The Complete Wire (13 Essential Scenes)

Years too late, I have finally finished The Wire. It was devastating, thrilling, terrifying, inspiring, and depressing, and pretty much always incredible acting, dialogue, and storytelling. The best television show I've ever watched? I don't know how to best judge that--because, ultimately, I'm not sure, The Wire even works as a television show, as we've traditionally understood them. Which is really the point: those who spent a lot of ink in years past talking about the brilliance of The Wire have usually been forced to admit that it doesn't work like a traditional television drama; it's more like a novel, and a 19th-century novel by Dickens or Zola at that. Of course, The Wire isn't alone having had such aspirations; the same could be said about many of the ground-breaking television dramas (The Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.) of the past 10 or 15 years. Clearly, the cable (and now digital) revolution has finally caught up with how writers and producers think the medium can be used to tell stories. Just as clearly, the British knew this a while ago (consider Prime Suspect)--but none of them, I think, gave us such a range of characters, all connected so clearly to such a sociologically (and morally!) grounding particular place. The best comparison is, inevitably, Homicide: Life on the Street, a show that I loved, and which I wonder might actually have been a better tv show than The Wire, if only because its aspirations didn't prevent it from occasionally going outside its own novelistic structure and treating itself like, well, a tv show. (Case in point: the winter 1997 episode, "The Documentary.") But did Homicide do for me, as a watcher, everything that The Wire did? Not nearly.

So let me document all that it did for me, all the ways I received its manifold characters and plots and surprises. This is, for me, my complete Wire experience.

Season 1
The first season was the tightest, and I suppose the least ambitious of all the rest of the series which followed. It was, in this season, a very, very good police procedural, introducing to us some of the fundamental mainstays of the show: McNutly, Bunk, Griggs, Pearlman, and Daniels on the police side, and Omar and Bubbles on the street side. It also gave us Stringer Bell and the Barksdale organization, and at this point it would have been reasonable to assume that the entire program was going to be a long, entertaining face-off between Bell (perfectly dressed, wicked smart, and a complete monster, the perfect homo economicus) and McNutly (rumpled and overwrought and struggling against his own worst elements, in both dress, body, and soul). But no, despite some good scenes between them, the central moral arc of the story of season 1 belonged to D'Angelo Barksdale, and he is the key character in the two essential scenes which communicate the season's plot. First, when he teaches (with a foreshadowing none of us could have seen at the time!) Bodie and Wallace about chess:



And second, after Wallace, upon secret orders from Bell, has been murdered by Bodie and Poot (under suspicion--justified, though there was no way Bell could have known that--of turning evidence to the police), and D'Angelo, facing time for transporting drugs, wants Bell to tell him what has become of his friend:



Season 1 is about kings and pawns, and how everyone--both cops and robbers--are playing their roles, and heaven help anyone who tries to go off the board.

Season 2
The second season was also tight and mostly self-contained, but it was during this season that you begin to see the show's ambitions broaden. Proposition Joe's character, and his connections with The Greek's organization, emerges as crucial to the developing economy of Baltimore's drug world; Bell's desire to be something more than a gangster is further fleshed out; Omar, through the confrontation with Brother Mouzone and the machinations of Bell, truly comes into his own. But all that is on the sidelines: the real action is a powerful, fully developed morality tale, told in the context of the collapse of blue-collar work and neighborhoods for Baltimore's white immigrant population. Again, in this season, a single figure--Frank Sabotka, a man who loves his union, his church, and his family, in that order, so much that he willingly embraces corruption and criminality to keep them going, and pays the price--dominates the crucial scenes of this season, and defines its central moral arc. First, Frank's furious socio-economic defiance of the police, in spite of the crimes (and bodies!) that he knows are piling up on his pier:



And second, after Frank is arrested, after his son Ziggy has lost control and got himself arrested for murder, after his nephew Nicky arrested for dealing in drugs, Frank watches his ultimate prize, rebuilding the grain pier that will bring business to his union, slips out of his fingers. After this, really, what is left for him to do, then to walk up to The Greek and embrace his doom?



Season 2 is my favorite season of the whole show, and while things from here on out got ever more complicated, deep, and intense, it was this straightforward story of class and ethnic determination and vain resistance to a world which cannot help but change, economically as well as socially, that rings most true to me.

Season 3
The third season of The Wire is where the interweaving of storylines and mutually re-enforcing plots really took off. We start examining city politics through the ambitions of Tommy Carcetti and the manipulations of Clay Davis; the struggle between the various factions in Baltimore's drug economy, with the rise of Marlo Stanfield and his organization, goes into high gear; we start to see the possibilities of redemption in Cutty's release from jail and his honest struggles to figure out a place for himself in a world where "the game" is no longer for him; and, of course, there is Bunny Colvin, and his experiment with drug legalization in "Amsterdam." In some ways, this resulted in the most loosely structured, least effective season overall, though it was still excellent television, and included some scenes of tremendous power. But picking amongst all that was going on this season to find consistent through-lines is hard. Two do stand out, though. There is the tremendously suspenseful and ominous balcony scene between Avon and Bell, both of them having sold each other out, and both of whom will be out of the picture by the season's end:



But for a real moral journey this season, I have to point, not to the finally doomed main street dreams of Bell, but to Ellis Carver--a small player throughout the whole show, but one who Colvin's experiment puts on a different path. Once he was a slacker cop, hard-working but without direction or perspective, willing to engage in petty corruption and betrayal when it suited him. Under Colvin, he learns loyalty, dedication to the job, and a mature sense of the streets that he serves. His vision is widened, he feels his failures (and he has a doozy coming up) more deeply, he finds a quiet confidence that puts his friend and one-time partner, the incorrigible thug Herc, to shame. To a degree, by the final episode of the last season, Carver has emerged as perhaps the emblematic police officer of the whole series--and nothing did more to get his character to that end then this scene right here:



Season 3 is a story of rises and falls; some get up from their falls and try again, whereas many others stay down.

Season 4

A lot of people argue that the fourth season was The Wire's best, and I can see why--the shift to looking at Baltimore's school system was utterly immersive, surrounding us with brilliant little character moments (the teachers, the students, the academics, the do-gooders and power-hungry cops and drug addicts) while enveloping us in a fascinating, fierce picture of the harm which fear, poverty, and a culture of violence has on the young black people of America's mostly ignored underclass. It was, truly, the most realized, most perfectly balanced, season of the whole show. It's impossible to pick only one scene to capture the interaction between the four young men--Mike, Dukie, Namond, and Randy--and the adults who either hasten them towards or present alternatives to the destiny which awaits them all, so I'll pick two. Watch how their different personalities are foreshadowed by this scene: Mike, a hard-case with a code; Dukie, a follower robbed of the ability to do otherwise than what others suggest; Randy, a kid with a spirit of a joie de vivre just waiting to be hammered out of him; and Namond, the punk who is, nonetheless, smart enough to see the stakes.





The greatest moral arc of season four, though, is Bubbles. He's been around since the very beginning, fighting his addictions or inventively glorying in them, and he's seen tough times before, but only now, truly, do the same streets and the same corrupt forces which grinds down three of our four young, lead him to take steps that finally put him on bottom. As Walon, his once-and-future sponsor, said, no one will truly seek to change until they've lost it all. Now, Bubbles has.



Season 4 is about the harshest, most honest and most despairing, but also the most decent, season of television I've ever watched. It's a story about how most of the time, most of us can't be saved--but sometimes, one or two of us just might be. It's not my favorite season of The Wire, but I agree it's probably the best.

Season 5
The fifth season doesn't get much respect from those who loved the show--they agree that it stayed great until the end, to be sure, but they felt the end was rushed, almost ginned up to tie everything together in a tidy package. I can see the point of that--but the truth is, what possible way could there be to bring the story of a whole city, a whole economy, a whole racial and class tragedy, to an end? I give season 5 some credit: it provided us with a resolution, of sorts, for the two greatest losses from the previous season, Mike and Dukie:



And Omar's story also comes to an end, in some ways providing, again, a kind of resolution to the struggle for honor in the midst of a drug war that slowly but surely went from neighborhood pride, to cold-blooded business, to simple exercises of tyrannical power. Omar is a broken man by the end of the series, shattered by his own inability to bend from his mission; his death is almost poetic.



But ultimately, the real moral arc of the fifth season is one which was promised since the very first episode: McNulty, every last horrible and brilliant part of him, comes under the microscope, and he somehow just barely manages to escape with his skin, and our respect, intact. The death of Bell at the end of season 3 had seemed to pull back McNulty back from the edge, and as season 4 unfolded, I started to believe that The Wire was going to do the nigh-impossible: take beloved, complicated anti-hero, and let him fade away into ordinary domesticity. Instead, McNulty in season 5 re-emerges, angrier than ever, pushing his scams to force the police department to work further than ever before--I'm sure I'm not the only viewer who truly believed that he was going to murder a homeless man, just to keep his lie alive. He pulls back, at the last moment, and it's really only because his lie was so huge (and had been unwittingly furthered by a certain lying fool in the media) that the powers that be couldn't let everything come down around him that he was able to back away and, one hopes, finally realize who he is. The result is probably the funniest scene in the whole show:



And then finally, the truest:



Season 5 ends The Wire by telling a story about telling stories about Baltimore. The stories in question are told to voters, to newspaper readers, and to ourselves. Some stories, like McNulty's, hurt (even if they do some good). Some stories, like the one Bubbles is able to stand and deliver at the end, heal. Ultimately, that's what we all are--story-telling animals. The Wire gets that absolutely right.

Matthew Broderick is the Walrus

Hey, like almost everyone else, I love Ferris Bueller too...but where is Cameron?!? The ad makes almost no sense without him around.

Prayer and the Sovereignty of God

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This is a sermon (though we Mormons rarely call these things "sermons"; usually just "talks" instead) which I gave in our main church meeting on January 1, 2012. It was the day after our third daughter, Alison, was baptized, and my parents and parents-in-law were in attendance, which all made for a wonderful occasion. I don't think I would have done anything different with this sermon it had been just another Sunday though. In any case, I think it turned out well, and enough people told me afterwards that they liked it that I decided to post it here. Enjoy.

*******

Exactly one week and about twelve hours ago, Melissa and I were watching “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which we watch just about every Christmas Eve. Most of you, I assume, know the story, but to any who don’t, it’s a movie that features a man named George Bailey, who has continually passed up opportunities to pursue his dreams because the love and sense of duty he felt towards his family and his community always won out. In the film, there comes a point where he is in terrible financial straits, unable to see any way to come out of his dilemma alive, and in a moment infused with bitterness and desperation, he starts to pore out his fears to God while drinking in a bar. He starts out plaintively, saying “Dear Father in Heaven, I'm not a praying man...”

That scene from the movie came to my mind when Brother Adams invited me to give a talk on prayer earlier this week, because I doubt could qualify as a “praying man” myself. I try to remember to say a personal prayer at the beginning of my day, and we say prayers over most of our evening meals and some of our breakfasts, and we try to have family prayer twice a day, and Melissa and I usually end our day praying together...but still, I can see that a lot of that praying is somewhat rushed, and somewhat routine. The truth is I don’t take my problems, my concerns, my needs or my worries to the Lord as regularly as I should, and I definitely don’t express my thanks to Him for all my blessings with as much faith and piety as I ought. This is something Jesus always reminded his disciples to do, and which our prophets remind us repeatedly to do today. One of the very last things Nephi wrote to his posterity was a reminder to “pray always, and not faint, and that we “must not perform any thing unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he will consecrate thy performance unto thee, that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul” (2 Nephi 32:9). That is a standard I know I don’t live up to.

I have a friend and colleague at Friends University, an English professor named Marv Hinten, who is a devout evangelical, and he’s written a short book about prayer. Marv truly is a praying man; he has invited me to prayer meetings which he holds in his office before, and he talks in his book pretty casually about spending 20 to 40 minutes a day on his knees speaking with the Lord. I confess I can’t relate to that; hopefully some of you can. The overall thesis which I take away from the essays in his book is that prayer is primarily about “acknowledg[ing] the sovereignty of God” (God is Not a Vending Machine, p. 33). Now, I teach political science, and “sovereignty,” which means rulership or authority, is one of the terms that I like to argue with my students about. So I’d like to try to think about prayer from that perspective a little bit in the time I have remaining.

Brother Adams suggested, when he asked me to give this talk, that I look at a General Conference talk given last October by Elder J. Devn Cornish, a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, titled “The Privilege of Prayer”. The beginning of that talk is taken up with Elder Cornish, who was a doctor for many years, telling a story about when he was doing his medical residency at a hospital in Boston decades ago, and how he usually commuted to and from work by bicycle. Since I’m a bike commuter as well, I liked the story already. But then it continued:

One evening I was riding home after a long period in the hospital, feeling tired and hungry and at least a bit discouraged. I knew I needed to give my wife and four small children not only my time and energy when I got home but also a cheery attitude. I was, frankly, finding it hard to just keep pedaling. My route would take me past a fried chicken shop, and I felt like I would be a lot less hungry and tired if I could pause for a piece of chicken on my way home. I knew they were running a sale on thighs or drumsticks for 29 cents each, but when I checked my wallet, all I had was one nickel. As I rode along, I told the Lord my situation and asked if, in His mercy, He could let me find a quarter on the side of the road. I told Him that I didn’t need this as a sign but that I would be really grateful if He felt to grant me this kind blessing. I began watching the ground more intently but saw nothing. Trying to maintain a faith-filled but submissive attitude as I rode, I approached the store. Then, almost exactly across the street from the chicken place, I saw a quarter on the ground. With gratitude and relief, I picked it up, bought the chicken, savored every morsel, and rode happily home.

Now, as probably everyone in our elder’s quorum in this ward knows, I am unfortunately a bit of an intellectual, and also a bit of a cynic. And so I’ll admit that my first reaction to reading this story was to think it was silly, a story of a small coincidence that Elder Cornish foolishly assumes teaches us that “our Heavenly Father loves us so much that the things that are important to us become important to Him, just because He loves us.” But that first reaction didn’t last, because it was pretty quickly replaced by a memory–a memory of an event from my own life pretty similar to the event Elder Cornish used to teach about prayer. (Some of you have heard this story before; if so, please just bear with me.)

When Melissa and I were first married, Melissa didn’t have a wedding band; with our parents’ help we’d been able to buy wedding rings for us both, but no additional band for Melissa to wear when wearing the ring itself wasn’t appropriate. For this purpose, Melissa’s mother gave her an old wedding band of hers to wear, and Melissa wore it almost every day. One weekend however, Melissa and I decided to go on a short camping trip, and when we were heading back to our apartment and packing up the gear, we couldn’t find her band. We searched the pockets of the tent; we turned the tent inside and out; we searched the car; we turned out the pockets of all our clothes; we traced our path around the campground trails; we wondered whether a raccoon could have gotten into the tent during the night and stolen it; we considered everything. Melissa, I hope she will not be too embarrassed at me saying this, was absolutely distraught. Losing her mother’s wedding band! So, we what seemed, in that moment, to be the only thing left: I said a prayer for our family, begging the Lord that we’d find the missing ring. I don’t remember having any confidence that the prayer would work but I got up off my knees afterward and walked across the campsite, kicking the dirt is frustration. On my very first kick–PING! My foot connected with the lost wedding band and it bounced off a tree in front of me.

I don’t really remember what I thought about that experience at the time, but I know what I think about it now. That’s the way our human minds tend to work: we rethink and re-interpret the events of our life and even our own memories of them as we live longer and experience more. Joseph Smith retold the story of the First Vision several times in his life, and each time was a little bit different, presumably because as he grew older and the Lord revealed more to him, he understood that event differently. I’m no prophet, but the same thing has happened to me: there are experiences from my mission in South Korea long ago that had little or no impact on me at the time, but which now loom very large in how I account for my own beliefs. As for this event more than 18 years ago, it has become one of the few absolute foundations of my faith: God heard and answered my prayer.

There are people all around the world, both 18 years ago and today, that truly are in horrifying conditions: loved ones dying, enemy soldiers rampaging, tidal waves smashing everything in sight. Right here in Wichita there are people in situations pretty much like George Bailey from the movie, facing the prospect of losing their homes and jobs and whole livelihood. They pray in desperation, and sometimes are rewarded with what they ask for–but sometimes not. Melissa and I were pleading for an old wedding band–just like Elder Cornish was pleading for a quarter. And for us, He heard and answered: He guided Elder Cornish’s eye to the coin on the street, and He guided my foot to the right dirt clod. Do I know that for certain? I don’t know how I could ever prove it. But I believe it.

That belief in the power of what we might call “petitionary prayer”–that is, those times when we utter a prayer in order to petition God for a specific outcome–leads me back to the whole matter of “sovereignty.” The sovereign is defined by scholars as where power actually, finally lies: in the context of a polity like the United States, it is the power to make laws in the first place, or to change or make exceptions to those laws. One of the most crucial of all of Jesus’s teachings was His laying forth a pattern for prayer, something He did multiple times during His mortal ministry–and the very first step in that pattern of prayer was to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. As that pattern was recorded in Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount in the King James Version of the Bible: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:9-10). Elder Cornish, expanding on this first step of the Lord’s Prayer, doesn’t use the term “sovereignty,” but that’s clearly what he has in mind. He states: “Jesus addressed his Father in an attitude of worship, recognizing His greatness and giving Him praise and thanks....[we thus] freely acknowledge our dependence on the Lord and express our desire to do His will, even if it is not the same as our will.”

All of us, I suspect, have had an experience of approaching a sovereign with a petition. We’ve approached our parents, or an employer, or a teacher, or a banker, or a bureaucrat, or a politician, with a request: sometimes a righteous and desperately needed one, though if we’re honest we’ll probably have to admit to ourselves that sometimes it’s been for a merely self-interested one. Surely that’s been the case with myself. Now sometimes that approach is complicated, because we might argue, rightly, that the sovereign’s power isn’t absolute: we might insist that we have rights, or maybe that we, the voters or the workers, are the real sovereigns. With prayer, however, there is no such complication. We straightforwardly acknowledge a point which my father has made to his kids probably hundreds of times over the years: we are all, at best, simply stewards. We have what we have–our money, our jobs, our health, everything we have–because God, the real and ultimate sovereign of the world, created all things; we simply receive, through God’s infinite but also unpredictable grace, what we receive, sometimes through our own honest efforts but sometimes through pure genetic or historic luck, and the Lord invites us to work at it, in the same way Jesus, in the parable of the laborers, showed us a householder inviting all to come and work in the vineyard, whether they come early or come late. As He put it (again, from the King James Version of Matthew):

For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, And said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. (Matt. 20:1-7)

What a hard lesson that must be for any of us to learn: that the Lord is calling to us from wherever we are, whether great or small, whether early or late, and that in our response to His call, we will receive...what? Whatever we ask for? Very likely not. What we expect? Almost certainly not (George Bailey certainly didn’t receive anything like what he expected when he expressed his anguished plea). No, God will answer our prayer, will respond to our petition, with “whatsoever is right.” And, I would add, apparently whenever it is right, whether we recognize it as such a response at the time or not.

Does this mean we simply shouldn’t bother petitioning God, and instead content ourselves with looking forward as our sovereign does or allows whatever it is He will do or allow? There is a defensible logic to that kind of fatalistic approach, but I do not agree with it. On the contrary, I think the act of petitionary prayer is where our worship of Him, where our acknowledgment of His sovereignty, becomes the most real. To continue with the Lord’s pattern of prayer, immediately after we acknowledge that we live in His kingdom and are submissive to His will, Jesus told all of us to simply ask the Father: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) Will we get it? Maybe...but maybe not. Maybe God will hear that petition, and respond to it in an entirely unexpected way. It may be a response that, as was the case with Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove, or with me praying on the ground of a campsite somewhere up Provo Canyon nearly 20 years ago, will take a while, perhaps a long while, to really come to understand it, whatever it is, for what it is. And in the meantime, we will have done the most important thing, a thing that is so important that Jesus would have us conclude our prayers with a repetition of it, when He finished His pattern of prayer with the benediction, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever” (Matt. 6:13): we will have acknowledged God’s sovereignty over us. We will, in short, have worshiped Him, acknowledged Him, and therefore expressed gratitude to Him. This is how my friend Marv put it:

In Jesus’ example of prayer–the Lord’s Prayer–the physical request is “Give us today our daily bread.” Besides its literal meaning, “bread” stand for our other physical necessities also. The disciples could look around and see that a refusal to pray did not cause starvation. Prayer is not simply a magic wand to fill larders, then, but a humble bow toward the Source of all the world’s provisions. If you ask God for a safe trip to work tomorrow and your neighbor does not, it is very likely that both of you will arrive safely anyway. But only one of you will be properly grateful. (God is Not a Vending Machine, p. 33)

For myself, I have arrived safely following short commutes and long trips more times than I can count, but I suspect that I have almost never remembered to thank God for that. On the other hand, there have been many times when I’ve lost things and I’ve prayed desperately for them, and never once has an angel answered my prayer, as the movie provided for George Bailey. Sometimes those things I’ve prayed for were, in the grand scheme of things, pretty small and unimportant. But other times they have been big things: job opportunities and interviews which I lost out on through no fault on my own, or conversely, losing the trust, due to my own mistakes and bad habits, of someone I respect or even love. God, I believe, feels for us when we suffer losses and have needs, and we’ve told repeatedly, by Jesus and by the prophets, that God’s great purpose to bless and fill our lives. Sometimes that fulfillment could mean enabling us to see a coin in the road or to kick over the right clod of dirt; sometimes it may even be miraculous healings or marvelous changes of fortune. But, it seems safe to say, that most of the time it won’t be. The response will be different, perhaps distant, perhaps unexpected, perhaps barely even noticeable after years of time. But however long it takes us to recognize God’s response for what it is, the deepest purpose of prayer is already accomplished when we, through our thoughts and words and deeds, acknowledge God as sovereign; that we are stewards, laborers in the vineyard, the ones whom make petitions, and wait for the answer, or the lack thereof, which is right.

To be a praying person, in the end, is to recognize that principle always, in everything we perform, as Nephi wrote. I am a long ways away from living that standard, though I have been blessed with many great examples of prayer, and many reminders of God’s sovereignty, and I think I have learned from them some, and I hope I can learn from them more as I grow older, and rethink my experiences again and again. There are many things I hope for, often in a self-centered way, but more important than any of those things that I may wish to petition God for, I believe a sovereign God hears my petitions, and responds to them as He will. And that belief, the belief that, whatever God may do, He does hear me, is perhaps my most important belief of all.

"There's Nothing Quite Like a Real Book"

I agree.

"You Can't Be What You Can't See"

I'm not sure if I believe that phrase entirely, but it is true enough, often enough. I have four daughters, and I love them, and I hate HATE HATE the fact that the modern consumer and media marketplace demeans them. Sometimes I express that frustration humorously, and yes, I am fully aware that the whole script of the world facing my daughters, particularly when you bring in socio-economic transformations that apparently privilege women, is much more complicated than this. But the fact remains that the magazines, the commercials, the clothing lines, and the porn which this world is awash in mostly sees my daughters as toys. Somebody remind me why on earth we installed that digital converter so we can watch television again.

Of Course, Satan Had a Band of Demons to Back Him Up, So Maybe That Wasn't Entirely Fair

You know, this "Good Guy Lucifer" meme has got something going for it.



As McSweeney's demonstrated long ago, it's not as if any proof is actually necessary here.

Huzzah for the Montana Supreme Court!

This is the kind of states' rights I like:

Montana’s Supreme Court has issued a stunning rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 that infamously decreed corporations had constitutional rights to directly spend money on ‘independent expenditures’ in campaigns.

The Montana Court vigorously upheld the state’s right to regulate how corporations can raise and spend money after a secretive Colorado corporation, Western Tradition Partnership, and a Montana sportsman’s group and local businessman sued to overturn a 1912 state law banning direct corporate spending on electoral campaigns.

“Organizations like WTP that act as a conduit for anonymously spending by others represent a threat to the political marketplace,” wrote Mike McGrath, Chief Justice of the Montana Supreme Court, for the majority. “Clearly the impact of unlimited corporate donations creates a dominating impact on the political process and inevitably minimizes the impact of individual citizens"....

The Montana Court then launched into detailed explanations of sufficiently compelling state interests to merit sustaining the century-old law. The majority opinion read like a history lesson that recounting how the state, especially in the decades following its founding in 1889, struggled to restrict the power and influence of mining corporations. In 1906, the citizenry amended the state Constitution to allow for ballot initiatives. Six years later it passed the ban on corporate spending, specifically to curb mining companies based in Butte. The Court noted that the state—then and now—was beset with corporate players whose money, power and influence easily overshadow individuals.

“What was true a century ago is as true today: distant corporate interests mean that corporate dominated campaigns will only work ‘in the essential interest of outsiders with local interests a very secondary consideration,’” the opinion said, quoting a historian’s testimony from a lower state court that reviewed the case. “While specific corporate interests come and go in Montana, they are always present.”

The Court said Montana had a political tradition that has emerged in intervening decades and they wanted Montana to remain a state where candidates run low-budget, personal campaigns and do not rely on anonymous, well-financed messaging from outsiders.

I wish I could believe that this sort of populist and democratic resistance to distant (and distancing!) corporate power was actually a major motivation throughout America's more rural and western regions--or in other words, I wish it was the case that Wendell Berry and Daniel Kemmis and others like them truly typified the often libertarian, decentralist sensibilities of the America West. Too often, though, that doesn't seem to be the case; too often, I find that many of my Kansas friends and neighbors tend to believe--wrongly, I think--that cutting school and arts and social service funding, eliminating jobs, rejecting federal supports, and hanging out with supply-siders like Arthur Laffer, is how one gets a "Jeffersonian" revolution. But hell: we have to take what we can get. And in Montana, we've been given a gift of a clear and ringing denouncement of a principle that, while perhaps originally grounded in a legitimate consideration of the First Amendment (an amendment which I think is overrated anyway), has grown, with Citizens United, far beyond anything that a free community of citizens ought to accept. And you know--even the dissenting vote on the Montana Supreme Court saw the truth of that:

“While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s decision,” wrote Justice James C. Nelson, in his dissent. “And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping....

“While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law, I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”

Well said, Montana. I need to get back to Big Sky country more often.

The Very Last Friday Morning Videos: "Closing Time"

Well everyone, this is it: for 2011, for this most recent excursion through one-hit-wonderism, but also for Friday Morning Videos as a whole. It's closing time, in other words. I've been running this feature for over three years, and--allowing for the occasional double-posting, but also a few repeats--I've probably posted over 150 videos in that time, nearly all of them from different artists. (No, I'm not going to go back through and check.) I'd say that amounts to a pretty decent accomplishment--but whether it is or not, I think it's time to close shop, and go on to something new. My apologies to all thirteen or so readers out there who have come to depend upon my weekly servings of mid-70s through mid-90s pop, but I'm sure you'll be able to satiate your addictions somehow. And besides, check back every once in a while; I may not put up videos regularly any longer, but I'll never get them entirely out of my soul, I'm sure. Anyway, thanks for watching, and happy almost new year!

Eleven Theses on 2011 (on Democracy, Anarchism, and OWS)

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

More than a month ago, Peter Levine asked 10 thoughtful questions about Occupy Wall Street. In the spirit of one of the most succinct works of philosophy in Western history, let me provide 11 answers, as 2011 comes to a close.

1) It wasn't just Time magazine; it was a whole lot of people noticing the same thing: that in 2011, a whole lot of ordinary people--generally not-wealthy people, generally not-politically-engaged people, generally people who apparently would have preferred that the political and economic contexts upon and through which their ordinary lives operated not be playgrounds for elite exploitation--took a whole lot of risks, and made a whole lot of noise. The risks were hardly equally shared: the protests and rebellions across the Arab world that began a year ago involved lives being put on the line (and frequently lost), while the protests in Madison, Wisconsin, last February, or the Occupy Wall Street protests that spread across the country beginning last September, usually involved nothing more than being willing to stand outside in uncomfortable weather and possibly face occasional rough treatment at the hands of the cops. But nonetheless there is a common thread through them all: it was a year in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, throughout the Middle East and Europe and North America, went to the streets to be heard.

2) Getting outdoors and into the street--leaving the privacy of one's home and attempting to literally "occupy" public space--is a principle of deep importance to democratic thinking. It is not, for the most part, a liberal democratic principle, focused on ensuring the privacy and protection of individual rights, but rather is a communitarian/populist/socialist/anarchist principle, underscoring the idea that for a people to govern themselves, to be heard as themselves, then they must assemble as a people, and not from a distance, through (established, and perhaps thus easily co-opted) state channels and experts and forms of representation.

3) Once people assemble together--really assemble, not to listen to already-appointed authorities, but to constitute their own authorities--one result is a community of equals. Again, not equals in the liberal sense--in which all individuals, in their place and with their claims, are duly recognized in the context of a general pluralism--but equals in the sense of being joint participants in a general, collective project.

4) A project such as that potentially leads--or at least potentially should lead--to the disappearance of the lines and norms which keep socio-economic classes and racial groups and genders separate from each other. Obviously, this is not a development which takes place without some context, and in so many of 2011's protests, from Greece to Wall Street, the context was already pushing many members of the liberal elite into a confrontation with lower-class sensibilities, leading to a re-evaluation of what unites the middle classes with the poor, and a deeper appreciation of thinking in more immediate ways about "sustainability" and "equality." Was this sort of philosophical realization taking place concomitant to all OWS protests, and all those different types of contests with power which proceeded them? Probably not--but it did take place in at least some of them, or else you wouldn't have seen the political discourse change as much as it did. (The far-from-complete-but-still-real changes in the public role of women in Arab countries following the revolutions there is another example of this.)

5) Of course, these kind of philosophical realizations usually don't happen through simple intellectual conversation; they happen as people plan and eat and rub up against and work with one another. They happen, in other words, through dozens, hundred, thousands of people finding ways to keep their assemblies going and succeeding, in the radical changed context which the people involved have placed themselves (or been placed) in. It's easy to mock some of the at-times-infuriating (even to those involved!) procedures which evolve as "mobs" try to figure out how exist amongst and alongside themselves as equals, but the slow work of participatory democracy is a great teacher nonetheless.

6) One of the key ideas which being assembled together into a community of equals makes clear is that many categories and labels--most of which presume a liberal individualist model of social organization--don't actually fit. Is OWS a "liberal" movement? Only in the most circumstantial sense of tending to push causes that have a somewhat greater likelihood of being embraced by "liberal" political parties. One could, however, just as easily argue that there is a deep "conservatism" to these protests, in the sense that they are powered by people wanting to conserve the social contracts and communities that they have built (or have attempted to build) their livelihood and neighborhoods upon, social contracts and communities that are being challenged by financial institutions that view homes and retirement funds as speculative playthings, by political parties that are ripe with corruption, and by governments quick to align their interests with those of austerity-minded corporate players. Protests like OWS are liberal, conservative, socialist, and most importantly, anarchist, all at the same time.

7) The anarchism implied by the assembled, democratic power of people in the streets and the parks has prompted a great deal of commentary, and that's for the best: it is important for the left to be reminded that the power of collective, utopian thinking about equality is greater than that the forms by which it is usually institutionalized in liberal governments and state policies. But it is also essential that the anarchist reflections which 2011 has generated not be reduced to individualistic bromides; to say that the genius of anarchism is that it combines a "thoroughly socialist critique of capitalism" with a "liberal critique of socialism" misses the mark; to blithely combine the promise of "autonomous associations" with an unspecified "freedom of the individual" does not serve anarchism, or the promise of general democratic assemblies, particularly well.

8) The importance of this ideological observation is demonstrated by simply looking at the actual history and development of the various uprisings of 2011: leadership was always necessary, and always involved, from the very beginning of each of them. Whether it was done formally or informally, invariably community bounds were set, rules were developed, and thus a sense of identification, of mutuality, and of responsibility followed. To pretend otherwise--that 2011 represented some complete break from the nature of human beings as social animals, as creatures that need some sort of structure and stability for their language and passions to even make sense--is to set up these movements for failure before their work is half-started.

9) This is not a contradiction in terms--the reality that these assemblies of protest were organized and had some community integrity and structured maintenance doesn't mean they were no different from the liberal movements and organizations which they often rejected. The key difference was the presence of these organically emerging and developing community forms; the fact that these movements and their leaders were grounded locally and focused locally. It really is a misnomer, though a handy one, to globally speak of 2011 as "The Year of the Protester" as a singular; I would argue, in contrast, that the reason why so many of these movements had as much success as they did in their various challenges to the many entrenched powers that be, was that they were multiple, springing up and taking shape, whatever their ideological inspiration, in the context of the specific abuses and threats felt by those who shared (and contested over!) these very same cities and institutions with one another. (By the end of 2011, there have been close to 3000 different "Occupy" movements around the United States and throughout the globe; such decentralized, local assemblies are, in the eyes of some, a model for where capitalism needs to go.)

10) The fact that these assemblies of protest and organic communities of equals were so variable and didn't fit into any universally established procedural boxes was a constant frustration to many. Again and again, commentators who claimed to be concerned about inequality and all the rest looked at OWS and wondered what it was all about, scratched their heads at the supposedly fuzzy-headed notion of that democratic communities have so much to do with "feeling," and groused that populists fail to recognize--as the neoliberal technocrats presumably do--that democracy is ultimately about political power, and that you can't have that unless you have a hierarchy setting priorities and getting results. Such carping has a point, of course; to be carried away in experience of democratic belonging, of real in-the-street-change-making, gets one away from the fact that there are allies who are equally grounded, equally local, and equally exploited ready to assist in the protest, so long as those in the community don't get confused as to who their real friends are. But in the end, the critics missed the point: the ability of people to govern themselves, to truly being sovereign, is fundamentally tied to being, and feeling, outside of and larger than themselves, to being awash in the Arendtian demos. That is, to be sure, a sometimes frightening and dangerous thing, which is why liberal protections and retreats to privacy have an important place in free societies. Moreover, all that is rarely a good recipe for making concrete judgment calls about the wheres and whens and hows of an assemblies operation, and while all of these assemblies did have the kind of evolving, localized, informal leadership which has to happen whenever people get together, it's probable that, as weeks and months went by, the legitimacy of such structures needed to be better, more fully, recognized. But to insist on such recognition before the experience of being in a community of equals even begins is, I think, to misunderstand the interpenetrative, and interpretive, nature of politics entirely.

11) Finally, remember that in an important sense all of this is besides the point. The real purpose of these hundreds of thousands, these millions, of people who captured the imagination and inspired the rage of millions of others was not to understand what was happening around the world in 2011; on the contrary,the real purpose of 2011 was to change the world itself. And to a small degree, perhaps it did. Let’s hope for more of the same next year.

The 10 Most Intellectually Stimulating Books I Read in 2011

In alphabetical order by author:

I received a copy of Sigal Ben-Porath's excellent Tough Choices: Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice last year, and started it immediately...but then was distracted by something, and didn't get around to finishing it until early this year. I'm very glad I did; it formed the basis of a couple of the most important lectures I gave in my "Simplicity and Sustainability" class this year. Her argument for the relevance of paternalistic policies, moral norms, and other communitarian truths (though she doesn't call them by that name, for reasons I found both curious and perhaps limiting) that can and should work to shape public choices in a liberal egalitarian society was persuasive, thorough, and original.

Jim Faulconer's Faith, Philosophy, Scripture is a collection of essays by a former, and much beloved, Mormon professor of mine back at BYU; I wrote about it, and the significance of his many ideas (as well as some unfortunate limitations arising from what was and what wasn't included in the book), with effusive praise here.





Shannon Hayes's rambling, always eye-opening Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, is, despite its several missteps, a superb challenge to the sort of bourgeois thinking which limits the "radical" potential and understanding that she asserts, persuasively, in embedded in the most conservative and traditional of family and economic decisions and actions. It is also a book I blogged about, here.






This collection of essays by Alan Jacobs, appropriately and lyrically titled Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, was a delightful read, at times haunting, stimulating, sobering, and hilarious. I discovered Alan through our mutual love for Harry Potter, but now I'll read just about anything he writes.






Leigh Jenco's serious, meticulous Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao is a tremendous and concise work of scholarship. I've run into Leigh many times over the years, and been on the receiving end of her brilliantly intelligent (and usually harshly accurate) criticisms more than a few times as well (most recently at the conference I attended in Hong Kong last January), but reading this book was the first time I really understood the grandness of her aims: she is convinced (and she came close to convincing me) that the worldview of East Asia--call it the "Confucian tradition" if you'd like, though she doesn't--provides sufficiently distinct alternatives to how we think about political action and revolution that whole theories of the political can and should be worked out using those resources alone, without much (if any) reliance upon Western terminology or references. Leigh has gotten me to think differently about how communities are constituted before; through the writings of Zhang Shizhao, she's gotten me to rethink even more differently again.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us is huge, magisterial, encyclopedic, and endlessly surprising and fascinating, even when it is only providing data which provides evidentiary support for something that I, as a pretty solid member of a religious community myself, always suspected was true. I'll be making use of this book in a writing project this year, and I'm not the only one; it's going to be discussed for years and years to come.





I read Jeffrey Robbins's Radical Democracy and Political Theology to review it for a journal, but ultimately found it the sort of book I would have wanted to read anyway. A book that probably tries to do too much, but which has packed within its narrow covers insightful readings of Carl Schmitt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Sheldon Wolin, and many more. If nothing else, it made me think hard about what it means to affirm democracy, especially being a member of a fairly non-democratic religion myself.





Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less is a somewhat older book, another book which I had my students read for the aforementioned "Simplicity and Sustainability" class, and one that didn't go over with them terribly well: they found it often obvious and repetitive. I did too. But I also haven't read a great deal of psychology in my life, and so much of the sort of research that Schwartz presented, and the kind of issues and questions he brought up in the context of that research, I found engaging and insightful. His basic thesis--that, both socially as well as economically, we are healthier when we do not allow our lives and our societies to be littered with excessive, technologically-enabled, often meaningless-apart-from-status choices--is intuitively obvious, but no less valuable for all that.


A fine, at times surprising and perplexing, but always entertaining read about, appropriately enough, a constantly surprising and perplexing entertainer. I blogged about Sean Wilentz's idiosyncratic paean to the greatest poet American pop music ever created here.







Ethan Yorgason's cultural and ideological study of how Mormon culture changed from the late 19th century up through the middle of the 20th century is an important and insightful addition to the more famous historical study of that same era by Thomas Alexander. Yorgason insightful reading of the relevant texts as well as his sociological analysis helped me see the much-belabored "Americanization" of Mormon communitarianism, feminism, and patriotism in a new (and perhaps, for a left-leaning Mormon like myself, even more tragic) light.