my premuims would be subsidized.
Am I disappointed in the reform effort? Yes. I believe in single payer. I was terribly disappointed the Medicare buy-in for 55 and older was dropped, not because I give a rat's ass about Lieberman or the political wrangling involved, but because I am two years shy of 55 and I would have loved to be able to tough it out on the private market for a little while longer knowing Medicare coverage was just around the corner. Believe me, it's scary being 52 and unemployed with a medical condition. Any form of security is vital.
My case is not unique or unusual. In fact, it is common. I am one of thousands if not millions with the same issues that this bill would affect. And when I read or hear people from the left arguing against the bill that would likely provide me and people like me with some modicum of security because the bill doesn't accomplish everything they had hoped it would or it doesn't help every last person or the insurance industry will benefit, I do feel abandoned.
Again, the bill is not perfect. It might not even be marginally acceptable. Liberals, at least those most vocal folks on the internet, are sounding more and more like the right when it was in power, disdainful of politics and revolted by the legislative process, disgusted by the shallowness and vanity of politicians. Some, I think, wish that Democrats behaved as Republicans did when the latter were in power. Rather than have an actual debate and include the minority in the process, just steamroll over everyone. Yes, the Republicans can and are stonewalling - but that is the way the process works.
While I am quite sure there are people who could point to this or that provision of the bills before Congress that fail to address the concerns expressed in the above, I find that kind of thing meaningless. The bill may not be what we want in details; in principle, however, it will be established that Congress can set the ground rules for health care coverage. As this generation of politicians passes in to history, more will become accustomed to the reality that health care is an issue over which Congress has control. It isn't a pretty, or easy, process. In the end, though, health care will be like Social Security, a third, or perhaps fourth, rail.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Seeking Understanding
As modernism wanes, theologians have very often taken to quoting St. Anselm of Canterbury, who described the pursuit of a Christian intellectual life as fides quaren intellectum, roughly translated as "faith seeking understanding". This usually means that there are claims Christians make concerning what they believe; ours is a faith that cannot rest upon these claims without attempting to make sense of them. Karl Barth famously quipped that theology is nothing more than sermon preparation, which is kind of the same thing; in the Reformed tradition, the sermon sits at the center of the communal worship life, and is exposition of a Biblical text to the faithful.
Yet, at some point in these times when so much of the intellectual energy of the modernist project has exhausted itself, I believe the question needs to be asked: Is the intellectual content of the Christian faith both a necessary and sufficient condition for making this faith tenable? Indeed, considering the varieties of intellectual approaches to the Christian faith, to the variety of claims existing under the name "Christian", one need hardly imagine my own answer to this question is "No".
This is not to say the intellectual pursuit of understanding isn't an important part of our communal life. It has been from the beginning and will continue to be long after people have stopped reading David Hume carry on about miracles and Voltaire talk about strangling princes with the entrails of the last priests (or is it the other way around? I can never remember). It should also be remembered the assaults on the Christian faith currently in fashion - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris being the most notorious - aren't exactly new.
The late second-early third century Christian Apologist, Tertullian wrote a long dialogue in which he addressed then-current slanders against Christianity, which included, among other things, the charge that worship services included cannibalism, sexual orgies, and the worship of a donkey. This last charge I find amusing precisely because it shows that common Roman sentiment on divinity was so limited they could not imagine human beings worshiping a god who was not represented by some image or other (their common slander against both Christians and Jews was they were "atheists" because they refused to create an image; popular imagination changed that in to Christians, at any rate, paying obeisance to an ass). Tertullian did not attempt to refute, point by point, this kind of thing. Instead, he did the equivalent of pointing and laughing at how stupid the accusations were (even though there were believers who paid through torture and even death for the accusations), and made a clear case for what it was Christians actually believed and practiced.
This trip back in time is necessary, first, to remind Christians that attempts to ridicule our faith are neither new nor, in the main, terribly original. At least the Romans managed to picture Christians being interesting in their worship practice, rather than either nonsensical or boring. Second, while Tertullian's defense of Christianity was superb (he was, perhaps, the brightest, and certainly the wittiest, Christian writer in the centuries before Augustine; few Christian writers in the centuries since have managed to be quite as funny as Tertullian was), it was also done with one eye on the fact that the defense of the faith was secondary to the proclamation of that faith. Getting the word out that Jesus of Nazareth had lived and died and risen again in order to bring about the reconciliation of fallen humanity with God was the point; fleshing out what that might mean, and what it most certainly did not mean, was important, but not necessary to making that faith real, a living thing among those who declare it.
Whether it's the best and brightest among the Roman Empire, European intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century deciding that "miracles" are the mark of Christian belief, or Sam Harris writing the only true Christian faith is fundamentalism, we have always faced those who decide, from outside, who we are and what we believe and why it's nonsense. While addressing these criticisms is important, it should always be done with one eye on the reality that making sense of the idea of Jesus as God incarnate isn't as important as declaring it.
Tertullian's lead in another area needs to be followed as well; Christian writers need to remember that a little scorn, the kind of writing that makes folks laugh is effective. Making fun of people who think they're really smart but are actually both ignorant and stupid gets the message out that they aren't quite as authoritative as they claim.
Yet, at some point in these times when so much of the intellectual energy of the modernist project has exhausted itself, I believe the question needs to be asked: Is the intellectual content of the Christian faith both a necessary and sufficient condition for making this faith tenable? Indeed, considering the varieties of intellectual approaches to the Christian faith, to the variety of claims existing under the name "Christian", one need hardly imagine my own answer to this question is "No".
This is not to say the intellectual pursuit of understanding isn't an important part of our communal life. It has been from the beginning and will continue to be long after people have stopped reading David Hume carry on about miracles and Voltaire talk about strangling princes with the entrails of the last priests (or is it the other way around? I can never remember). It should also be remembered the assaults on the Christian faith currently in fashion - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris being the most notorious - aren't exactly new.
The late second-early third century Christian Apologist, Tertullian wrote a long dialogue in which he addressed then-current slanders against Christianity, which included, among other things, the charge that worship services included cannibalism, sexual orgies, and the worship of a donkey. This last charge I find amusing precisely because it shows that common Roman sentiment on divinity was so limited they could not imagine human beings worshiping a god who was not represented by some image or other (their common slander against both Christians and Jews was they were "atheists" because they refused to create an image; popular imagination changed that in to Christians, at any rate, paying obeisance to an ass). Tertullian did not attempt to refute, point by point, this kind of thing. Instead, he did the equivalent of pointing and laughing at how stupid the accusations were (even though there were believers who paid through torture and even death for the accusations), and made a clear case for what it was Christians actually believed and practiced.
This trip back in time is necessary, first, to remind Christians that attempts to ridicule our faith are neither new nor, in the main, terribly original. At least the Romans managed to picture Christians being interesting in their worship practice, rather than either nonsensical or boring. Second, while Tertullian's defense of Christianity was superb (he was, perhaps, the brightest, and certainly the wittiest, Christian writer in the centuries before Augustine; few Christian writers in the centuries since have managed to be quite as funny as Tertullian was), it was also done with one eye on the fact that the defense of the faith was secondary to the proclamation of that faith. Getting the word out that Jesus of Nazareth had lived and died and risen again in order to bring about the reconciliation of fallen humanity with God was the point; fleshing out what that might mean, and what it most certainly did not mean, was important, but not necessary to making that faith real, a living thing among those who declare it.
Whether it's the best and brightest among the Roman Empire, European intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century deciding that "miracles" are the mark of Christian belief, or Sam Harris writing the only true Christian faith is fundamentalism, we have always faced those who decide, from outside, who we are and what we believe and why it's nonsense. While addressing these criticisms is important, it should always be done with one eye on the reality that making sense of the idea of Jesus as God incarnate isn't as important as declaring it.
Tertullian's lead in another area needs to be followed as well; Christian writers need to remember that a little scorn, the kind of writing that makes folks laugh is effective. Making fun of people who think they're really smart but are actually both ignorant and stupid gets the message out that they aren't quite as authoritative as they claim.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Persistence Of Religious Life
If I have a complaint about George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? it is the constant repetition throughout various essays that religious belief is no longer a tenable, intellectually viable alternative in the west. While I understand the reality that much of western Europe has been de-Christianized, and the United States is increasingly less religious than a generation or two ago, I believe this confuses two very different things - one is social secularism and the other is personal, and even communal, agnosticism or atheism. With religious belief ne of the driving forces behind so much of the social and political conflict in our world, the repeated invocation that religious belief itself is some kind of anachronistic, intellectually void area leaves me thinking that self-satisfied and self-declared intellectual elites like George must believe that those who hold to some kind of religious belief are the benighted, intellectually incoherent crowd who haven't heard that God, like the tooth fairy, is an illusion best left behind as we as a species mature.
The persistence of religious belief is, perhaps, the most unremarked upon phenomenon of our time. While militant atheists publish near-best-sellers declaring the tattered remnants of the faithful to be incoherent, even socially and politically dangerous, and the beliefs themselves to be nonsensical, millions and even billions around the world pay them no heed whatsoever, and carry on their lives as if the question of intellectual coherence and moral confusion were of little interest to them. Whether it's Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia, Roman Catholics and Muslims in the Philippines, Pentecostals across Africa, Seventh-Day Adventists in South America, snake-handlers in the deep woods of Appalachia, animists in most Chinese villages, or whatever, religion persists.
Yet, the conceit among intellectuals that (a) they understand religious belief better than believers, and are (b) capable of rejecting it far more easily has led to a third unchallenged assumption among our late-modern intellectuals - (c) this rejection of religious belief allows them to see and think about the world far more clearly than those who have not done so. Yet, I would ask: if this is so, why don't you see that billions of your fellow human beings not only don't agree with you, but find your insistence that religious belief is no longer a live, viable, human option not just insulting but really kind of silly?
Part of the confusion, I believe, lies in missing an important distinction. On the one hand, many western societies have become far more secular in their official position regarding matters of state. While many western European nations remain officially religious - they have a state-sanctioned church, and regulate religious practice, going so far as, for example, Germany, in which clergy are state employees - in day-to-day reality, the de-Christianizing of their societies (go to any European country on Sunday and check out church attendance; you'll find more people in pubs on Sunday morning than in church) has led to a hands-off approach to religious matters. In the United States, one of the great benefits of the separation of church and state in an official capacity has been the on-going liveliness of our national religious life, yet even here, where even the most convinced political liberal has to make some kind of obeisance to our demand our political leaders have some kind of religious belief, we are increasingly less religious in practice. The golf course, beach, and ski resort are the places we spend our Sunday mornings (or in bed, or sitting around and watching television, the real high priest of our society). Increasingly secular in our social life, the language of religious faith less familiar than a generation ago, our common western heritage gives to religious life a place. This place, however, is far more peripheral to our official view of ourselves than in the past.
The realities of becoming less capable of speaking a common religious vocabulary and the increasing social secularization are not, however, demonstrative of the demise of religious belief as a powerful force, either in our own societies or the world at large. At best, they are part of the larger fracturing of any kind of common vocabulary, common to a diverse, pluralist society. Ours in America has always been a minimalist public vocabulary, rooted in the Constitution and our burgeoning democratic sense (this was first noted by de Tocqueville). The realization that we can speak of religious belief less and less is part of the marginalization of most common vocabularies rather than the demise of religious belief.
Yet, this would seem to contradict my earlier assertion that ours is an increasingly de-Christianized society. I believe, however, that most Americans would profess some kind of belief, in a vague, generalized sense, in some kind of generic God. They would also, I believe, insist that such belief is a necessary part of human life, both personal and communal (in nine days, check out the parking lots at various churches as communities gather for Christmas Eve services if you don't believe me).
This contrasts with the kind of atheism espoused by Scialabba. While less militant than that of, say, Richard Dawkins, it is no less insistent that religious belief is, as George himself says quoting the godfather of western Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, part of our self-imposed social and cultural minority. My problem with quoting Kant in this context, however, is that Kant was a devout Christian, after a fashion. While his expression of belief, given in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is hardly "orthodox" by any stretch of any definition of that particular word, Kant, the son of an 18th-century evangelical pastor who spent his entire life under the roof of his parents, would hardly insist that part of true Enlightenment is tossing off the shackles of religious belief. He might insist we clarify what kind of religion we profess; for Kant, it was a highly individualized profession, centered in an ethical commitment to our innate moral sense that, he insisted, was the divine spark within us. While later Enlightenment figures in Germany and elsewhere would seek to distance themselves from any profession of religious belief at all - Nietzsche, too, was the child of a Lutheran minister, it should be recalled - to quote Kant in this way is disingenuous.
Skipping forward to our own time, the reality that our public life is dominated by issues and events rooted in various kinds of religious belief is undeniable. Yet, far too many commentators seem unwilling, or unable, to grant this reality, or at any rate to discuss it in an intelligent manner. Even the website GetReligion.org, dedicated as it is to fleshing out half-assed religious journalism, doesn't always get to the heart of the matter as it explores various questions and issues and even quotes before us. It would be nice, to be sure, if journalists whose job it is to make sense of various events, could be a little more interested in the relationships among religious belief, religious practice, and public events from the profound to the horrific. Yet, again, this inability on the part of journalists is less evidence of the efficacy of religious belief and simply more evidence of the fracturing of a common vocabulary on any number of topics.
Directly, I think the insistence that religion as a viable human personal and collective option is no longer sustainable, either intellectually or existentially, is demonstrably false. Look around the world, or even one's own community. Indirectly, I believe its repetition, while certainly heartening to the person who holds that view, is evidence that, despite his or her best intentions, it just can't be sustained in the wake of massive evidence to the contrary. While it might be an overall social benefit for religious beliefs of all sorts to just fade away (yet, I'm not sure how that argument makes any sense, considering that officially atheist societies have been, in the previous century, the perpetrators of the most horrific acts of cruelty against their own and other populations), I see no evidence whatsoever that this is going to happen any time soon. Refusing to grasp that fundamental reality, self-declared intellectuals sideline themselves, in many ways, from serious, on-going discussions of public import. While this may give them a sense of their own heroic advantage to we benighted few who still profess some kind of belief in this or that religious tradition, it makes what they say less relevant, and less intellectually honest than it might otherwise be.
The persistence of religious belief is, perhaps, the most unremarked upon phenomenon of our time. While militant atheists publish near-best-sellers declaring the tattered remnants of the faithful to be incoherent, even socially and politically dangerous, and the beliefs themselves to be nonsensical, millions and even billions around the world pay them no heed whatsoever, and carry on their lives as if the question of intellectual coherence and moral confusion were of little interest to them. Whether it's Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia, Roman Catholics and Muslims in the Philippines, Pentecostals across Africa, Seventh-Day Adventists in South America, snake-handlers in the deep woods of Appalachia, animists in most Chinese villages, or whatever, religion persists.
Yet, the conceit among intellectuals that (a) they understand religious belief better than believers, and are (b) capable of rejecting it far more easily has led to a third unchallenged assumption among our late-modern intellectuals - (c) this rejection of religious belief allows them to see and think about the world far more clearly than those who have not done so. Yet, I would ask: if this is so, why don't you see that billions of your fellow human beings not only don't agree with you, but find your insistence that religious belief is no longer a live, viable, human option not just insulting but really kind of silly?
Part of the confusion, I believe, lies in missing an important distinction. On the one hand, many western societies have become far more secular in their official position regarding matters of state. While many western European nations remain officially religious - they have a state-sanctioned church, and regulate religious practice, going so far as, for example, Germany, in which clergy are state employees - in day-to-day reality, the de-Christianizing of their societies (go to any European country on Sunday and check out church attendance; you'll find more people in pubs on Sunday morning than in church) has led to a hands-off approach to religious matters. In the United States, one of the great benefits of the separation of church and state in an official capacity has been the on-going liveliness of our national religious life, yet even here, where even the most convinced political liberal has to make some kind of obeisance to our demand our political leaders have some kind of religious belief, we are increasingly less religious in practice. The golf course, beach, and ski resort are the places we spend our Sunday mornings (or in bed, or sitting around and watching television, the real high priest of our society). Increasingly secular in our social life, the language of religious faith less familiar than a generation ago, our common western heritage gives to religious life a place. This place, however, is far more peripheral to our official view of ourselves than in the past.
The realities of becoming less capable of speaking a common religious vocabulary and the increasing social secularization are not, however, demonstrative of the demise of religious belief as a powerful force, either in our own societies or the world at large. At best, they are part of the larger fracturing of any kind of common vocabulary, common to a diverse, pluralist society. Ours in America has always been a minimalist public vocabulary, rooted in the Constitution and our burgeoning democratic sense (this was first noted by de Tocqueville). The realization that we can speak of religious belief less and less is part of the marginalization of most common vocabularies rather than the demise of religious belief.
Yet, this would seem to contradict my earlier assertion that ours is an increasingly de-Christianized society. I believe, however, that most Americans would profess some kind of belief, in a vague, generalized sense, in some kind of generic God. They would also, I believe, insist that such belief is a necessary part of human life, both personal and communal (in nine days, check out the parking lots at various churches as communities gather for Christmas Eve services if you don't believe me).
This contrasts with the kind of atheism espoused by Scialabba. While less militant than that of, say, Richard Dawkins, it is no less insistent that religious belief is, as George himself says quoting the godfather of western Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, part of our self-imposed social and cultural minority. My problem with quoting Kant in this context, however, is that Kant was a devout Christian, after a fashion. While his expression of belief, given in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is hardly "orthodox" by any stretch of any definition of that particular word, Kant, the son of an 18th-century evangelical pastor who spent his entire life under the roof of his parents, would hardly insist that part of true Enlightenment is tossing off the shackles of religious belief. He might insist we clarify what kind of religion we profess; for Kant, it was a highly individualized profession, centered in an ethical commitment to our innate moral sense that, he insisted, was the divine spark within us. While later Enlightenment figures in Germany and elsewhere would seek to distance themselves from any profession of religious belief at all - Nietzsche, too, was the child of a Lutheran minister, it should be recalled - to quote Kant in this way is disingenuous.
Skipping forward to our own time, the reality that our public life is dominated by issues and events rooted in various kinds of religious belief is undeniable. Yet, far too many commentators seem unwilling, or unable, to grant this reality, or at any rate to discuss it in an intelligent manner. Even the website GetReligion.org, dedicated as it is to fleshing out half-assed religious journalism, doesn't always get to the heart of the matter as it explores various questions and issues and even quotes before us. It would be nice, to be sure, if journalists whose job it is to make sense of various events, could be a little more interested in the relationships among religious belief, religious practice, and public events from the profound to the horrific. Yet, again, this inability on the part of journalists is less evidence of the efficacy of religious belief and simply more evidence of the fracturing of a common vocabulary on any number of topics.
Directly, I think the insistence that religion as a viable human personal and collective option is no longer sustainable, either intellectually or existentially, is demonstrably false. Look around the world, or even one's own community. Indirectly, I believe its repetition, while certainly heartening to the person who holds that view, is evidence that, despite his or her best intentions, it just can't be sustained in the wake of massive evidence to the contrary. While it might be an overall social benefit for religious beliefs of all sorts to just fade away (yet, I'm not sure how that argument makes any sense, considering that officially atheist societies have been, in the previous century, the perpetrators of the most horrific acts of cruelty against their own and other populations), I see no evidence whatsoever that this is going to happen any time soon. Refusing to grasp that fundamental reality, self-declared intellectuals sideline themselves, in many ways, from serious, on-going discussions of public import. While this may give them a sense of their own heroic advantage to we benighted few who still profess some kind of belief in this or that religious tradition, it makes what they say less relevant, and less intellectually honest than it might otherwise be.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Music For Your Monday
Inspired by my friend Wes, I think it's important to remember, in these days when most pop is pretty watered down crap, with too much control in the hands of record company management, artist management, and others who know nothing about music that there was once a time when artist produced music they wanted. In the early 1970's, Elton John released album after album of outstanding music. It is difficult to remember just how extraordinary these songs are, precisely because John has become something of an icon. I should also note that my youngest sister was the biggest Elton John fan I have ever known, so I kind of grew up with these songs in the background a lot.
First comes "Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", which Dream Theater does covers almost to perfection on their Different Seasons EP. I can't imagine a pop performer even thinking about recording, let alone releasing, anything like this today. At least there was a time it was done.
While George Michael seems to have hijacked this song, I still prefer the original.
Finally, the song that started me thinking about it all today. Funny enough, the lyrics by Bernie Taupin are about . . . Bernie Taupin who saved John from a half-assed suicide attempt as he drew closer to a marriage that would have been a travesty for him. This is "Someone Saved My Life Tonight"
First comes "Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", which Dream Theater does covers almost to perfection on their Different Seasons EP. I can't imagine a pop performer even thinking about recording, let alone releasing, anything like this today. At least there was a time it was done.
While George Michael seems to have hijacked this song, I still prefer the original.
Finally, the song that started me thinking about it all today. Funny enough, the lyrics by Bernie Taupin are about . . . Bernie Taupin who saved John from a half-assed suicide attempt as he drew closer to a marriage that would have been a travesty for him. This is "Someone Saved My Life Tonight"
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Christmas Memories - 1988
If ever there was a Christmas that actually surpassed one from my childhood, it was this year. For one thing, the house was full of people. My parents, of course, and my three of my siblings. My older sister's husband joined us, as well as my youngest sister's then-boyfriend. We awoke on Christmas morning to find the living room quite literally filled to overflowing with gifts. The piles and piles of packages stuck out in to the middle of the floor! Not even when we were kids had there been a Christmas where the room was so full!
If it seems that, at this stage, odd to mention presents, it is important to remember that, at 23, I was the youngest person in the house. Adults usually give and receive smaller gifts; that year, however, we all seemed to get more, and bigger, gifts than ever. This was the year I received my first guitar, a 12-string. Everyone was surprised, with a small chuckle, at the size and extent of the gifts that year.
Because we were older, there was no sense of this Christmas being "about" anything other then sitting around, unwrapping presents, and enjoying one another's company. We certainly did that. There was a tremendous amount of laughter that day. As morning slipped to afternoon slipped to evening, it seemed the gift-opening would never end. We broke for dinner later than usual - it was after eight o'clock, I think - and still had oodles of packages to unwrap. We finished just shy of midnight, making it easily the longest time spent together unwrapping gifts.
We snacked during the day, spent time talking about finding this or that gift, commented on whether a present was given in good taste or bad, as a joke or as something more serious. We reminisced about Christmases past, and other gifts of a similar quality or kind that meant something to us. Most of all, we just enjoyed sharing the time together.
Never again would I have a Christmas, at my parents' house or anywhere else, with such a crowd or such a sense of simple enjoyment. I, for one, cherished that whole season, from the arrival of my brother to the bemused smile on my brother-in-law's face when he realized my mother had determined he would collect rhinos as his particular family collectible (my mother had decided that everyone in the family would collect figurines of this or that animal; mine, with no irony at all, is elephants). It was a day with little or no rancor; rather, just a day with eight adults enjoying Christmas and one another's company. It recaptured, for one brief, shining, moment that sense of wonder and enjoyment I always had as a child, a part of a large, boisterous family that could revel, at least for that day and time, in one another's company.
If it seems that, at this stage, odd to mention presents, it is important to remember that, at 23, I was the youngest person in the house. Adults usually give and receive smaller gifts; that year, however, we all seemed to get more, and bigger, gifts than ever. This was the year I received my first guitar, a 12-string. Everyone was surprised, with a small chuckle, at the size and extent of the gifts that year.
Because we were older, there was no sense of this Christmas being "about" anything other then sitting around, unwrapping presents, and enjoying one another's company. We certainly did that. There was a tremendous amount of laughter that day. As morning slipped to afternoon slipped to evening, it seemed the gift-opening would never end. We broke for dinner later than usual - it was after eight o'clock, I think - and still had oodles of packages to unwrap. We finished just shy of midnight, making it easily the longest time spent together unwrapping gifts.
We snacked during the day, spent time talking about finding this or that gift, commented on whether a present was given in good taste or bad, as a joke or as something more serious. We reminisced about Christmases past, and other gifts of a similar quality or kind that meant something to us. Most of all, we just enjoyed sharing the time together.
Never again would I have a Christmas, at my parents' house or anywhere else, with such a crowd or such a sense of simple enjoyment. I, for one, cherished that whole season, from the arrival of my brother to the bemused smile on my brother-in-law's face when he realized my mother had determined he would collect rhinos as his particular family collectible (my mother had decided that everyone in the family would collect figurines of this or that animal; mine, with no irony at all, is elephants). It was a day with little or no rancor; rather, just a day with eight adults enjoying Christmas and one another's company. It recaptured, for one brief, shining, moment that sense of wonder and enjoyment I always had as a child, a part of a large, boisterous family that could revel, at least for that day and time, in one another's company.
Which Question Deals With The Reality?
Getting a tip on a piece by Matt Taibbi is always a good thing. Even when it is a slam at the Obama Administration and its management of the economy. Sad to say, I was not aware that two of Obama's inner circle, folks who pushed serious reform in the direction of economic democracy and tighter controls on financial institutions and transactions, were replaced almost the moment Obama won the election by Wall Street insiders.
There is a part of me that wants to defend this kind of thing. Who else did people think would be in charge of economic policy? As even Taibbi notes, most of those mentioned were not only executives at Citigroup; they were also veterans of the Clinton Administration. While it is true the Clinton Administration was the period of time during which the basis for the current crisis was laid, most especially the '99 repeal of Glass-Steagall, although other regulatory provisions on banking, investment, and financial products in general were weakened during the Clinton years as well. It should also be noted it wasn't Bill Clinton or Bob Rubin who repealed Glass-Steagall's provision on separating investment from commercial banking, but Congress, with former Texas Republican Phil Gramm taking the lead.
Yet, there really is no defense for Obama's actions. He not only had people already in place who had sound policy recommendations. There were various advisers, formal and informal, who were making all sorts of recommendations and proposals that could have benefited the newly-victorious President-elect. Instead, he made a crucial error, thinking that people with experience in both government and industry at the highest levels were more capable of dealing with the crisis then those who did not have the experience. That there were serious questions regarding the role, and even responsibility, senior banking executives played not only in setting the housing bubble - and its effect upon the economy in general - in motion; having these same people turn around and devise a plan that, in essence, saved them from the worst effects of their own actions is unconscionable.
Taibbi begins his piece asking the following questions:
Whether the source of Obama's decision to look for help from the very people who brought about our current catastrophe lies in inexperience or naivete is important, but also irrelevant. My own guess is that, in reality, it was a deliberate decision on his part, done in the belief that "these people know best", even if actual evidence shows they really don't know anything at all. Yet, it is important to ask the question, because it goes to the heart of how Obama will govern for the rest of his time in office, and how we evaluate his performance.
So, deliberate choice? Ignorance based either in inexperience or exuberance? What do you think?
There is a part of me that wants to defend this kind of thing. Who else did people think would be in charge of economic policy? As even Taibbi notes, most of those mentioned were not only executives at Citigroup; they were also veterans of the Clinton Administration. While it is true the Clinton Administration was the period of time during which the basis for the current crisis was laid, most especially the '99 repeal of Glass-Steagall, although other regulatory provisions on banking, investment, and financial products in general were weakened during the Clinton years as well. It should also be noted it wasn't Bill Clinton or Bob Rubin who repealed Glass-Steagall's provision on separating investment from commercial banking, but Congress, with former Texas Republican Phil Gramm taking the lead.
Yet, there really is no defense for Obama's actions. He not only had people already in place who had sound policy recommendations. There were various advisers, formal and informal, who were making all sorts of recommendations and proposals that could have benefited the newly-victorious President-elect. Instead, he made a crucial error, thinking that people with experience in both government and industry at the highest levels were more capable of dealing with the crisis then those who did not have the experience. That there were serious questions regarding the role, and even responsibility, senior banking executives played not only in setting the housing bubble - and its effect upon the economy in general - in motion; having these same people turn around and devise a plan that, in essence, saved them from the worst effects of their own actions is unconscionable.
Taibbi begins his piece asking the following questions:
Is [Obama] just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whether the source of Obama's decision to look for help from the very people who brought about our current catastrophe lies in inexperience or naivete is important, but also irrelevant. My own guess is that, in reality, it was a deliberate decision on his part, done in the belief that "these people know best", even if actual evidence shows they really don't know anything at all. Yet, it is important to ask the question, because it goes to the heart of how Obama will govern for the rest of his time in office, and how we evaluate his performance.
So, deliberate choice? Ignorance based either in inexperience or exuberance? What do you think?
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Saturday Rock Show
About fourteen years ago, Molly Hatchet performed at a small speedway in southside VA. They stayed at the small roadside hotel at which I worked. I received quite a few complaints and ended up heading over to their rooms, to find the band had left (their tour bus was gone from the parking lot) and they had managed to trash their hotel rooms quite nicely. It ticked me off, because of all the later additions to the whole southern rock thing, I liked them quite a lot, and this cover of Greg Allman's "Dreams" is one of the few cover songs I think actually improves on the original.
The Scaredy-Cat Delusional Left
One would think that, having won two national elections in a row, liberals might be a bit more bold. I'm not talking about Democrats in Congress, mind you; since most of those folks spent a good chunk of their careers in the minority, they have become quite used to being cowed in the face of Republican intransigence and nonsense. I am talking, first and foremost, of those liberals and leftists who blog, comment on blogs and news articles, are most vocal in our current public discussions on health care reform, the economy, the opening of discussions on financial re-regulation, and, of course, the Presidency of Barack Obama. I have become increasingly frustrated with the fact that most of these folks believe, lacking any evidence whatsoever, that the radicalization of the Republican Party, its embrace of a combination of ignorance and a seething social rage just barely this side of out-and-out violence is a sure formula for success.
What utter nonsense.
Take, for example, the following comment, which follows a piece at Washington Monthly online on a Virginia Republican who, in the face of overheated rhetoric (the feds are gang-raping America), rather than confronting it and the person who said it, seems to agree with the sentiment.
"Dark days"? Ridiculous. Last time I checked, the Democrats have 58 seats in the United States Senate, with the two independent members caucusing with them. The House majority is larger than any the Republicans had in their twelve years in control from 1994 through 2006. And while it is indeed true that his favorability numbers are falling, Pres. Obama is the first Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson to enjoy such wide support for so long after his election, and pretty much across the board. Indeed, even Ronald Reagan had serious problems in favorability as the recession of the early 1980's - a very different animal to be sure - dragged on and on. In many ways, Barack Obama is by far the most successful American President with the American people in a very long time.
Yet, the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a Democratic President, a resetting of our national policy agenda away from tax cuts in perpetuity for the wealthy and the freeing of any restrictions on capital and financial transactions does not seem to satisfy. The attention the press paid over the August Congressional recess to the Tea Party movement has only fed that particular beast, to be sure; the persistence of Sarah Palin in our national consciousness is the one gift, sad to say, the McCain campaign has bequeathed the American public. We face climate skeptics, evolution skeptics, even birth-skeptics who believe that Barack Obama not only was not born in the United States, but that a massive conspiracy has hidden this truth from the American people. Liberals, for all their claims to a greater clarity of vision and adherence to the principles of science and understanding, are actually surprised that these notions, all easily proven to be factually inaccurate, nevertheless survive and even thrive in the fever swamps of the right.
With the persistence of these imaginary threats, we also have the rough road health care reform has faced. The emergence of a few folks as opponents - Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson; Joe Lieberman and Bart Stupak - has generated so much concern that there is the widespread belief that it will fail, to the detriment not only of the millions of uninsured Americans, but the electoral and political fortunes of the Democrats. Now, obviously, since the world is imperfect, this is a live possibility. Yet, it seems that quite a few minds have already been made up that even the bill before the Congress right now is so awful, so devoid of merit - the magic phrase "public option" is on everyone's lips, even if few seem to understand that it really is nothing more than Medicare for everybody; which is why (surprise, surprise) the insurance industry is opposed to it - that passage in a form even somewhat similar would be tantamount to defeat.
Now, I have issues with the way health care reform has been done. It seems to me the best things the sponsors of the legislation could have done would be to do a quick study of the way the varieties of public health insurance work in industrialized countries then cherry-pick the ideas and programs that best fit the United States. This isn't rocket science, and far too many people seem to believe we as a nation are reinventing the wheel.
My larger complaint right now, however, is with those who seem to believe that disagreement on this issue is not just error-prone, but somehow immoral. The language of rights, already overburdened, has been weighted down with the addition of health care. Without explanation, without defense, with more moral fervor than intellectual muscle, liberals and leftists are demanding opponents stand aside because health care is a right and the passage of health care reform is a moral imperative.
Are they so afraid of actual debate they would silence opponents by painting them as immoral, in much the way the whole "death panel" nonsense suggested that behind the Democratic designs on health care reform was a kind of eugenics? The fear and loathing among liberals has become, in many instances - far too many - a mirror of the delusions among those on the right. We cannot have a dispassionate discussion on the merits, accepting the good faith and will of our opponents. Indeed, the entire social and cultural basis of our democracy - our pluralist acceptance of difference as a boon, with those differences to be negotiated constantly, including on issues of power - is not only forgotten, it seems to be a matter of scorn.
I suppose mine is one of those namby-pamby voices of moderation, a phony liberal who would surrender in the face of opposition. Since my complain, however, is that far too many liberals have surrendered, not so much because of the merits of disagreement but its reality, I find this difficult to swallow. One of the merits, to me at any rate, of the Obama Administration, is the respect the President shows for the inherent limits of the office, including a refusal to act as if he is "legislator-in-chief". He has made his legislative program known, offered his preference for certain specifics, and is sitting back and letting Congress do its job. This display of respect for the Office of the President has few fans on the left, however. Since one of the many complaints about the Bush Administration was its Imperial nature, its scoffing at any limits on Presidential power, one would think that an Administration that makes a virtue of these limits would be celebrated.
Instead, we hear the constant complaint that the President isn't "doing enough" for health care reform. Um, last time I checked, we the people have a role in this. Contacting our elected representatives, getting information to them, insisting that a vote one way or another on their part would help or hurt their future electoral prospects - while there are some who voice this opinion, far too often what one hears is a whine that it's all the President's fault.
I guess this rant is about done. All I can say is the following, and mark this post for reference in a year's time: the Republicans are headed to electoral disaster next year, and there will be a leftward swing, not huge, but noticeable, among the Democratic caucus in both Houses of Congress. Health care reform, and soon financial re-regulation, will pass in some manner, fashion, or form, and form the cornerstone of the platform the Democrats will take to the American people next fall. The notion that the Republicans are poised for some kind of comeback is ridiculous on its face, considering the current state of the Party and its elected members.
We liberals need to learn how to celebrate victory a little, but also how to celebrate democracy, too.
What utter nonsense.
Take, for example, the following comment, which follows a piece at Washington Monthly online on a Virginia Republican who, in the face of overheated rhetoric (the feds are gang-raping America), rather than confronting it and the person who said it, seems to agree with the sentiment.
The really scary thing is the potential snowball effect. Neo-Klan loudmouths talk rape, murder and revolution, rightwing politicans coddle them, Democratic supporters become disillusioned and don't vote due to Republican stonewalling and Democratic wimpiness, Republicans take power, fear the Baggers will turn on them if they don't deliver, and produce a fascist government they may not even believe in. I know Grassley doesn't, for one; like so many of them he's just terrified of a primary challenge from the right. But would he object to being part of a dictatorship? No, he'd love to be up on the balcony wearing the armband. Dark days, today and tomorrow.(emphasis added)
"Dark days"? Ridiculous. Last time I checked, the Democrats have 58 seats in the United States Senate, with the two independent members caucusing with them. The House majority is larger than any the Republicans had in their twelve years in control from 1994 through 2006. And while it is indeed true that his favorability numbers are falling, Pres. Obama is the first Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson to enjoy such wide support for so long after his election, and pretty much across the board. Indeed, even Ronald Reagan had serious problems in favorability as the recession of the early 1980's - a very different animal to be sure - dragged on and on. In many ways, Barack Obama is by far the most successful American President with the American people in a very long time.
Yet, the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a Democratic President, a resetting of our national policy agenda away from tax cuts in perpetuity for the wealthy and the freeing of any restrictions on capital and financial transactions does not seem to satisfy. The attention the press paid over the August Congressional recess to the Tea Party movement has only fed that particular beast, to be sure; the persistence of Sarah Palin in our national consciousness is the one gift, sad to say, the McCain campaign has bequeathed the American public. We face climate skeptics, evolution skeptics, even birth-skeptics who believe that Barack Obama not only was not born in the United States, but that a massive conspiracy has hidden this truth from the American people. Liberals, for all their claims to a greater clarity of vision and adherence to the principles of science and understanding, are actually surprised that these notions, all easily proven to be factually inaccurate, nevertheless survive and even thrive in the fever swamps of the right.
With the persistence of these imaginary threats, we also have the rough road health care reform has faced. The emergence of a few folks as opponents - Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson; Joe Lieberman and Bart Stupak - has generated so much concern that there is the widespread belief that it will fail, to the detriment not only of the millions of uninsured Americans, but the electoral and political fortunes of the Democrats. Now, obviously, since the world is imperfect, this is a live possibility. Yet, it seems that quite a few minds have already been made up that even the bill before the Congress right now is so awful, so devoid of merit - the magic phrase "public option" is on everyone's lips, even if few seem to understand that it really is nothing more than Medicare for everybody; which is why (surprise, surprise) the insurance industry is opposed to it - that passage in a form even somewhat similar would be tantamount to defeat.
Now, I have issues with the way health care reform has been done. It seems to me the best things the sponsors of the legislation could have done would be to do a quick study of the way the varieties of public health insurance work in industrialized countries then cherry-pick the ideas and programs that best fit the United States. This isn't rocket science, and far too many people seem to believe we as a nation are reinventing the wheel.
My larger complaint right now, however, is with those who seem to believe that disagreement on this issue is not just error-prone, but somehow immoral. The language of rights, already overburdened, has been weighted down with the addition of health care. Without explanation, without defense, with more moral fervor than intellectual muscle, liberals and leftists are demanding opponents stand aside because health care is a right and the passage of health care reform is a moral imperative.
Are they so afraid of actual debate they would silence opponents by painting them as immoral, in much the way the whole "death panel" nonsense suggested that behind the Democratic designs on health care reform was a kind of eugenics? The fear and loathing among liberals has become, in many instances - far too many - a mirror of the delusions among those on the right. We cannot have a dispassionate discussion on the merits, accepting the good faith and will of our opponents. Indeed, the entire social and cultural basis of our democracy - our pluralist acceptance of difference as a boon, with those differences to be negotiated constantly, including on issues of power - is not only forgotten, it seems to be a matter of scorn.
I suppose mine is one of those namby-pamby voices of moderation, a phony liberal who would surrender in the face of opposition. Since my complain, however, is that far too many liberals have surrendered, not so much because of the merits of disagreement but its reality, I find this difficult to swallow. One of the merits, to me at any rate, of the Obama Administration, is the respect the President shows for the inherent limits of the office, including a refusal to act as if he is "legislator-in-chief". He has made his legislative program known, offered his preference for certain specifics, and is sitting back and letting Congress do its job. This display of respect for the Office of the President has few fans on the left, however. Since one of the many complaints about the Bush Administration was its Imperial nature, its scoffing at any limits on Presidential power, one would think that an Administration that makes a virtue of these limits would be celebrated.
Instead, we hear the constant complaint that the President isn't "doing enough" for health care reform. Um, last time I checked, we the people have a role in this. Contacting our elected representatives, getting information to them, insisting that a vote one way or another on their part would help or hurt their future electoral prospects - while there are some who voice this opinion, far too often what one hears is a whine that it's all the President's fault.
I guess this rant is about done. All I can say is the following, and mark this post for reference in a year's time: the Republicans are headed to electoral disaster next year, and there will be a leftward swing, not huge, but noticeable, among the Democratic caucus in both Houses of Congress. Health care reform, and soon financial re-regulation, will pass in some manner, fashion, or form, and form the cornerstone of the platform the Democrats will take to the American people next fall. The notion that the Republicans are poised for some kind of comeback is ridiculous on its face, considering the current state of the Party and its elected members.
We liberals need to learn how to celebrate victory a little, but also how to celebrate democracy, too.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Some Personal Thoughts
OK, I'll admit that, at the moment, I'm feeling more than a little maudlin. I had a brief comment-conversation on FB with an old friend of mine, found after many years, that said so much without saying a whole lot about a mutual friend of ours who is nearly 23 years gone now. With the help of a soundtrack via Pandora and YouTube, I've been thinking about time, and memory, and the way that old memories - some of which can be painful - are necessary for us.
That's the theme of one of my favorite movies, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A couple, recently broken up, discovers they have availed themselves of the services of a company that erases memories. Love seems to be something "real", more powerful than our desire, let alone power, to control. Even more important, the film shows us that as painful as some memories can be, removing them robs us of something that makes us human.
Whether the pain is caused by a lost love, or the untimely death of someone near to us, that pain reminds us that what happened was real. The person who shared our life, now gone, was real. Those moments, never to return, live on.
It can suck, it's true. But the alternative is really too awful to contemplate.
That's the theme of one of my favorite movies, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A couple, recently broken up, discovers they have availed themselves of the services of a company that erases memories. Love seems to be something "real", more powerful than our desire, let alone power, to control. Even more important, the film shows us that as painful as some memories can be, removing them robs us of something that makes us human.
Whether the pain is caused by a lost love, or the untimely death of someone near to us, that pain reminds us that what happened was real. The person who shared our life, now gone, was real. Those moments, never to return, live on.
It can suck, it's true. But the alternative is really too awful to contemplate.
Resuscitating A Good Lost Law
This is great news.
It took less than a decade after the provisions in Glass-Steagall concerning investment versus commercial banking were removed for the entire edifice to collapse. Think about that. From 1933 to 1999 - two whole generations, roughly speaking - the banking sector, and by extension the rest of society - were protected from the dangers of complete financial collapse. Then, from 1999 to 2008, and look where we are now. It almost makes me want to go back in time and smack Phil Gramm around.
Anyway, this is an idea that is long overdue, precisely as the House is taking up consideration of new financial industry regulations. It seems to me we don't so much need new ones as a return to the old ones that worked quite well. They weren't perfect, to be sure, but they worked, which is far better than perfection any day of the week.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and provided a strong regulatory environment that largely served the nation and its banking sector well. The law separated commercial banks from investment banks by banning commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a lender or an underwriter but not both. The law was finally repealed in 1999 during the Clinton Adminstration after 12 attempts in 25 years had weaken the provisions. [...]
This week five House Democrats - Maurice Hinchey of New York, John Conyers of Michigan, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington, and John Tierney of Massachusetts - will introduce an amendment that would give banks one year to choose between being commercial banks or investment banks. I support this amendment and believe it critical to the future success of the country because it will restore a balance within the finance industry letting commercial banks do what they do and investment banks do what they do.
It took less than a decade after the provisions in Glass-Steagall concerning investment versus commercial banking were removed for the entire edifice to collapse. Think about that. From 1933 to 1999 - two whole generations, roughly speaking - the banking sector, and by extension the rest of society - were protected from the dangers of complete financial collapse. Then, from 1999 to 2008, and look where we are now. It almost makes me want to go back in time and smack Phil Gramm around.
Anyway, this is an idea that is long overdue, precisely as the House is taking up consideration of new financial industry regulations. It seems to me we don't so much need new ones as a return to the old ones that worked quite well. They weren't perfect, to be sure, but they worked, which is far better than perfection any day of the week.
Scrooge WIth A Lemon Twist
In 1843, Charles Dickens published a very short book that has become so much a part of our celebrations, we think of it as eternal. The message of the book was simple - part of the Christmas Spirit is remembering to live with our fellow men and women, with love and care and concern just because they are fellow travelers for our short season on this Earth. Far more horrible than poverty is the loneliness that leaves one unlamented, unmourned, and forgotten at death.
There was, of course, a social and even political dimension to Dickens' spirited tale of Ebeneezer Scrooge; yet focusing on that to the exclusion of the deeply human, deeply faithful theme at the heart misses the main point. The social and political dimension exists precisely because of the stresses and strains on human community and interaction.
Fast forward to our time, and we face this, which shows just how little times have changed, or indeed have degraded. Rather than create a marvelous world full of characters so memorable even the minor ones - like Scrooge's nephew Tom - stand out in our minds as people we know and care about, some people believe it necessary to forget that Christmas isn't about coercion, or laws, or forcing anything upon anyone. Christmas is the amazing story of Divine love entering the world in the most remarkable, unbelievable, fashion and form. For all their insistence that they are doing what they are doing in the name of Christmas and the faith of the child whose birth we commemorate, these latter day Scrooge's lack even the slightest notion that all their passion, all their righteous indignation could be far better spent working for others in the name of the Christ child, rather than legally demanding superficial conformity in the form of required artistic performance.
These are our Scrooges. Who, I wonder, could be their Marley, arranging an intervention to spare them, and us, from the ravages of their narrow lives? What answer could they give to the Second Spirit, who sees in Scrooge's pettiness nothing of merit, insisting that he (Scrooge) is far less deserving of life than millions such as Tim Cratchit (my guess is, for all his joviality, that Spirit was not one to mess around with)? They are just as petty, just as spiteful, just as removed from human fellowship as Ebeneezer. Just as his nephew did for Scrooge, we should pity them for their small minds, their shrunken hearts, their refusal to accept the invitation to be with others. Whether gold or god, an idol is an idol is an idol.
There was, of course, a social and even political dimension to Dickens' spirited tale of Ebeneezer Scrooge; yet focusing on that to the exclusion of the deeply human, deeply faithful theme at the heart misses the main point. The social and political dimension exists precisely because of the stresses and strains on human community and interaction.
Fast forward to our time, and we face this, which shows just how little times have changed, or indeed have degraded. Rather than create a marvelous world full of characters so memorable even the minor ones - like Scrooge's nephew Tom - stand out in our minds as people we know and care about, some people believe it necessary to forget that Christmas isn't about coercion, or laws, or forcing anything upon anyone. Christmas is the amazing story of Divine love entering the world in the most remarkable, unbelievable, fashion and form. For all their insistence that they are doing what they are doing in the name of Christmas and the faith of the child whose birth we commemorate, these latter day Scrooge's lack even the slightest notion that all their passion, all their righteous indignation could be far better spent working for others in the name of the Christ child, rather than legally demanding superficial conformity in the form of required artistic performance.
These are our Scrooges. Who, I wonder, could be their Marley, arranging an intervention to spare them, and us, from the ravages of their narrow lives? What answer could they give to the Second Spirit, who sees in Scrooge's pettiness nothing of merit, insisting that he (Scrooge) is far less deserving of life than millions such as Tim Cratchit (my guess is, for all his joviality, that Spirit was not one to mess around with)? They are just as petty, just as spiteful, just as removed from human fellowship as Ebeneezer. Just as his nephew did for Scrooge, we should pity them for their small minds, their shrunken hearts, their refusal to accept the invitation to be with others. Whether gold or god, an idol is an idol is an idol.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
"Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace"
I read the text of Pres. Obama's acceptance speech in Norway. What struck me the most? Not just his admission that he was probably far less deserving of this award than many others; acknowledging that was surely necessary. More than anything, what stood out for me was Obama's refusal to deny the reality that human conflict will ever be eradicated. This struck me as courageous, considering the venue and circumstances.
This is not to say that I believe the "wars" over which he presides as Commander-in-Chief of the US military meet the criteria of "Just War"; rather, it is to say that, on a theoretical level at least, Obama understands that there has to be a mixture of idealism and realism in pursuit of the most noble of goals, peace among nations and peoples.
The biggest problem facing the international community was addressed directly by the President - the reality that most conflicts, at least in the years since the Second World War, are civil wars, wars within states. Obviously there have been and will be exceptions (most recently the Israeli attack on Lebanon); for the most part, however, national collapse or an internal revolt have been far more destructive of human life than wars between states. Far more protracted, intractable, and difficult to deal with from the perspective of international law, civil strife within states, especially when combined with the overarching idea of the inviolability of national sovereignty, has yet to be untangled successfully.
Consider a couple examples. When the Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea created a refugee problem in Vietnam, and the reality of what was happening there became clear (not to mention historical animosity between them), Vietnam invaded, to all sorts of international condemnation, despite the fact that their intervention ended the worst of the horrors of Pol Pot's regime.
Similar reaction met Tanzania's military intervention in Idi Amin's Uganda.
Pres. Obama's Nobel Prize speech may just rank as among the most memorable precisely because of the clarity of vision, and the ready acknowledgment that the unity of peace and justice in the international sphere needs a grounding in the undeniable reality that injustice and violence and conflict are far more complicated issues, and necessitate creative measures to confront, and perhaps even prevent, in the future.
This is not to say that I believe the "wars" over which he presides as Commander-in-Chief of the US military meet the criteria of "Just War"; rather, it is to say that, on a theoretical level at least, Obama understands that there has to be a mixture of idealism and realism in pursuit of the most noble of goals, peace among nations and peoples.
The biggest problem facing the international community was addressed directly by the President - the reality that most conflicts, at least in the years since the Second World War, are civil wars, wars within states. Obviously there have been and will be exceptions (most recently the Israeli attack on Lebanon); for the most part, however, national collapse or an internal revolt have been far more destructive of human life than wars between states. Far more protracted, intractable, and difficult to deal with from the perspective of international law, civil strife within states, especially when combined with the overarching idea of the inviolability of national sovereignty, has yet to be untangled successfully.
Consider a couple examples. When the Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea created a refugee problem in Vietnam, and the reality of what was happening there became clear (not to mention historical animosity between them), Vietnam invaded, to all sorts of international condemnation, despite the fact that their intervention ended the worst of the horrors of Pol Pot's regime.
Similar reaction met Tanzania's military intervention in Idi Amin's Uganda.
Pres. Obama's Nobel Prize speech may just rank as among the most memorable precisely because of the clarity of vision, and the ready acknowledgment that the unity of peace and justice in the international sphere needs a grounding in the undeniable reality that injustice and violence and conflict are far more complicated issues, and necessitate creative measures to confront, and perhaps even prevent, in the future.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
When The World Collides
The Climate Summit in Copenhagen is providing interesting reading for folks. Apparently, Sarah Palin has weighed in via the always friendly op-ed pages of the Washington Post. Last night, California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher took to the House floor to denounce "globalists" who have a secret agenda that only he, apparently is aware of, although what it is, he can't say, because then he'd have to kill everyone listening.
Then there's the alleged "Climategate" scandal, in which hacked emails from a British climate research institute reveal . . . that scientists debate stuff, including the political implications of their research. Ooo!
When politics and science collide, it is usually a messy business. Politics is about power; science is about explaining how stuff happens, a "best guess" based on publicly-accessible methods, providing answers that even the most dedicated practitioner would admit are nothing but provisional. After all, even Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Darwin were "wrong" in the sense that their theories have either been superseded or, at the very least, are known to be incomplete. Precisely for this reason, however, the introduction of scientific data in to political debate creates problems. Since there are actually politicians who are unscrupulous enough to point out that scientific data can be erroneous, we have the odd combination of a political conference, meeting to discuss the policy implications of scientific data, based in a theory, all of which, as some rightly point out, could be wrong.
"Could be" is not "is", however. Falsifying a scientific theory is difficult. A theory that is able to take in to account all sorts of disparate data, and predict the potential outcomes of future research is a pretty robust theory. Then there are the facts that the theory attempts to connect - the belching of all sorts of gases known to create the greenhouse effect by two hundred years of industrial activity in the west; rising global temperatures and sea levels; the disappearance of glaciers; the upward trend in global temperatures; the increasing instability of regional meteorological phenomenon; even species extinction rates and migration patterns of birds and sea mammals. These are phenomena that, taken separately, make no sense. Drawn together through a theory that states that they are related, or at the very least highly correlated, makes sense of this data.
No scientist, of whom I am aware, would make a policy recommendation based on any particular bit of research, or even an entire theory. At their best, as handmaids of politicians, they merely report their findings, based on current research models, and allow the politicians to figure out what to do, if anything.
Since it is devilishly difficult at the moment to get some folks in the United States Congress to understand the reality that we face, imagine getting delegates from nation-states as disparate as Uzbekistan, the Central African Republic, the Maldives, and Bolivia to come to anything like agreement on a kind of global policy regarding climate change. Yet, the UN is cowboying up, getting roughly representatives from over 200 nations together to discuss "what do we do about it." In principle, this is a good thing; global warming effects us all. No single country can possibly address this issue on its own. Yet, at the same time, there are all sorts of complications that make such a meeting not quite a farce, but certainly an exercise in futility, especially for those who are dedicated to the idea that global warming is the most pressing problem facing the planet at the moment. Energy-producing countries certainly have no interest in curbing the use of fossil fuels; some of those countries, like Venezuela and Nigeria, need that oil money for development purposes. Emerging economies like India, China, Brazil, and Argentina might balk at being told by those in western Europe and North America that they are required to take steps to make further industrial expansion more expensive. African nations that are potentially rich in mineral wealth and other natural resources might not be best pleased to be told that extracting that wealth would be a danger to the climate. It is difficult enough to find investors willing to risk putting their money toward mining ventures in unstable places in the world; now, it seems, it might be possible that such would be cost-prohibitive.
These are only some examples of the political realities the meeting will face. Then, of course, there are on-going international rivalries and even conflicts that make these economic questions pale in comparison. There is the developed world faced by an increasingly recalcitrant undeveloped world. Many of these latter states, only recently released from over a century of imperial domination, still de facto colonies of the interests and industries of the imperial power, might be a tad reluctant to be told by these same former colonial powers how to run their countries.
Finally, there are the activists. A fun bunch, they are convinced that the threat of global warming is such that we must simply disregard the social, economic, and political realities of the world and do somethingright now!!!!! What "that" might be . . . well, beyond "curbing greenhouse gas emissions" and "ending our reliance on fossil fuels" some might offer some ideas, to be sure. For the most part, though, the nitty-gritty details of policy - like cap-and-trade, say, in the United States, or investment incentives via the World Bank for developing nations to adopt "clean" industries - are up to other folks. Too many activists, in my experience, really can't be bothered with this kind of stuff. "Raise awareness" is their mantra and motto.
The clean lines and elegance of science meeting the dirty, sometimes nasty, occasionally delusional, world of politics can be fun to watch. Yet, when the issue facing us is as full of roadblocks and pitfalls, crazy folk screaming at the clouds and earnest do-gooders insisting that the entire planet is going to die unless we all shut up and listen to them, we have the makings not so much for a road map for future policy as an exercise in global futility. It may be that Rep. Rohrbacher's delusion of "global governance" is what is necessary to address the threat posed by global warming; sadly, the reality is that such does not exist, and even if it did, it would face these same problems, only slightly more organized.
Then there's the alleged "Climategate" scandal, in which hacked emails from a British climate research institute reveal . . . that scientists debate stuff, including the political implications of their research. Ooo!
When politics and science collide, it is usually a messy business. Politics is about power; science is about explaining how stuff happens, a "best guess" based on publicly-accessible methods, providing answers that even the most dedicated practitioner would admit are nothing but provisional. After all, even Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Darwin were "wrong" in the sense that their theories have either been superseded or, at the very least, are known to be incomplete. Precisely for this reason, however, the introduction of scientific data in to political debate creates problems. Since there are actually politicians who are unscrupulous enough to point out that scientific data can be erroneous, we have the odd combination of a political conference, meeting to discuss the policy implications of scientific data, based in a theory, all of which, as some rightly point out, could be wrong.
"Could be" is not "is", however. Falsifying a scientific theory is difficult. A theory that is able to take in to account all sorts of disparate data, and predict the potential outcomes of future research is a pretty robust theory. Then there are the facts that the theory attempts to connect - the belching of all sorts of gases known to create the greenhouse effect by two hundred years of industrial activity in the west; rising global temperatures and sea levels; the disappearance of glaciers; the upward trend in global temperatures; the increasing instability of regional meteorological phenomenon; even species extinction rates and migration patterns of birds and sea mammals. These are phenomena that, taken separately, make no sense. Drawn together through a theory that states that they are related, or at the very least highly correlated, makes sense of this data.
No scientist, of whom I am aware, would make a policy recommendation based on any particular bit of research, or even an entire theory. At their best, as handmaids of politicians, they merely report their findings, based on current research models, and allow the politicians to figure out what to do, if anything.
Since it is devilishly difficult at the moment to get some folks in the United States Congress to understand the reality that we face, imagine getting delegates from nation-states as disparate as Uzbekistan, the Central African Republic, the Maldives, and Bolivia to come to anything like agreement on a kind of global policy regarding climate change. Yet, the UN is cowboying up, getting roughly representatives from over 200 nations together to discuss "what do we do about it." In principle, this is a good thing; global warming effects us all. No single country can possibly address this issue on its own. Yet, at the same time, there are all sorts of complications that make such a meeting not quite a farce, but certainly an exercise in futility, especially for those who are dedicated to the idea that global warming is the most pressing problem facing the planet at the moment. Energy-producing countries certainly have no interest in curbing the use of fossil fuels; some of those countries, like Venezuela and Nigeria, need that oil money for development purposes. Emerging economies like India, China, Brazil, and Argentina might balk at being told by those in western Europe and North America that they are required to take steps to make further industrial expansion more expensive. African nations that are potentially rich in mineral wealth and other natural resources might not be best pleased to be told that extracting that wealth would be a danger to the climate. It is difficult enough to find investors willing to risk putting their money toward mining ventures in unstable places in the world; now, it seems, it might be possible that such would be cost-prohibitive.
These are only some examples of the political realities the meeting will face. Then, of course, there are on-going international rivalries and even conflicts that make these economic questions pale in comparison. There is the developed world faced by an increasingly recalcitrant undeveloped world. Many of these latter states, only recently released from over a century of imperial domination, still de facto colonies of the interests and industries of the imperial power, might be a tad reluctant to be told by these same former colonial powers how to run their countries.
Finally, there are the activists. A fun bunch, they are convinced that the threat of global warming is such that we must simply disregard the social, economic, and political realities of the world and do somethingright now!!!!! What "that" might be . . . well, beyond "curbing greenhouse gas emissions" and "ending our reliance on fossil fuels" some might offer some ideas, to be sure. For the most part, though, the nitty-gritty details of policy - like cap-and-trade, say, in the United States, or investment incentives via the World Bank for developing nations to adopt "clean" industries - are up to other folks. Too many activists, in my experience, really can't be bothered with this kind of stuff. "Raise awareness" is their mantra and motto.
The clean lines and elegance of science meeting the dirty, sometimes nasty, occasionally delusional, world of politics can be fun to watch. Yet, when the issue facing us is as full of roadblocks and pitfalls, crazy folk screaming at the clouds and earnest do-gooders insisting that the entire planet is going to die unless we all shut up and listen to them, we have the makings not so much for a road map for future policy as an exercise in global futility. It may be that Rep. Rohrbacher's delusion of "global governance" is what is necessary to address the threat posed by global warming; sadly, the reality is that such does not exist, and even if it did, it would face these same problems, only slightly more organized.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
In Which I Attempt An Answer To A Conundrum
Via Duncan Black comes this question:
The answer is really quite easy. You hear it all the time on Rush. In fact, it is one of his great themes. We liberals, really just socialists/communists, want to destroy prosperity out of spite and envy; since it is a product of capitalism, which we loathe, we want to end it. If that means impoverishing the entire world in the process, so much the better. Rather than offer a model of development and a standard of living to which the whole world should aspire, so this argument seems to go, we should destroy American wealth, American industry (or what remains of it, anyway), and our entire economic structure in order to share it with the rest of the world, not in any constructive way - that is, allowing others to copy its merits in order to lift themselves out of poverty - but to get even with all those wealthy people who have achieved something in their lives.
See, to a certain conservative mind-set, we liberals are not motivated by any sense of fellow-feeling, even less any love for all the makes the United States great. Rather, we are motivated by the most base feelings of loathing for all those political and economic and cultural values that make our nation great. Being nihilists, we wish nothing more or less than the destruction of those values in the name of abstractions that sound good, but are merely lies, hiding our true, nefarious desires.
Since any attempt to end global warming would necessitate moving us away from reliance on the oil industry, perhaps any industry as it exists right now, this obviously means that we liberals, standing behind our real leader, Al Gore, want to destroy American prosperity. Since it's snowing outside right now where I am, and since we had, here in northern Illinois, a mild summer by recent standards, global warming is a farce. Retreating glaciers and melting permafrost are as nothing to what is quite visible and plain for anyone to see.
I hope this clears things up.
Still, one thing I've never quite understood is to the extent that they actually believe or claim to believe that it's all some liberal conspiracy, just what is it do they think we have to gain from it? What's the point of our little conspiracy?
The answer is really quite easy. You hear it all the time on Rush. In fact, it is one of his great themes. We liberals, really just socialists/communists, want to destroy prosperity out of spite and envy; since it is a product of capitalism, which we loathe, we want to end it. If that means impoverishing the entire world in the process, so much the better. Rather than offer a model of development and a standard of living to which the whole world should aspire, so this argument seems to go, we should destroy American wealth, American industry (or what remains of it, anyway), and our entire economic structure in order to share it with the rest of the world, not in any constructive way - that is, allowing others to copy its merits in order to lift themselves out of poverty - but to get even with all those wealthy people who have achieved something in their lives.
See, to a certain conservative mind-set, we liberals are not motivated by any sense of fellow-feeling, even less any love for all the makes the United States great. Rather, we are motivated by the most base feelings of loathing for all those political and economic and cultural values that make our nation great. Being nihilists, we wish nothing more or less than the destruction of those values in the name of abstractions that sound good, but are merely lies, hiding our true, nefarious desires.
Since any attempt to end global warming would necessitate moving us away from reliance on the oil industry, perhaps any industry as it exists right now, this obviously means that we liberals, standing behind our real leader, Al Gore, want to destroy American prosperity. Since it's snowing outside right now where I am, and since we had, here in northern Illinois, a mild summer by recent standards, global warming is a farce. Retreating glaciers and melting permafrost are as nothing to what is quite visible and plain for anyone to see.
I hope this clears things up.
On The (Different) Merits
I hate to disagree with Tbogg's casual dismissal of Stanley Fish's column on Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, but Fish has it right. For those who may not have heard of him, Fish is a big deal in the pomo world; he ended up at Duke University back in the 1990's, which sought to become the home of serious lit-crit. In the 1990's, he did a debate tour with Dinesh D'Souza, and published a summary of the event as There is No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's A Good Thing. Cantankerous, brilliant, always thought provoking, Fish has the ability to grasp not just texts, but reading in a way few can.
On how to read Palin's book, Fish nails it quite easily.
Fish insists we need not bother with questions of reliability in any traditional sense precisely because these aren't the criteria by which the book is to be judged. Not just by "impartial reviewers", of which there are sure to be few. The question forced upon the reader of the autobiography is one not of "truth" in some verifiable sense, but Truth as a property of one's life. More than just integrity as a condition of singularity of purpose and vision and practice. In the sense meant here, Truth is something that one possesses that is a condition for integrity, gives strength in times that challenge the desire to live it out, and is recognizable to those who share it in their own lives. This is Truth not as something that is factually accessible; this is the Truth that Palin and her admirers understand lies at the heart of our common life as Americans.
Unlike liberal elitists, with their penchant for fact-checking and defining reliability as something that has nothing to do with personal integrity (also not defined with any reference to anything outside one's own sense of oneself), Palin understands, and communicates to her readers, that the threats to our country do not lie in abstractions like global warming or the still faltering economy. Rather, the real threat to America, far more sinister and dangerous precisely because it is cloaked in the rhetoric of concern and a kind of patriotism, comes from those who do not understand that reliability is a personal quality, Truth is a possession, and integrity is the drive that keeps one from succumbing to doubts in the face of outside criticism. Rather than consider criticism as a constructive discussion with others, Palin simply dismisses any and all criticism of her life-choices, at a professional level, as coming from those who do not understand how she is living out, with integrity grown from the inner light of Truth.
As a cultural artifact, then, Palin's memoir is important as a demonstration of the persistence of a kind of child-like refusal to submit one's life to the judgment of others. Rather than self-knowledge, or at least the kind of understanding that comes from wrestling with the doubts and differences of others, Palin's work stands out as a kind of defiant call to return to an earlier understanding of the self as something flowering from inside oneself. Should others not understand that, not see the way Truth and certain simple American values create a life that values family and mild ambition above all others, they are only revealing their own unAmericanness, their own adherence to alien views of Truth, their elitist concern with petty things like facts.
As a cultural and political artifact, then, Fish gives readers an understanding of Palin's book that should leave us pondering the question, "What next?"
On how to read Palin's book, Fish nails it quite easily.
My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of persons they are — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.
The questions to ask then are (1) Does Palin succeed in conveying to her readers the kind of person she is? and (2) Does she do it in a satisfying and artful way? In short, is the book a good autobiographical read? I would answer “yes” to both.
Fish insists we need not bother with questions of reliability in any traditional sense precisely because these aren't the criteria by which the book is to be judged. Not just by "impartial reviewers", of which there are sure to be few. The question forced upon the reader of the autobiography is one not of "truth" in some verifiable sense, but Truth as a property of one's life. More than just integrity as a condition of singularity of purpose and vision and practice. In the sense meant here, Truth is something that one possesses that is a condition for integrity, gives strength in times that challenge the desire to live it out, and is recognizable to those who share it in their own lives. This is Truth not as something that is factually accessible; this is the Truth that Palin and her admirers understand lies at the heart of our common life as Americans.
Unlike liberal elitists, with their penchant for fact-checking and defining reliability as something that has nothing to do with personal integrity (also not defined with any reference to anything outside one's own sense of oneself), Palin understands, and communicates to her readers, that the threats to our country do not lie in abstractions like global warming or the still faltering economy. Rather, the real threat to America, far more sinister and dangerous precisely because it is cloaked in the rhetoric of concern and a kind of patriotism, comes from those who do not understand that reliability is a personal quality, Truth is a possession, and integrity is the drive that keeps one from succumbing to doubts in the face of outside criticism. Rather than consider criticism as a constructive discussion with others, Palin simply dismisses any and all criticism of her life-choices, at a professional level, as coming from those who do not understand how she is living out, with integrity grown from the inner light of Truth.
As a cultural artifact, then, Palin's memoir is important as a demonstration of the persistence of a kind of child-like refusal to submit one's life to the judgment of others. Rather than self-knowledge, or at least the kind of understanding that comes from wrestling with the doubts and differences of others, Palin's work stands out as a kind of defiant call to return to an earlier understanding of the self as something flowering from inside oneself. Should others not understand that, not see the way Truth and certain simple American values create a life that values family and mild ambition above all others, they are only revealing their own unAmericanness, their own adherence to alien views of Truth, their elitist concern with petty things like facts.
As a cultural and political artifact, then, Fish gives readers an understanding of Palin's book that should leave us pondering the question, "What next?"
Monday, December 07, 2009
Music For Your Monday
In memory of my Aunt Joan, the biggest Alan Sherman fan I ever knew, here are some examples of some of the best song parodies ever written. The Ballad of Harvey and Sheila ("The ladies of Haddasah!"):
Al & Yetta need a life.
I wonder if Tom Waits ever heard this song. "Shake Hands With Uncle Max":
Al & Yetta need a life.
I wonder if Tom Waits ever heard this song. "Shake Hands With Uncle Max":
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Christmas Memories - 1985
Sticking with my stated goal, this Second Advent Sunday brings another Christmas memory, from my college years. I have struggled, trying to determine how I should present this. In the end, rather than be retrospectively harsh on my 20-year-old self, I am going to write it from within the perspective of that young man, full of naive optimism, and with little understanding of the world or his place in it. There may come a time to make fun of the person I was, but this isn't it.
There are those fleeting moments in one's life when, despite all sorts of obstacles and in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary, one seems to have one's hand securely on the tiller of life. All the different pieces of one's life, once tossed in the air, seem to have landed to form the perfect picture. One can get a gliimpse - all too brief, and maybe even wrong - of the course one's life could take; as long as the course one is taking doesn't veer off too far, it is possible to get to where you want to go from where you are with a minimum of effort. That time in my own life - viewed with a mixture of harsh criticism and a kind of burning nostalgia - runs from the spring of 1985 through the end of the summer, 1986. Situated almost exactly in the middle of this time, Christmas 1985 stands out precisely because, having just emerged from my first straight-A semester, I felt like I was, indeed, sailing with the wind of life.
Four of the five children would be at my parents' that year. I was the first to arrive, on December 20th. The next day, I went with my folks to pick out a Christmas tree (this was pretty typical; some years, the tree wouldn't be finished until Christmas Eve!). My mother told me once, a few years later, that I picked out the best tree we could have found that year. Maybe, but it certainly seemed that way. Like a Saturday Evening Post cover, it started snowing as my parents and I walked through Rosh's Trees.
A couple days later, on the morning of Christmas Eve, my youngest sister, my brother, and I all went last-minute shopping for stocking stuffers for my parents (my youngest sister started that tradition, and it was enjoyable to get Mom and Dad stockings). The snow from the previous couple days was having additional inches added to it by a Christmas Eve snowstorm; I remember, as we drove in to the parking lot at Newberry's Department Store in Sayre, PA that it seemed as if nature was cooperating to provide a memorable, almost classic, Christmas.
As we adult children gathered around the Christmas tree the next day, for the first time the atmosphere was relaxed. We sat and drank coffee or hot chocolate, ate a little breakfast, checked out who had what package, laughed and looked forward to what turned out to be an almost textbook example of The Perfect Christmas.
In retrospect, though, I wonder about that. Does it seem perfect because it was filled with those elements that, as someone just emerging from adolescence, seemed to define what Christmas should be - snow, but not too much; friendliness, even joviality around the Christmas tree; family actually enjoying one another's company - or are those memories tainted by my own retrospective sense that this particular Christmas seemed to come in the midst of a time when my life was firing on all cylinders?
That is a question I cannot answer, not really. Rather than sit and deconstruct those memories, taking this very special Christmas from a very special period of my life and attempting to make it in to something it was not, might satisfy my own sense that I need to be far more critical of my younger self. Yet, the reality is, reading my journal entries from this time - I've kept a journal fitfully for over a quarter century - I get no sense of anything other than a joy at living at this place and this time. I was somewhat dimly aware that I was living in the midst of a very special moment, that I had to hold the wheel carefully, because life has a way of taking over and not just capsizing it, but dragging it to the depths. Rather than sit and write all sorts of things that pointed out my many quite obvious personal flaws at the time, I want to let this moment - this Christmas that was perfect it could almost be used as a template for what Christmas should be - rest in my memory for what it actually was. The six of us gathered that morning of December 25th had a wonderful time together, the run-up to Christmas was something out of a Hallmark television special, and all the moments of my time home between semesters was filled with a sense that life was going to provide even more special moments, as long as I was open to those possibilities. What actually happened, well, that's a story for another time and place.
For now it is enough to say that this Christmas stands out precisely because it was, like so much else during this all-too-brief moment in my life, just about as perfect as can be.
There are those fleeting moments in one's life when, despite all sorts of obstacles and in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary, one seems to have one's hand securely on the tiller of life. All the different pieces of one's life, once tossed in the air, seem to have landed to form the perfect picture. One can get a gliimpse - all too brief, and maybe even wrong - of the course one's life could take; as long as the course one is taking doesn't veer off too far, it is possible to get to where you want to go from where you are with a minimum of effort. That time in my own life - viewed with a mixture of harsh criticism and a kind of burning nostalgia - runs from the spring of 1985 through the end of the summer, 1986. Situated almost exactly in the middle of this time, Christmas 1985 stands out precisely because, having just emerged from my first straight-A semester, I felt like I was, indeed, sailing with the wind of life.
Four of the five children would be at my parents' that year. I was the first to arrive, on December 20th. The next day, I went with my folks to pick out a Christmas tree (this was pretty typical; some years, the tree wouldn't be finished until Christmas Eve!). My mother told me once, a few years later, that I picked out the best tree we could have found that year. Maybe, but it certainly seemed that way. Like a Saturday Evening Post cover, it started snowing as my parents and I walked through Rosh's Trees.
A couple days later, on the morning of Christmas Eve, my youngest sister, my brother, and I all went last-minute shopping for stocking stuffers for my parents (my youngest sister started that tradition, and it was enjoyable to get Mom and Dad stockings). The snow from the previous couple days was having additional inches added to it by a Christmas Eve snowstorm; I remember, as we drove in to the parking lot at Newberry's Department Store in Sayre, PA that it seemed as if nature was cooperating to provide a memorable, almost classic, Christmas.
As we adult children gathered around the Christmas tree the next day, for the first time the atmosphere was relaxed. We sat and drank coffee or hot chocolate, ate a little breakfast, checked out who had what package, laughed and looked forward to what turned out to be an almost textbook example of The Perfect Christmas.
In retrospect, though, I wonder about that. Does it seem perfect because it was filled with those elements that, as someone just emerging from adolescence, seemed to define what Christmas should be - snow, but not too much; friendliness, even joviality around the Christmas tree; family actually enjoying one another's company - or are those memories tainted by my own retrospective sense that this particular Christmas seemed to come in the midst of a time when my life was firing on all cylinders?
That is a question I cannot answer, not really. Rather than sit and deconstruct those memories, taking this very special Christmas from a very special period of my life and attempting to make it in to something it was not, might satisfy my own sense that I need to be far more critical of my younger self. Yet, the reality is, reading my journal entries from this time - I've kept a journal fitfully for over a quarter century - I get no sense of anything other than a joy at living at this place and this time. I was somewhat dimly aware that I was living in the midst of a very special moment, that I had to hold the wheel carefully, because life has a way of taking over and not just capsizing it, but dragging it to the depths. Rather than sit and write all sorts of things that pointed out my many quite obvious personal flaws at the time, I want to let this moment - this Christmas that was perfect it could almost be used as a template for what Christmas should be - rest in my memory for what it actually was. The six of us gathered that morning of December 25th had a wonderful time together, the run-up to Christmas was something out of a Hallmark television special, and all the moments of my time home between semesters was filled with a sense that life was going to provide even more special moments, as long as I was open to those possibilities. What actually happened, well, that's a story for another time and place.
For now it is enough to say that this Christmas stands out precisely because it was, like so much else during this all-too-brief moment in my life, just about as perfect as can be.
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