What's It All About?

A colleague of mine enjoys teasing me because I (a) am married to an ordained United Methodist clergywoman, and (b) do all sorts of things one does not normally associate with what this person calls "being a churchboy", including liking psychedelic music (which this person refers to as "stoner music"). I find it fascinating not only because this person, who neither goes to church nor cares all that much for Church, seems to think it perfectly fine to tease me, with an undercurrent of moral scolding, for not conforming to some notion of what a "real Christian" does. Like, say, not listen to psychedelic music.

In a similar way, one of the recurrent right-wing scolds insists that I, and others, are "immoral". It is different only in degree rather than kind than my colleague's sometimes not-so-subtle scolding. Both charges - real Christians don't listen to all that weird music! Real Christians are MORAL! - hinge upon what is an irrelevant, and actually insidious, understanding of what it means to be a Christian. I was trying to figure out a way to sort through all this when I came across this post by John Meunier.

A holy person does no harm to himself or to others, either by what he does or by what he leaves undone.

A holy person does good to all people she encounters. Her life is one that enriches others in their bodies, their minds, and their souls. And she cares just as much for her own body, mind, and soul because there is great joy in living fully into the goodness of her own life.

A holy person knows where the power source of life can be found, and he is constantly found there. He worships with passion and reverence. He prays without ceasing. He searches the word of God with expectation that it has a word for him. He draws close to God by letting go of the world through fasting. He seeks out brothers and sisters to talk, listen, cry, celebrate, and mourn with because where they gather, God is.

This is a good start, and is very much in line with Wesley's understanding of holy living. All the same, I think there is a bit too much asceticism, a bit too little of the Bible in this. In particular, St. Paul. Paul's vision of what it means to be a Christian, at least in my understanding, begins with, "Christ came so that we have life, and that more abundantly." For me, holiness embraces not only the things John describes. Like St. Paul, and Jesus, it includes going about one's life no longer afraid that, in that living, one might slip and fall so far there will be no getting up. Jesus went about his work not caring for the moral scolds who insisted he hung out with the wrong crowd, or violated the rules set forth by God. St. Paul went about his missionary work even as he was chastised by St. Peter and the rest of the apostles. Why did they do this? Because both understood that, at its heart, being a Christian means being free.

It does not mean being free to do anything one wants to do. Rather, it means free to be as God intended. Living in service to others. Living with the understanding that God's love for us is real not because of what we do, but just because we are.

St. Paul does not speak of holiness directly. Rather he speaks of the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. While he certainly insists that we are to conduct our lives in a manner blameless before other persons and God, it is in these expressions of a full human life that a Christian demonstrates what it means to be fully human as a Christian.

I'm not one to sit around and write about the moral failings of others. This isn't because I am an immoral person. Rather, it is because conventional morality is irrelevant to the Christian life. Again, not because I believe God is immoral or amoral. Rather, the Christian life both embraces and transcends any passing ideas on conventional morality, seeing the Christian life as one lived freely, for others, in love and joy and all the rest. Further, I honestly cannot imagine any circumstance in which God cares what music we might choose to listen to, anymore than I believe God cares whether we wear a suit and tie to church, or shorts and flip-flops (I once raised eyebrows in a eucharist service at Wesley Theological Seminary by showing up in shorts, a t-shirt, and flip-flops; the celebrant, indeed, was "offended").

As long as we focus on non-issues - how we behave in inconsequential matters speaks more about who we are before God - the Church will always run in to trouble. Instead, we need to be living our lives full of joy and laughter, love and patience, with a heart and mind turned out to the sufferings of others, seeking to help them, be a presence in the midst of their pain. That is true holiness. That is what the fruits of the Spirit yield. Whether or not I tell other people they are immoral or bad or evil is immaterial; that we show them God's love through our freely-given love for them - that is what matters.

The Atheist Synthesis Of Bible And Theology - Boer On Bloch II

I would much rather that Bloch had allowed his politicised biblical criticism loose on theology. I think of the discernment of myths along class lines, between those that encourage sevility and those that enable human beings to stand up to the power that oppress. Is not this kind of discernment necessary in his readings of theology? These debates might continue, but, in the end, Bloch drops his ideological guard too often, especially in regard to theology and it is precisely here that is is needed. Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven, p.56

One of the first books I read as a seminarian is Phyllis Bird's The Bible as the Church's Book, a succinct discussion of the history of the formation of the canon. It is indispensable to any understanding of the Bible, to any approach to this much-contested text, to grasp that, in its final form, we have a Bible at all because the Church as a whole, early in its life, determined certain texts to be central to our communal understanding, while others were not.

This does not mean the canon is "closed". On the contrary, one of the most important insights of Hans Frei's monograph on biblical hermeneutics, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, is that interpretation itself keeps the canon open.

All the same, a basic historic fact is the Bible, for all that it presents many faces to many readers, and offers so much to readers less interested in religion and theology, nevertheless is the book of the Church.

Ernst Bloch recognizes this reality, calling the Bible Christianity's "uneasy conscience". A fair description, to say the least; it is in the words of the texts that so many in Christian history have found the resources to protest all sorts of abuses of power and authority. This historical reality, one Bloch notes runs from the Albigensians (one could add the Cathars and Waldensians as well) through the Hussites in Bohemia through Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Munzer and the Peasant Revolt during the early days of the Reformation. Rather than denounce the Bible as nothing but a work designed by those in power to maintain their power, Bloch wants to know how it is possible this collection of writings has offered and continues to offer so many readers resources, strength for the journey from nobody to fully human.

Bloch finds it, as he writes in Atheism in Christianity, within the contested texts of the Bible itself. Using the best available biblical scholarship at the time - in particular that known as "redaction criticism", a fancy name for how the various writings are edited - Bloch espies in the texts abundant evidence not only of stories from above, but of protests from below, stories that tell not only of a people's protest against various authorities here on earth, but also the imposition of a God who supports and even defines and legitimizes that imposition. In other words, within the Bible itself (much as each historical age, according to Marx, contains within itself its own contradiction that will, over time, lead to its destruction and the creation of a higher stage through synthesis) there lies a protest against God, the core of an atheism that elevates trammeled humanity to stand as fully human.

While applauding, in general terms, this hermeneutics of class, Boer wishes, as the quote above indicates, that Bloch had moved from the Scriptures to theology. The Bible has, indeed served as a check on all sorts of theological excesses. Taking the next, somewhat logical, step, and insisting that the Church's adoption of the Bible includes the incomplete revision of a whole series of texts, rooted in an oral tradition "from below", that undermine the very idea of God, falls short for Boer.

I don't think that Boer gives Bloch due credit. While I agree his interpretations of specific texts - for example the Cain/Abel/God story in Genesis 4 - include an attention to editorial detail that demonstrate clearly enough the heavy hand of a redactor somewhere, I believe that Bloch's insistence that this undercurrent of protest a-theology is "hidden" is belied precisely by the history to which Bloch himself appeals. Were it as hidden as he insists, it would not have served as a source for various social and political protests movements in the history of European Christendom, awaiting academic historical criticism to unearth. That this fundamental contradiction within the text of the books themselves exists is obvious enough to a careful reader. That Bloch uses it to construct a vision of Christian thought as anthropocentric, atheistic, synthetic of the questions raised throughout the text as the stories from below and above clash without any clear resolution is a testimony to his respect for both the Bible and Christian theology.

Boer's basic criticism, that the success of Bloch's hermeneutic and use of various historical-critical methods is belied by his theologizing misses, I think, a crucial issue. Bloch's project in Atheism in Christianity is precisely to construct a Biblically-based a-theology, an understanding of human community rooted in the Scriptural narrative that sees no need for hypostasizing "God" in order to make of creation something more. The protest stories, the hermeneutic of suspicion within the Bible to its various triumphalisms, reveal that, at heart, the higher synthesis, without any need for "God", is at the heart of the Biblical testimony itself.

Matters Of Style - Boer On Bloch I

When I first cracked open The Principle of Hope back in 1992, this was the very first section of the very first chapter:

I move. From early on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.

This rather inauspicious beginning both reveals so much, yet hides so much, about the writing style of Ernst Bloch. Described as expressionistic, Bloch's writing has a distinctive beauty about it, an almost romantic sweep and grandeur that is unlike anything, in any language.

Before delving in to what Bloch has to say, Roland Boer first says what needs to be said about how Bloch says it (pp. 11-12):

For there is an extraordinary charge in reading Bloch. His style has always been a source of delight and consternation, often incomplete, missing the various elements of the more conventional sentences (most notable the verb), declaratory when speaking of the most ephemeral of matters and tentative where the ground is firmer. There are thoughts and ideas thrown forward full of suggestion and promise; the longer sentences in which he juxtaposes two or more ideas or metaphors; and then the impossibly long paragraphs that run on for pages. The style is energetic, allusive. . . More specifically, along with the expressionist presence, there is a prophetic and poetic feel to Bloch's sentences, paragraphs and discourse, one that seeks not only to speak with the urgency of prophetic voices but also the encyclopaedic allusiveness of Goethe's poetry. It seems to me that Bloch sought, by means of style itself, to allow what he called the 'spirit of utopia' to speak, to create a new way of writing through which the utopian would emerge. . . .(emphasis added)

The distinct pleasure in the style, an almost utopian charge in the syntax itself tempts me to apply the comment to Bloch that Terry Eagleton first used for Jameson, namely, that he would have the oppressive pleasure of knowing that his works will be read in some future, postcapitalist society. . . For utopia is not merely hard work but also an extraordinary pleasure, an intense charge of which we can find moments now but not the continuity it should have. This is what Bloch's prose provides - a glimmer of such a perpetual pleasure.(emphasis added)

The seductive power of Bloch's style is canny enough to make criticism more difficult. Like parsing poetry, it would seem an intellectual crime to take the step back necessary and point out where Bloch has erred; who would want to do something so pedestrian, so pedantic, so mundane as take the effusive writings and render them something less?

Boer's comments on Bloch's style are also important because of the very seductive quality of that writing. Because one can fall under its spell, it becomes necessary to make clear its beauty in order to do the difficult work of delving beneath that style to what it is Bloch is saying in this most beautiful way. Boer does this quite well, a point to which we shall turn in the next post.

By Way Of Introduction

Since the move this past summer, I have felt more focused in certain interests. In particular, reading through my small, incomplete Reinhold Niebuhr library gave me a greater appreciation for just how radical the pre-WWII Niebuhr was, that his critique of Protestant liberalism was from the left, although itself deeply rooted in much of the same set of categories. After Niebuhr, I read Ernst Bloch's most thoroughly theological work, Atheism in Christianity. While dated, particularly his approach to biblical criticism, there is still a wealth of beauty, as is usual in the case of Bloch. His thesis, that the dialectic of Scripture reveals a protest against the royalist vision of YHWH, that Jesus' life and ministry was a protest against just such a vision. Inherent in Bloch's critical work is the idea that, at heart, the Bible is as much a sustained argument against the reigning notions of God as it is a defense of God.

After floundering around quite a bit this fall, I was given a new sense of where I wanted to move in thinking about being a Christian after reading, twice in rapid succession, Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I was not just intellectually impressed, I was emotionally moved by much of Eagleton's writing, not least because, as a Marxist, Eagleton's work provided evidence that much of what has passed for "the God debate" over the past few years has been deeply flawed on any number of levels. I turned back to Ernst Bloch, a collection of his writings on aesthetics (The Utopian Function of Art and Literature), and then, taking a hint from a friend on Facebook, just received (after much toil and trouble) Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Australian Roland Boer. The book is nothing short of exactly what I'm interested in - a critical engagement of 20th century Marxist thinkers at their deepest engagement with theology. Boer reads Bloch, Walter Benjamin (I guess I never really considered him a Marxist, per se; more a fellow-traveler), Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. That such a wide array of important figures in 20th century Marxist thought have considered theology important enough to address on its own terms should give any critic who wishes to dismiss it as irrational drivel at least a moment's pause.

So, because I am utterly predictable, expect posts over the next week or two on Boer's work, as I work through what he has to say about each of these men. That this work was suggested to me at the very moment that I was moving toward this very subject - the junction of Marxism and theology, and how to engage with respect two very different intellectual traditions - is proof, to me, of the existence of God.

I Write So Others Can Read Me

I was recently informed that I write too much. Further, by providing links on Facebook, I am advertising my writing, which is apparently wrong somehow.

I'm not sure how and why this is bugging me, but it has really got under my skin. Do I write too much? I started to think I have; moreover, I think it far better to write less, and write it well, than write more, no matter how much rattles around my mostly empty skull. Furthermore, after four years of writing on the Internet, I just knew that, with the rise of a new Republican majority in the House (and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell acting like he's majority leader), there would be plenty of opportunities for me to huff and puff about how truly stupid and horrible and full of crap so much of our public discourse is; yet, this is no less true than when the Democrats were in control of Congress, the fault hardly lies with Republicans. The rhetorical nightmare that has been the national response to the Tucson shootings is evidence enough for me that we are a deeply flawed country, unable to confront an event like this in anything like a sane, contrite manner. Rather than exhaust my outrage button because I would keep hitting it, I am just going to allow the vast majority of the stupid to pass me by.

Furthermore, this site was never intended as a running commentary on our stupid discourse. That I bogged myself down that way far too often is my own fault. My New Year's Resolution to refocus has been aided by my decision to no longer get too upset by the constant flow of crap that is too much of our mainstream social and political commentary. Years of complaining, not just from me but all over the Internet hasn't changed the nature of our discourse one bit. So, far better to lean toward one's strengths, true?

So, sure, I write on the internet. Because I've always wanted to do that, there are topics that interest me; more important, I think they are important, serious topics, and I try best I can to treat them as such without (I hope) ever losing any sense that I am a walk-on, a bit player in so many of the discussions of the topics about which I write. My own preferences are eclectic enough that my guess is most of those who read are left scratching their heads, wondering why I'm wasting my time. That it is my time to waste should be clear enough, I suppose.

Finally, as to posting links on FB, like most writers (J. D. Salinger is the exception that proves the rule), I write so others can read what I've written. While the initial exercise is little more than making clear in my own mind what I might think about this or that topic under consideration, I put this stuff up on the internet to see if what I have to say, and the way I say it, makes any sense. Most of the time, I guess the answer on both counts is "No". All the same, I continue to do it, and to post those links, in the hope that someone, somewhere, finds something in my various typing exercises to make them mad enough, or sad enough, or frustrated enough, to start thinking for themselves. If you find those Facebook links too much, all I can say is, "Don't push that button!"

Finally, as a general response, I have to ask, "Why do you care?"

Will Illinois Join Civilized Society?

Just before leaving office under a cloud that turned in to a hailstorm for him, former Illinois Governor George Ryan not only imposed a moratorium on all death penalties, he commuted the death sentences of all those on the state's death row. He did this after 13 death row inmates were exonerated by DNA evidence, by the combined efforts of students at Northwestern University and The Innocence Project. After the commutation, two more inmates still serving life sentences were shown conclusively to be innocent. The moratorium has remained in place, with subsequent governors Blagojevich and Quinn supporting it until the state legislature rewrote the rules.

Yesterday, they went a step further. The previous week the lower house passed a bill ending the practice of judicial murder. The state senate followed suit. All the bill awaits now is Gov. Pat Quinn's signature. Quinn is dithering, supporting the moratorium while still supporting a more "just" death penalty. In the midst of so much horror and sadness, the news that Gov. Quinn has signed the repeal would be a moment of profound joy.

Fifteen states have ended the practice. A majority of Americans are opposed to it, for the first time in our history. Its deterrent value was long ago proved non-existent. Because of stringent appeal rules set up by the US Supreme Court years pass between the imposition of the penalty and its actual occurrence. In the end, those executed rarely are the same individuals who committed the crimes for which they've been convicted. Its disproportionality in relation to the race and class of the perpetrator have rendered it a joke, a sick, horrid joke. Two decades ago, a long-time supporter on the Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun announced that he no longer supported what he would term "the machinery of death".

I hope and pray that Gov. Quinn does the right thing, the just thing, and signs the bill.

Forgive My Lack Of Sympathy

I suppose I should have more compassion for the people of Tucson, AZ. The events of this past weekend have focused attention on their city in a way no one would want their municipality to suddenly grab the spotlight. Furthermore, mass murder does have a way of making people pause. All the same, I found some parts of this story on Morning Edition from NPR just, well, ludicrous.

Ms. SARAH EVANS: It's kind of like 9/11 for me. It took me a long time to wrap my head around the complexity of all the events that happened.

ROBBINS: The tears are never too far away as she talks. It will be a while before the processing is complete, if it ever is.

If there is any evidence that narcissism, now removed from the psychologist's "Bible", was still prevalent, this short bit should disabuse them of it. See, Ms. Evans, all teary-eyed, considers what happened on Saturday "complex", an inscrutable act like the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that, for her, have everything to do with Sarah Evans. Her tears are for her inability to "process" (which reporter Robbins helpfully adds, in an aside, may never end).

I'm sorry, but I have very little sympathy for Ms. Evans. A nice woman, I suppose, gathering with a couple hundred fellow Tucson residents to walk and run through the streets of the city, she seems to have little comprehension that events on Saturday have nothing to do with her. They are, by and large, clear and easy enough to understand. There is no "processing" needed. Not really.

All I can get from Ms. Evans statement is she almost no psychical or emotional resources to deal with even the most peripheral tragedy. I consider this a symptom of how far too many Americans can be considered ill-prepared to handle any type of emergency situation. Seriously. This woman is aflutter because of a shooting in her city. Good Lord, what if she sat back and considered the reality that there is, roughly speaking, a hate crime committed once an hour each and every day somewhere in the United States? That there were, on average, 151 violent crimes committed each and every hour in the United States in 2009? Of course, these numbers reflect reported incidents.

What if I were to say to Ms. Evans that 34% of women in the United States were the victims of sexual coercion by a spouse or significant other? Would that leave her teary eyed, unable to leave her home because the situation is so complex?

We are not going to be able to address the reality of violence in the United States as long as close our eyes and ears to its banality. As long as a single shooting incident leaves people so flustered and unable to cope that they cannot leave their homes, and when they do emerge are teary-eyed and barely coherent, I have to wonder how it will be possible to talk about the reality around us without causing a national case of the vapors.

Our moral confusion in the face of the events on Saturday are as much a result of our insulation from the reality far too many of our fellow citizens face as it is a measurable and acceptable emotional response to a public trauma. Far too many Americans understand the reality of violence as just another part of their day to be either surprised or unduly horrified by the mass shooting. It is cheap and easy to point the finger of blame. It gives us an eased conscience to denounce the act, something that costs us nothing, asks nothing of us, and leaves us content in our remove from the human reality around us. I am not saying that the shooting on Saturday is not evil; on the contrary, I am insisting it is an all-too-common evil, something with which we have become too familiar, too accustomed to do more than shake our heads at its "senselessness", without ever grasping the far more disturbing reality that, perhaps, it might just make sense as being part and parcel of living in America.

Stupidity Wastes No Time

I must admit I am still frustrated, even angry, with the on-going political commentary concerning Saturday's mass shooting in Arizona. Matt Yglesias, Duncan Black, and Digby, among large-traffic liberal bloggers, have written quite a bit - with digby clearly out in front with the whole "It's the right's fault because they use violent rhetoric!" angle - including stirring defenses of the politicization of this event. The discovery of a similarity between some of Loughner's beliefs, expressed in his YouTube uploads, and those of one David Wynn Miller is adding fuel to the inferno of the whole view that, sure Loughner may be legally insane, but he was insane in a certain way which gives us license to make all sorts of accusations about our political opponents.

Of course, the right has enough evidence to give them tools to shoot back. Loughner's reading list includes The Communist Manifesto, Fahrenheit 451, and other classics of liberal education. It also includes Mein Kampf (full disclosure, I have read the first and last of these, but not the middle). All of which, really, means absolutely nothing.

There is no way to stop the endless flow of stupid crap, sides-taking, pointing fingers. I mean, really, not only is it fun, it doesn't involve any effort, it gives one a sense of moral and political superiority to make clear that a mass murderer is one of The Other. We congratulate ourselves on "proving" that he is One Of Them. It's cheap, it's easy, and like most such things, it is wrong.

To the morally righteous who insist we must denounce violence, I posted yesterday in order to remind readers that ours is a society so soaked in violence we do not even notice it anymore. Taking the opportunity of an event like this to denounce violence may make one feel better. It would be less egregiously hypocritical and shallow if one spent some time, each and every day, denouncing the attrition among the poor, among women and children, a steady-stream of broken bodies and lives we tune out because it is so common.

To the oblivious, who wonder, "What is happening to us?", I can only say, "Nothing new." Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy were successfully assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have been targets of high-profile failed assassination attempts (more full disclosure - my grandmother happened to be in Niagara Falls in 1901 when Pres. McKinley was assassinated, a reward from her grandmother for good grades in school). From Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts to the New Orleans police department using the Katrina flood as an excuse to murder African-Americans, our country has seen violence as a legitimate tool for making political and social statements. It's just a fact. Violence is, indeed, as American as cherry pie. Who holds the gun is an important consideration, but at the end of the day, it seems, in America, someone is always holding a gun.

Before we start casting aspersions on our political opponents of whatever stripe, or claiming we are king of moral hill because we can denounce violence, we need to take a good, long look at the country, the state, the city in which we live. We need to hear the cries of the families whose lives are disrupted by violence every day. This event may have a whole cluster of specific markers about it that may, indeed, mark it out as some kind of political statement, fed in part from the poisonous rhetorical atmosphere - when Democrats are denounced as standing for policies that are contrary to American tradition and law; when the President of the United States is denounced as an anti-American foreigner holding political views antithetical to our traditions, is it any wonder there are folks out there willing to pick up a gun and solve our problems this way? - but, right now, I think we need to take a moment and look around us. The bodies lie unburied, the cries of the slain call out just to be noticed. Instead of shouting about how evil are those who don't think like we do, we might all shut up, listen, and maybe do something about the carnage in which we stand, the killing floor that is America and its history.

Snapshots

What follows are snippets, glosses and illuminations that I offer as revision and extension upon the following comment, via a friend on Facebook: "There is no stopping crazy and no politics to it. But many people want the nation to search it's soul and ask why "America" has changed. All while 49% of every year's averaged murdered are black men. Poverty, education, nutrition, access, rights are all things we as a nation can change. Our shock is cheaply won and immorally numb." Lest we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should remember - ours is a nation that cleanses itself each and every day in the blood of the forgotten.

From Wikipedia:

On April 19, 1989, the slightly-built 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City's Central Park. She was raped and beaten almost to death. When found about four hours later, she was suffering from severe hypothermia and blood loss from multiple lacerations and internal bleeding, and her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was removed from the socket. The initial medical prognosis was that she would die or, at best, remain in a permanent coma due to her injuries. Remarkably, she largely recovered, with some lingering disabilities related to balance and loss of vision. As a result of the severe trauma, she had no memory of the attack or of any events up to an hour preceding the assault.

The crime, one of 3,254 rapes reported in New York City that year, was unique in the level of public outrage it provoked. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post, "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm."

According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding." New York City detectives said the word was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police.[4] This account has been disputed by other journalists, who say that it originated in a police detective's misunderstanding of the suspects' use of the phrase "doing the wild thing", lyrics from Tone Lōc's hit song "Wild Thing".[5][6] April 19 was known to have been a night when such a gang attack occurred, in which the suspects had entered the park in Harlem with over 30 acquaintances. Contrary to normal police procedure, which stipulates that the names of suspects under the age of sixteen are also to be withheld, the names of the juveniles arrested in this case were released to the press before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted, including one 14-year-old who was ultimately not charged.[1] The mainstream media's double-standard — printing the names, photos, and addresses of the juvenile suspects while shielding Meili — was cited by the editors of the City Sun and the Amsterdam News to explain their continued use of Meili's name in their coverage of the story.[7] While many teenage suspects were identified (or identified themselves) as participants in the Central Park assaults that night — although not necessarily in the attack on Meili — only five, known later as the Central Park Five, were brought to trial.

--snip--

In 2002, another man's confession, plus DNA evidence confirming his crime, led the district attorney's office to recommend vacating the convictions of the teenagers originally accused and sentenced to prison. In 2002, convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes, serving a life sentence for other crimes but not, at that point, associated by the police with the attack on Meili, declared that he had committed the assault, and that he had acted alone. The DNA evidence confirmed his participation in the crime and identified him as the sole contributor of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people"

A small school of literature arose in the wake of the initial convictions in the Central Park jogger case, questioning the moral education of minority youth that would lead to "wilding".

Wikipedia, again:

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County, Colorado, United States, near Denver and Littleton. Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a massacre, killing 12 students and one teacher. They also injured 21 other students directly, and three people were injured while attempting to escape. The pair then committed suicide. It is the fourth-deadliest school massacre in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and the deadliest for an American high school.

The massacre provoked debate regarding gun control laws, the availability of firearms in the United States, and gun violence involving youths. Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques, subcultures, and bullying, as well as the role of violent movies and video games in American society. The shooting also resulted in an increased emphasis on school security, and a moral panic aimed at goth culture, social outcasts, the gun culture, the use of pharmaceutical anti-depressants by teenagers, violent films and music, teenage internet use,[1] and violent video games.

As with the Central Park jogger, this incident spawned a small industry of social and cultural commentary. Newt Gingrich blamed liberal Democrats. There arose a suspicion of difference, particularly over anyone who participated in Goth culture. A host of myths, each and every one proved false, followed the retelling of the story of Columbine.

Jim Crow was not just a set of laws. It was an entire social and cultural system, enforced by extra-judicial murder, events that took on a form of social and cultural liturgy, reinforcing roles and status. Unlike contemporary executions, done quietly, in secret, these were community events. This photo was turned in to a postcard.

The following are two stories that appear in today's Chicago Tribune, so routine they do not even merit major comment.

Benjamin West was standing in a public housing play lot in University Village when two teenage boys approached, asking him for a lighter.

Moments later, West, 59, lay naked and dying, with his clothes heaped atop him in the cold after the teens robbed him and beat him, Cook County prosecutors said Saturday. West was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital less than an hour after the Tuesday-morning attack.

Chicago police said a dispute over the 99-cent lighter erupted into a fight. The teens — cousins Sharee Musgray, 15, and Angelo Cobbins, 17 — were both charged as adults with first-degree murder and robbery.

A 15-year-old boy who was shooting at several other teens on the street was shot to death Friday afternoon by an off-duty Aurora police officer trying to intervene in the fight, a police spokesman said.

The teen, who has not been identified, refused to drop his revolver after the officer told him to do so and then aimed the gun at the 11-year-veteran who fatally shot the teen, Aurora Police Spokesman Dan Ferrelli said in a press release today.
The teen, whose name has not been released but who is from Aurora, was declared dead about 5:25 p.m. at Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, about two hours after the shooting, according to the release.

Similar stories, from the Los Angeles Times:

A 26-year-old man was fatally shot Saturday at his home in the Central-Alameda neighborhood of South Los Angeles, authorities said.

Eleodoro Gaspar-Tlatelpa was in his living room about 10 p.m. when he was struck by multiple shots fired through his window, according to Los Angeles Police Lt. Samuel Rhone and a coroner’s investigator.

The suspect fled, and police said at this point they had no leads. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene.

Redlands police have redeployed two-thirds of their 74-officer staff in the wake of a shooting Wednesday night in which a suspected Latino gang member fatally shot two black youths and wounded two others, an incident that the mother of one victim believes was racially motivated.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Statistics Report, Preliminary Findings for the first six months of last year, there were 21 murders in the city of Tucson, AZ during that time period, roughly three-and-a-half per month. So, yesterday was an unusual day, but hardly unique.

Former Chicago police officer Jon Burge presided over a reign of terror on the South Side of the city, from 1972-1991, when he is alleged to have tortured as many as 200 criminal defendants. Burge, white, serving in the majority-black south side, was found not-guilty several times, although he was fired by the police department in 1991, and a series of civil suits followed. He was eventually convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice charges, leveled by federal prosecutors in regard to testimony in the series of suits the City of Chicago had to settle.

I could go on, but I think I'll stop for now. When blacks are lynched to enforce white supremacy, it's a party. When blacks for a political party in the city of Oakland that includes wearing army fatigues, and carrying perfectly legal sidearms, much of the nation quivers in fear. One of the people who inspired the Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, was denounced when he quipped that "violence is as American as cherry pie." Yet, it is Brown, not his critics who are correct. All the hand-wringing over the mass shooting yesterday is a cheap escape from the reality that our history is a river of blood in which we swim.

Who Needs To Soul-Search?

Yesterday's mass shooting in Tuscon, AZ is a test case for our public discourse. Quite apart from the untold human tragedy, our reaction to the event as a people will tell us not so much about who we are, but about those who are the gatekeepers of our national dialogue. So far, color me unimpressed, sad, and amused.

We are so accustomed to the left/right divide, absent any but the slightest evidence whatsoever, there was a rush to answer that most difficult of questions: Why did this happen? Perusing Twitter yesterday, the general sense was there was a need to tie this event to the seeming uptick in violent rhetoric, particularly on the right; to tie Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter, to the Tea Party, to the culture of gun enthusiasm. As Duncan Black said, "Which Team Does This Nut Play For".

The reality of violence, its ubiquity in our social and cultural and political history, its prominence in our popular and high culture, the reality of violence in our homes, our schools, our streets, our prisons, our churches, our places of work all make placing blame in a case such as this virtually impossible. Furthermore, "blame" is for children. It is an escape from responsibility.

There are other ways to escape responsibility, too. Among the statements released yesterday by various elected officials, House Speaker John Boehner's use of the adjective "senseless" can be taken any number of ways. Personally, I take it as meaningless. No act is "senseless". The person who acted had "a sense" as to why the act was performed. Political assassinations, successful or not, are usually done to make a statement, to achieve a particular political goal the person so acting believes cannot be achieved any other way. Even John Hinkley's attempt on the life of Pres. Reagan in 1981 made sense, to him. Obsessively pursuing the actress Jodi Foster, Hinkley decided that, like Robert DeNiro's character, murdering (or at least attempting to murder) a political figure would garner her attention. Calling the act "senseless" divorces it from any possible attempt to understand the act as something real, something human, some part of our national life.

I would like to offer an alternative approach. One that seeks to understand what happened yesterday, given our limited understanding of the event and the facts surrounding it, that nevertheless provides us all an opportunity to take in the enormity of it, the horror of it, the humanity of it.

Shut the hell up.

There are 9 people dead, including a nine-year-old girl. Nine families whose lives have been torn asunder by the persistence of violence in America. Those who survived, including Rep. Giffords, are in for a long road to physical and psychic recovery. The young man who has been placed in custody for the event, from what little evidence we have, seems to show signs of some kind of mental illness; some bit of compassion needs to be extended to him, as well, as someone who might not have been aware of the moral import of his actions.

Rather than rushing to judgment - which team does this nut play for? - in silence, we might discover our own complicity in the prevalence of violence. Politics is, indeed, about struggle, about power, and violence is merely an expression of struggle, a tool for those both in and out of power. In America, however, there is an almost mythic quality to the resort to violence. We read it in declarations concerning our private response to crime. We read it in the celebration, not so much of our military personnel, but of military actions that result in mass death. We see it in homes where far too many women and children find no haven, no respite from the ugliness of the world outside. We fear it at work, wondering if some employee or former employee might decide to take out frustrations or grievances by bringing a gun and opening fire. We read it in our newspapers as various politicians and their supporters declare that violent opposition to whatever prevailing party or ideological rule is not only possible, but morally and politically legitimate.

All of this violence, and we far too often remain silent. All the calls to violence and all too often dismiss it as "mere" rhetoric. In short order, I am quite sure, we will read (if it hasn't been suggested already; I don't peruse the comment threads of right-wing web sites for the sake of my mental hygiene) that, had some person in the crowd had a weapon, the alleged perpetrator might have been stopped (I'm guessing that owning a gun provides psychic powers; such an individual would know who this person was and what he planned, and could stop it before it began). Thus is the cycle of violence heralded, and given force to continue.

Since we remain silent in the midst of the ordinary violence that surrounds us, why is it that when the extraordinarily violent occurs, we suddenly find ourselves moved to speak?

Rethinking Christian Sexual Ethics: Human Agency Under Capitalism

Once again, it's the fault of The New Inquiry and their damn syllabus. Anwyn Crawford's essay on the intersection of capitalism, feminism, and sexuality has made me realize that this subject, a theme with which I've played on and off over the life of my time writing on the internet, has been far too abstract, far too naive, far too blind to the realities that shape our understanding of being human, being engendered, being sexual beings. Before we can be clear about how it might be possible to be Christian - that is, fully human, free for the sake of freedom in service to others - we should be clear about the intersecting systems that limit our ability even to make that choice.

Ms. Crawford's essay has made me realize I have much more to learn, much more to think through. The essay itself, covering everything from anorexia to porn to riot grrrl from a radical feminist perspective, is well worth the read in and for itself. It has also made me see that unpacking the ways the world seeks to define us, and to do so without our consent and prior to our ability to grasp that we are being defined and limited, is part and parcel of what it means to do Christian ethics. Unless the scales fall from our eyes, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how thorough we may sound to ourselves, we are being unfaithful to the calling to work out what it means to be Christian, living in free community for the sake of the world.

"The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death"

The New Inquiry is to be thanked and praised for providing a link to this 2005 commencement address by the late author David Foster Wallace. I really don't have anything to say about this, beyond praising the beauty and profundity of the possibility Wallace presents his listeners (and now readers) available in even the most mundane, perhaps (as he describes them) even frustrating, situations. That right here, right now may just hold the possibility for some transcendent moment - each here and each now, provided we open ourselves to it - is indeed a cliche. As Wallace makes the point, however, it is the "capital-T truth".

This Is Your Brain On Music By Daniel Levitin

Before reading further, turn on some music. Anything will do. I read the last hundred or so pages of this book with a Porcupine Tree concert playing. It seemed incongruous to me to be reading about how the brain processes music - as well as how music makes the brain work better - without having some music playing. So, whether it's Mahler or Molly Hatchet or Merle Haggard, turn it on. I'll wait.

OK, ready? From page 191, we have the following general description of what happens in the human brain when it hears music.

Listening to music caused a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: first, auditory cortex for initial processing of the components of the sound. Then the frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, that we had previously identified as being involved in processing musical structure and expectations. Finally, a network of regions - the mesolimbic system - involved in arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opioids and the production of dopamine, culminating in activation in the nucleus accumbens. And the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter. The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum's cotribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods. Now we think we know why.

Daniel Levitin started out as a musician. He moved on to become a sound engineer, then a record producer. Late in life, he returned to college, and now studies the interconnections between music and the human brain, at McGill University in Montreal.

This work, a popular distillation of the latest (as of 2006) cognitive neuropsychology that deals specifically with music, can be considered as a musical composition. Each chapter becomes a movement within the larger suite that is the book. Within each movement is a stated theme, that is elaborated through discussions of the unfolding of the scientific evidence, punctuated by examples from music that work out that theme. Each chapter, up to this point Levitin has explicated a particular theme; in this chapter, he begins by relating his meeting with Francis Crick, the impact of Crick's personal story upon his own life, and how this meeting encouraged a new direction in Levitin's research. All this seems to be a new theme, yet again, but as the chapter unfolds we realize that, like the best composers, Levitin is bringing together all the previous themes, weaving and recasting them as part of a much larger, more grand theme that culminates in the climactic release of the paragraph quoted above.

The final chapters are far from being mere addenda, or to use musical terminology a coda. Rather, they describe certain practical considerations of how the picture drawn in this paragraph work themselves out, first in the lives of musicians (the issue of expertise and technical mastery) and the larger question of the evolutionary basis of the development of musical ability in the human species. These are variations on the now-revealed central theme, working through a whole series of questions that revolve around the the nature/nurture debate and the place of art in the life of the human species.

Levitin's books is nothing short of masterful. Whether one is a musician, a musical aficionado, or one interested in cognitive neuropsychology, the book has much to offer, with a minimum of technical vocabulary - either musical or scientific - to interfere with the flow of explication. As one reads through the paragraph quoted above, taking the time to work through it slowly, it is nothing short of remarkable what is occurring within our brains as we sit and listen to music. Even more amazing is the reality that we human beings have the ability to do all that, and do other things while listening to music. I do hope you are still listening to whatever music you put on. Your brain is doing all that stuff and I hope continuing to process the words on the computer screen in front of you. Perhaps other physical stimuli is being processed, too, whether it's the amount of light or darkness around you, the background sounds in the room or house. In short, what makes the book amazing is what it reveals about the ability of the human brain, engaged in what some consider such a trivial activity, sitting and listening to music. Everything from memory to the pleasure center to the emotive portions of the brain are not just firing but exchanging information, the neurological activity constantly moving among the various areas of the brain working as a piece of music plays.

Whether one likes hip-hop or hoedown, reggae or Rachmaninov, your brain is involved in a complex operation, a series of evolutionary adaptations related to other characteristics but resulting, as biologist Ernst Mayr describes them, in an emergent phenomenon that also is rooted in human evolution, in what Darwin referred to as sexual selection. Music is part and parcel of what it means to be human for no less a reason than musical ability is one of the forces in mate selection. Levitin offers the simple example of rock stars and the sheer volume of sexual conquests they have; I had a similar discussion at work with a colleague just a few days ago about Vince Neil, lead singer of the 80's hard rock band Motley Crue. While hardly begrudging rock musicians one of the perks of the trade, it is a bit frustrating that even Vince Neil manages to win this particular evolutionary battle. Reading Levitin, it makes sense why this is so.

Musical Templates

I've been reading This Is Your Brain On Music by cognitive neuropsychologist and former rock engineer and producer Daniel Levitin. It is a marvelous, eye- and ear-opening book that, among other things, gets you thinking about what, exactly, shaped your appreciation for music. In one review, author Fahrad Manjoo writes of the impact of Weezer's debut back in the mid-1990's. Levitin speaks of lying on the floor while his mother played the piano. The late rock critic Lester Bangs wore his musical heart on his sleeve about his introduction to the anarchic possibilities in rock in the mid-1960's.

I, too, once wrote - not on the internet, but for myself - a long piece that attempted to understand the birth, growth, and development of my own musical obsessions and preferences. I started out with hearing "Star Cycle" by Jeff Beck on the radio, and kind of moved on from there. To this day, having listened to that song for 30 years, I still get chills during parts of it, and am discovering little nuances and subtleties both of production and arrangement that surprise me. All the same, I was being dishonest with myself. While "Star Cycle" was, and remains, a pivotal point in my (I hope) never-ending search for moments of transcendent bliss in the midst of music, both performing it and listening to it, were I honest, I would have to admit a far less cool beginning for my understanding of what is exciting in music.

It is the English single-version of this:



It was probably a 45-rpm single one of my older sisters bought. The performer, Miguel Rios, was one among many who, even today, take basic melodic themes from the classical repertoire, and adapt it for pop songs. In this case, Rios took not just the musical theme from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Fourth movement, he also took the poetic theme, which was a poem by the German Friedrich Schiller. Interesting enough, I found several videos for this song on YouTube and, not having heard this song in what may be almost 40 years, I remembered the twists and turns, not the least of which is a break around 2:10 in to the song, after a passage from a string section, where some horns play a descending decrescendo motif as a Spanish guitar enters to take the next verse. The final section weds both classical and contemporary, as Rios syncopates in front of a fully-orchestrated backdrop, complete with choir.

I admit it sounds dated, it really kind of cheesy, and is a bit too literal in its adaptation (just consider how Eric Carmen treated Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, Second movement in his song "All By Myself"; better yet, don't). All the same, having heard the song for the first time in decades, I recognize how much it has influenced my obsession with music, with what I find exciting and beautiful and interesting.

First, it is a wedding of classical and pop music. Hello Yes, Genesis, ELP, the end is listless. Yet, there is more. The arrangement, while faithful harmonically and melodically, takes liberties with instrumentation, rhythm, even mixing and matching classical and contemporary instrumentation and approaches simultaneously. Further, being a bit longer than the standard pop song (at just over four minutes, it must have seemed an eternity in a world where two minutes and thirty seconds was the norm), there is room to accentuate breaks in arrangement and verses, such as the one described above, to build tension and release it until the song comes to a resounding finish.

It isn't the song itself whose sound I continue to emulate. Rather, it is the emotional response I was surprised to learn I still had. The variation within the arrangement actually allowed for multiple tension/release moments, for rhythmic and timbral variation on the basic melodic theme, elements that are as surprising now as they were when I was four years old. In a sense, that continues to drive what I look for in songs. Some songs are simple enough in their emotional impact - consider any punk or heavy metal song, and you have that relentless sense of a release of energy. One advantage seventies classic rock has over much heavy metal is the build-up of tension (consider "Stairway to Heaven" as the archetype, too often badly copied; another approach was Boston's debut LP, where the songs use that tension/release formula, multiple times in the same song, in textbook fashion). On the other hand music I continue to listen to - classical and jazz, rock and pop - returning time and again follows those simple rules I first learned in Miguel Rios' "Hymn to Joy".

The Necessity Of History

We are a month away from the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth. Accordingly, the state of Indiana is celebrating by, among other things, offering students the opportunity to write an essay on the importance of Ronald Reagan for American history. Here are some thoughts on that particular subject.

Whether we like it or not, Reagan is a historical figure of much import. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama praised Reagan's rhetorical approach, his sunny optimism, his oft-stated belief in the power and promise of America and the American people. He received quite a bit of heat, in particular from his rival at the time, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for his comments. I defended the things he said at the time, and I still believe he was right, as far as it goes, that Reagan's contribution to our national psyche included praising America and Americans for our better natures. There's nothing wrong with that, in a general way. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama seemed to understand this in ways other Democratic candidates for President have not, part of the reason they won.

All the same, Ronald Reagan's time in office, his impact upon our polity, our politics, our national discourse, and so much else, has been, once one gets passed encomiums such as this, quite pernicious. As the Republican Party drifts further and further to the rights, they cling Reagan ever more closely to their collective bosom, it is important to keep in mind that the fault lines within the Party lie squarely at the feet of the 40th President.

One can survey the totality of his Presidency for all sorts of evidence that make clear how bad it really was. He began his run for the Republican nomination in Stone Mountain, GA, the birthplace of the KKK, a definite signal he was not only continuing but expanding Nixon's Southern Strategy. It has worked so well, the southern states, formerly iron-clad Democratic in their politics, are now Republican, for very bad reasons. In a famous moment in an early debate in New Hampshire, Reagan insisted on being given time to respond to a question by saying, "I've paid for this microphone." Except, of course, he hadn't paid for the microphone. It had been provided for him. The celebration of his sense of rugged individualism was belied by the reality of the case. No one, even at the time, pointed out to him that he was either misinformed or lying through his teeth. Of course, this was the case throughout his public career, from his time as governor of California to the end of his Presidency.

Reagan's courting of the religious right, hugely successful, is an object lesson in the contradictions of American conservatism. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals rejected one of their own, Jimmy Carter (who spent his Presidency teaching a Sunday School class at a Baptist Church; his invocations of the Deity were real, heart-felt, and deeply-rooted) for Reagan. Quite apart from the obvious personal issues involved - divorced; forced to marry his second wife because she was pregnant; he was not a church-goer at any time in his adult life - his vocal support for many of the policies embraced by the religious right came late in the pre-1980 election cycle. Up to the primary season, the then-nascent religious right was going to throw their support behind former Texas governor and former Democrat John Connally. Connally not only sang their tune. He also was deeply committed to their vision, and had a record of support that Reagan lacked. The switch came not least because Reagan's people convinced people like Richard Viguerie that Reagan, not Connally, was the only Republican capable of beating Carter.

The Republicans have failed, in the generation since Reagan's election in 1980, to deliver on any of the religious right's pet policies. There is no official prayer in public schools. Abortion remains legal. Our culture continues to drift toward openness, rather than embrace some arbitrary set of values labeled Christian, yet bearing little resemblance to the Christian ethic. Yet, the religious right continues to support the Republican Party, always a bridesmaid and never a bride, it seems.

One could continue in this manner ad nauseum, but the central point, I hope, is clear. For all that Ronald Reagan is and will continue to play a pivotal role in our understanding of the second half of the 20th century in America, any such understanding needs to be done with at least one eye on the contradictions and flaws within the Republican Party he helped shape, and the pernicious effects it has had on our country.

Moving Forward - New Year's Resolutions?

The Daily Howler is one of my daily "must-reads". Despite several issues I have with Somerby's approach, in general it is a site that keeps me thinking about the ways our public discourse is distorted by our elite press corps. His column today, for example, focuses on a really bad page 1 story in the New Year's Day New York Times. For him, this is just a question of elite stupidity spreading a cancer of Dumb through the body politic by metastasizing their core neuroses to the rest of us through the bloodstream of the press.

I take this same article, and while I agree it is cliche-ridden and nonsensical, I see it less of a symptom of elite stupidity, than elite distraction. Like the columns of Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins, or even David Brooks and E. J. Dionne, two often held up as more thoughtful commentators from a conservative and liberal bent, respectively, the sum-total of mainstream discourse is really awful for a reason. Elites tend to believe that those not of the same social or cultural milieu are ignorant. Dangerous, even. Consider how often we hear characters in television shows talk about the dangers of making some bit of information public because it might cause panic. Yet, in actual emergency situations - the New Orleans flood, say, or a tornado ravaging a small town - most people act both sensibly and even communally. Far from the specter of the mad, mindless mob, human beings in fact do quite well. Yet, the myth refuses to die, and is part of the operant conditioning of our political elites. Thus, we get page one stories in our most important national newspaper that are mindless rehashings of cliches that have absolutely no validity whatsoever (there are cliches that have some ring of truth about them; these, however, do not).

I have already written, and completely deleted, who whole posts this afternoon. Not because either one was bad. Rather, they really weren't focused on the aim of this site, or my current interests. So, in the future, expect less knee-jerk reaction to whatever insanity happens each day and more thoughtful (I hope) exploration of underlying structures and assumptions. Raging against the mindlessness of so much of our politics makes little difference because the mindless happen to be in charge.

Captured By Britney Spears' Abyss

The syllabus of The New Inquiry now has a link to a 2008 Esquire magazine piece - it was supposed to be an interview, but morphed in to ruminations far beyond anything captured in the interview itself - to accompany a now-famous photo-shoot, Britney Spears in as little as possible, yet again tantalizing and teasing an America so wrapped-up in a whore-madonna complex it may never find its way out again. The article, by well-known pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman, hits all the right points in discussing Ms. Spears, yet it seems to me that he misses something that would have been more obvious had he not been present for the photo shoot before doing the interview. I'm not blaming him; Lord knows, had I been there, even with that translucent screen keeping the rest of the world away, my guess is my thoughts would be addled. All I'm saying is that, when trying to "figure out" Ms. Spears and her place in pop culture, her history as a constantly manipulated cluster of social and cultural symbols is really what is important about her.

Since her emergence in the late-1990's as that most dangerous female creature for most men - the not-quite-of-legal-age yet nevertheless undeniably sexy young woman, either unaware of her sexual appeal, or using it to achieve her own ends - she has rarely moved forward in either her private life or career without those movement being scripted, covered by the ubiquitous tabloid press and paparazzi, with attendants including personal assistants and publicity directors carefully feeding stories, even contradictory ones, to those same tabloids. In other words, even in the very-public emotional and personal meltdown that followed not long after this interview was published, we should remember that Ms. Spears is far less an individual than she is a brand, perhaps even an industry unto herself.

Getting caught up in what Britney Spears thinks or says about her public image misses the fundamental reality that it this image has been carefully cultivated, kept before a public eager to finally pierce the veil (as it were). When Klosterman asks her about her sexuality, and Ms. Spears insists she doesn't think about it, in all likelihood she is correct. Since she was a child appearing on The New Mickey Mouse Club, Britney Spears has been a commodity. The entertainment industry in all its facets - music recording, television, photography, the music video - has attuned itself to her. My guess is Britney Spears has no idea how to live any other way than what others would see as exploited, dehumanized, hyper-sexualized, and finally foisted on the public with its various sexual and interpersonal neuroses. What "Britney Spears" has to offer by way of reflection on any subject matter is irrelevant not because she as an individual is irrelevant.

As an individual, sad to say, "Britney Spears" does not exist. No matter how many pictures we have of her, we are looking at an empty space, the contours of which are filled in by masters of manipulation. Stripping away the facade, we come face to face with the best example of Nietzsche's abyss that stares back at us, dragging us down.

New Year's Resolution With An Example

John believes it necessary for me to provide links to every factual claim I make, because facts can be disputed. In order to accommodate his wishes, in the future, my posts will look like this. Full of links that allow John the ability to check and make sure that I haven't made something up.

In fact, I'm going to provide a service in this post. A test case, as it were, of how this would work. It is common currency among right-wing pundits, bloggers, and politicians to insist that tax cuts increase revenue. This has been shown to be factually inaccurate - not controversial, not disputed, but an actual inaccurate description of the fact of the matter - over and over and over again. How do I know this latter case is, indeed, true? Why, I just made it up.

As with my already long-standing policy that I do not debate the reality of the Holocaust, of biological evolution, or global warming, the established fact that tax cuts do not increase revenue will not be a matter for dispute, debate, or controversy. I do not treat facts as disputable, as John does.

Enron And The Financial Collapse - A Dry Run?

I have been thinking quite a bit about the collapse of Enron and whether or not it presaged the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of financial markets. While I realize there are some that don't trust Wikipedia, its well-documented entries are easy enough to double-check, and it is a nice clearing house for all sorts of information, one-stop shopping as it were. So, from Wikipedia, a key point:

In Enron's natural gas business, the accounting had been fairly straightforward: in each time period, the company listed actual costs of supplying the gas and actual revenues received from selling it. However, when Skilling joined the company, he demanded that the trading business adopt mark-to-market accounting, citing that it would reflect "... true economic value."[20] Enron became the first non-financial company to use the method to account for its complex long-term contracts.[21] Mark-to-market accounting requires that once a long-term contract was signed, income was estimated as the present value of net future cash flows. Often, the viability of these contracts and their related costs were difficult to judge.[22] Due to the large discrepancies of attempting to match profits and cash, investors were typically given false or misleading reports. While using the method, income from projects could be recorded, which increased financial earnings. However, in future years, the profits could not be included, so new and additional income had to be included from more projects to develop additional growth to appease investors.[20] As one Enron competitor pointed out, "If you accelerate your income, then you have to keep doing more and more deals to show the same or rising income."[21] Despite potential pitfalls, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the accounting method for Enron in its trading of natural gas futures contracts on January 30, 1992.[20] However, Enron later expanded its use to other areas in the company to help it meet Wall Street projections.[23]

So, Enron signs a contract with the Widget Corporation, a 10-year deal that will bring in $10 billion. Instead of reporting $1 billion on its balance sheets for each of the ten years - the actual net gain it received that and each subsequent year - it reported the full $10 billion. In order to make up the lost reported revenue in subsequent years, however, it had to keep looking for new contracts, and kept reporting the income in this same fashion. Not only were reported net earnings erroneous. The actual cash-on-hand, the capitalization of the company, was wrong. Instead of receiving a check for $10 billion from Widget, they received and could only use $1 billion.

The SEC did approve this particular bit of legerdemain for one aspect of their business - energy trading. Enron, however, was a diverse company, and the practice spread to all areas. In essence, they were their own bubble - overvalues not the least because they claimed to have a certain amount of capital reserves they did not in fact possess. One $10 billion contract might have been easy enough to cover. Soon, however, all its business dealings were accounted for this way. When audited by Arthur Andersen, they insisted this accounting method was legitimate (it was, in one of its businesses) and that, in fact, their reported income was accurate. Andersen was duped, or perhaps went along with the charade.

How does this relate to the collapse of the mortgage-financing industry? I am still at a loss as to how smart investors would view a liability - and a mortgage, whatever else it might be, is just that, a debt owed - as an asset. Yet, they are routinely sold from the originator, bundled together, and sold on the open market as assets. In the 2000's this practiced was supported by no less than a statement from the President of the United States that home-ownership was a goal of federal policy. Mortgages, then, became not only a hot item with a certain safety net - mortgage default in the US has historically been relatively low - but with the backing of the federal government. It became a seller's market. The goal was increasing home-ownership. Banks, real estate firms, and other mediators were aggressively pursuing all sorts of potential customers. Once the pool of safe home-buyers dried up - those folks who would have qualified for a mortgage in any market - they started pursuing more and more marginal customers. No money down was offered. The variable-rate mortgage became commonplace, where the change in rate came in the future, at some time perhaps when the customer may be in a more secure financial situation. Interest-only mortgages seemed to promise low payments, but actually created much of the problem. Without any principal included, no equity could be accumulated; such mortgages were actually worthless in a financial sense.

In this seller's market - like the energy market that Enron controlled - the price of the commodity being sold went up, so the situation arose where more and more marginal customers were chasing after products, the price of which was climbing out of any realistic assessment of value, but also their ability to afford. The whole system teetered. As defaults began to increase, in 2007, the mortgage-backed securities held and traded by the large investment houses and banks (now indistinguishable thanks to Gramm-Leach) shrank in value, then disappeared.

The various stages differ. Enron was a single company, but did control enough of a particular market to have an impact, particularly on pricing. The end of Governor Gray Davis' term in office in California was in no small way due to Enron's price-manipulations of energy, and absent a regulatory regime, no effective controls. Absent a regulatory regime over the various financial products during the housing boom, investment houses and insurance companies that promised to cover potential losses (think American International Group, which died when Lehmann Brothers went south) had no floor beneath them. In both cases the free market worked to create not just volatility but instability, precisely because pricing control rested in the hands of either a single actor (Enron) or a few such actors (the investment banks, plus Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, a few others). While Enron died not least because of fraudulent accounting practices, claiming all sorts of profits and capital reserves it simply did not have, the housing bubble worked in much the same way, driving up the value of properties, creating a situation on paper where their value exceeded any reasonable estimate.

I'm not sure if these similarities offer any insight. They do, for me at any rate, point out that free markets, outside any regulatory framework or control, end up bringing about their own instability. In this sense, regulation of markets, setting all sorts of legal and administrative barriers, in effect keep capitalism afloat, a point most economists accepted during the Depression when it was noted that, far from overturning capitalism, Roosevelt's New Deal saved it from itself. Despite years of stagnant economic activity, except of course for the investment banks bailed out by the Bush Administration that are enjoying record profits, there is the general notion abroad that any attempt to regulate the financial markets will result in economic stagnation, while free markets are our only hope. How this can be, I do not know.

Enron died not least because, with the markets it controlled deregulated, there was no one looking over their shoulder. Arthur Andersen's audits, while legally required, were not themselves checked because going through the motion of an audit was enough to satisfy the requirements of the SEC. The investment houses, seeing an opportunity and operating in a favorable market condition - the so-called "ownership society" - also acted outside any effective regulatory control. Both created a situation of unsustainable market volatility that could only lead to a settling of accounts. In Enron's case, once the actual value of their capital reserves became clear, the value of the company crashed. Once increasingly marginal mortgages started to default in greater numbers, the value of mortgage-back securities, the investments made with them as collateral, and the insurance backing them all collapsed.

On Poverty Both Economic And Intellectual

In this comment on another site, I get challenged because I refused to respond to the claim that poverty in the US is in decline, that situation of the poor here in the US is improving, and that the best way to consider our economic situation is within the context of the most free, most open personal space imaginable.

There are multiple layers here. So, to be fair to John, I'm going to deal, first, with the more concrete claim - that poverty in the US is in decline. John, apparently, doesn't know there is this thing called Google that provides access to all sorts of information. In order to use it, one types in the words one wishes to find in context. In my case, I typed "US poverty rate by year", and I received access to 3,870,000 links in under a second. The first couple links, because they have the words I typed in Google most closely associated with them, are from, in turn, Bread for the World, and the United Nations. Then, we come to a report from The Washington Times, from September just passed, that the poverty rate is on the rise. Indeed, right there in the title, it reads that the poverty rate has hit a 15-year high!

So, after glancing through that article, I continue on down the Google results page - having used that "Page Back" key - and I come to a US Bureau Of The Census report on poverty. There are many links on that main page to various Census surveys and summaries (.pdf) and one, a summary of the 2008-2009 Household survey, includes in its sidebar under the "Highlights", in the very first one, the little fact that in 2008-2009, the number of people living in poverty in the United States increased to 42.9 million. Increased. Which, in vernacular English, means went up.

I could go on in this way, but just these two little links provide a pretty clear counter to the claim that poverty in the US is on the decline.

OK. So. Libertarianism.

In the same linked comment, John seems to believe that I have made a claim regarding the Bush Administration that is contrary to fact. In many ways, he is correct. The beginnings of our current socio-economic tragedy began during the Clinton years. They were given a jet-engine during the Bush years, the declaration that home-ownership was now the goal of federal housing policy. Coupled with completely deregulated financial markets, this was a recipe for disaster, as people at the time predicted would happen.

Libertarianism begins with the premise that, with minimal interference from the public sector, individuals pursuing their interests create the conditions for optimum economic efficiency and growth. Many of the arguments made by the Republican Congresses of the Clinton and Bush years, and their supporters in Think Tanks and academia, were adamant on this point - the regulatory regime was stifling economic growth, financial innovation, and our general commonweal. The last tattered vestiges of Depression-era regulatory and legal restrictions ending toward the end of the Clinton years, the path was opened toward a golden age of entrepreneurship, of individual and social betterment with no brakes in the form of artificial legal barriers to economic activity.

What actually happened was, in many ways, akin to Somalia. Individuals, in a state of lawlessness, have no power. They may have rights, in some abstract sense. Absent power, however, in particular the police power of the state to protect those rights in the face of more powerful, organized actors - in this case the large investment banks, insurance companies, and brokers of various financial products - the only real players that mattered were these large institutions. With quite literally no barriers to what constituted a legitimate investment opportunity, the limited mortgage-backed security became a potential goldmine. Except, it relied upon a certain magical thinking whereby a debt actually became an asset. Because of the lack of oversight of the financial markets, and because of the federal policy goal of home ownership, the field seemed wide open. Mortgage default was in a steady state, relatively low and shrinking as the housing market expanded.

The end result, of course, is what we are currently living with. It was predicted at the time, of course, but all those who said that when the bubble burst the wreckage would be enormous were shouted down. They were nay-sayers, maybe even anti-American. The promise of the unfettered market, while benefiting the large corporations at the heart of the bubble, seemed to be helping individuals fulfill that part of the American dream that is most dear - owning their own home. Except, of course, what was really happening was a mixture of massive fraud, the aforementioned magical thinking, and the hubris that comes from unchecked power. Those who are paying the price for this libertarian dream-come-true aren't the criminal banks and investment houses; they got bailed out and continue to enjoy record profits by playing the bond market with the bailout money. Meanwhile, the millions who have lost their homes, the millions more who will lose their homes, the stagnant economy (stagnant in part because, as a recent NPR story reported, businesses don't like hiring the long-term unemployed) are all laid at the feet not of those who created the mess, but its victims.

Every time I hear a libertarian talk, I look around at the wreckage wrought by libertarian practice, and I want to scream. The human damage, the social damage, are incalculable. That it was preventable makes it even more tragic. That there are those who insist the just-rehashed facts of our recent past make no difference is a kind of intellectual cowardice that is breathtaking to behold. Because Bush expanded the federal bureaucracy over here (the growth of the national security state) means that freeing up some sector from any legal framework over there (the financial markets) doesn't count. Except, of course, that was not and has never been the concern of libertarians in practice, no matter how much they claim to the contrary. Rather, their sole concern is the unfettered marketplace. So, libertarianism as a practical matter results in . . . economic collapse. Most observers who are sensitive enough to the sufferings of our recent years understand this.

So, John, there you have it. There are your answers.