In Medias Res

Matthew Broderick is the Walrus

2012-01-31T06:14:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-15T07:00:00.002-06:00

[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"

2012-01-11T12:35:00.000-06:00

I agree.

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

2012-01-06T13:04:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-03T12:42:00.006-06:00

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!

2012-01-03T09:57:00.003-06:00

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"

2011-12-30T07:00:00.006-06:00

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)

2011-12-29T12:20:00.001-06:00

[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

2011-12-29T12:15:00.001-06:00

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.

Why I Want Ron Paul to Win the Iowa Caucuses

2011-12-28T11:52:00.002-06:00

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

My old friend and frequent leftist conscience Matt Stannard has taken to task, in a strong and persuasive editorial for Political Context, those left-leaning individuals who are cheering for Ron Paul (whom he calls "an opportunistic, dishonest, 76-year-old charlatan") to go the distance in the Republican primaries. The number of these Paul-supporting progressives, left-liberals, Greens, and socialists of various stripes is pretty small overall, but not negligible, and it include some fairly (in)famous names, like Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Hayden, and others. Nader--whom I've defended before and still admire--isn't in denial about the huge gap between those on the left and Paul's style of libertarian-conservatism when it comes to social spending and welfare, but he does think that supporting a real challenge to "corporate-conservatism" is worth it, particularly if it could mean undermining or at least scaling back the military-industrial complex and corporate welfare. Matt is having none of that. As he writes, before thoroughly dismantling Paul's supposed appeal to left-leaning voters:

“Left” is an orientation, not a list of policies. The policies emerge from the orientation. That similar policies may emerge from another orientation does not justify forming a political coalition with the far right. Working people, people of color, and the poor, cannot and should not latch onto Confederate, rich-white-guy libertarianism just because it converges with progressives on anti-imperialism and the war on drugs.

I agree with Matt here completely; to stand on the left, whether one does so with a populist or an anarchist or a social democratic or a communitarian or an egalitarian perspective (or some combination thereof), means at the very least to begin with a foundational belief in equality. To begin instead, as Paul does, with a foundational belief in individual liberty and property has generally resulted, in the American context, in the sort of attitude which Jacob Levy (a libertarian himself) has rightly condemned: "the interpretation of American history that says 'we were free until 1937'--an interpretation in which the restriction on Filburn's wheat production is slavery but actual chattel slavery and the tyranny of Jim Crow are asterisks." This is correct; even if this sort of libertarianism would advance many causes I think valuable, it carries with it much too much for any clear-thinking leftist to find it worth embracing.

However, "embracing" and "voting for" are not the same thing. I recognize that voting is in many ways an expressive act, and legitimately such...but it's a strategic act as well. In that sense, I disagree with Matt, as I can see some real value, as a leftist, to nonetheless supporting Ron Paul in certain circumstances. For example, should he choose to run as an independent candidate for president after he fails to win the Republican nomination and his name appears on the ballot here in Kansas, which will surely send its electoral votes in the direction of the GOP candidate, I might vote for him, depending on whomever else is on the ballot, to complicate local Republican politics if for no other reason. More immediately, I'm pulling for him to win the Iowa Caucuses next week. Why? Here are three reasons:

1) Because I have three students who are part of Christmas with Ron Paul and are traveling the back roads of Iowa right now--I want them to feel as though their work was successful, as well as educational. I'm actually quite curious to hear their reports when they return. None of them are committed libertarians and only one of them has ever appeared to me to be an active social conservative; one of them, in fact, is a supporter of Occupy Wichita and has told me that the best thing that could be done for American capitalism (which he proudly affirms his devotion to) would be overturning the Citizens United decision. So I'm hoping for Paul's success in Iowa because such would be a nice addition to their own continuing development as citizens.

2) Because Mitt Romney is all but guaranteed to easily win the New Hampshire Republican primary, and if does so after pulling off a win in Iowa, then he'll be able to sail without serious trouble through whatever reversals primaries in southern states may throw at him through the rest of January on his way to a bunch of wins in February and then eventually to cleaning up on Super Tuesday in March. Again, I repeat: absent huge unpredictable events (sex scandals, al-Qaeda attacks, meteors from space, etc.), there is no serious political science model which presents any other likely result besides Romney being the Republican nominee for president. And...that's boring. I'm a political junkie, I like political contests, and so I'd like this one to be kept alive and not-boring as long as possible. A Ron Paul win in Iowa would help that one along.

3) Most importantly, because--note reason number 2--a Ron Paul win in Iowa has almost no chance whatsoever in advancing Paul in a serious way towards the Republican nomination. Hence, his whole campaign is best viewed as an occasion for argument. An argument amongst the GOP itself? Would that such would be the case! But no, the Republican establishment's dismissal of Paul is pretty obvious; they will just tune him out, as always. The truly interesting argument is the one which the rise of Ron Paul as arguably the leading figure in American libertarianism has caused amongst those sympathetic to that position. The aforementioned Jacob Levy being a case in point, but you also see it the writings of Erik Kain, Mark Thompson, and, especially, Steve Horwitz: Paul is causing a real struggle amongst libertarians, as they (some of them, anyway) attempt to distinguish their distrust of concentrations of state power from the sort of fetishistic individualism which has, in recent decades, joined up with federalist (or neo-Confederate)-inspired dreams of reaction against all the political, social, and cultural (but, unfortunately, rarely the economic) developments in America in the 20th century. As a student of political ideologies that has long hoped a serious libertarian challenge could emerge in America which would break apart existing Republican and Democratic coalitions (and, not coincidentally, perhaps even turn the Democratic party back towards its old-school, religiously-informed sense of populism and social justice), I can only see this as a good thing.

Does this argument amongst libertarians require a Ron Paul win in Iowa to keep happening? No--but it certainly wouldn't hurt it, and if anything it might help it along even further. Imagine Ron Paul winning big in Iowa, and actually making a decent showing in New Hampshire. The Wall Street money which supports Mitt Romney would have to come out in force, pushing back against Paul (as Gingrich has been forced to) in regards to his record on racial and gender issues, his 19th-century economic ideas, his isolationism. Much of those beliefs of Paul's are embarrassing and ugly nonsense, but some of them are actually intriguing--and continually pushing the argument over all stuff that into the front of the news cycle could force libertarians to continue to do some clarifying work over their movement. I see relatively little value in libertarianism-as-classical-liberalism myself--but to the extent that libertarianism evolves closer to, at least in the minds of its most educated advocates, something progressive, something that recognizes the need to begin one's defense of liberty not with property, but with a society of equal individuals, then it's something I can learn from (as well as contribute to). Any leftist could, I suspect.

Happy Christmas, Everyone

2011-12-24T20:39:00.001-06:00

This, or something very much like this, is perhaps my oldest Christmas memory. Also one of my best.

Best wishes for a great holiday tomorrow.

Occupy Food! (And Other Simple Things)

2011-12-23T10:41:00.003-06:00

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and I to learn this year, and what that learning has meant to me. Leroy (the bearded gent on the far left of the second row) and his family have twice this year (first on the excursion linked to above, and more recently as a contribution to my class on "Simplicity and Sustainability") generously opened their home to my students and I, enabling us to observe, visit with, and learn from various local farmers, producers, and homesteaders living and working in Reno County west of us here in Wichita, KS. I doubt the Hershbergers would necessary agree fully with the conclusions I've drawn from these "Local Food Tours," but I'll stand by them nonetheless: what the people we learned from are doing, in developing locally and from the ground up their own markets and strategies for producing and providing food, is a fulfillment of some (not all, but some) of the best aims of the whole Occupy Wall Street movement. They are, in other words, in their own--usually religious, usually conservative, always humble--ways, radicals and anarchists and utopians and occupiers, every one of them.

Consider John Miller and his family, for example. Twice we've taken a fascinating tour of what the Millers--through their company, Cheney Lake Tomatoes--have accomplished, and it's eye-opening. They've turned themselves into thriving year-around tomato producers, selling their produce at local markets and stores throughout the area. On the one hand, it is thoroughly small-scale, low-tech operation: the Millers themselves provide all the labor, and John Miller himself has designed and maintains all the often jury-rigged machinery necessary to rotate his crops and keep them flourishing. The greenhouses are heated by pipes carrying water from wells that the Millers dug themselves, and the heating come from wood chips that power a furnace they also made themselves. The wood is just scrap which they collect from all over the county. The result is an essentially cost-free--and environmentally clean--way of providing an essential component of his business. Pretty simple and sustainable, yes?

Yet on the other hand, he makes use of some pretty sophisticated growing practices and resources to increase productivity (planting his tomatoes in perlite instead of soil, for example, or depending upon shipments of bumblebees to keep his plants pollinated). There is nothing ideologically pure about what he is doing, but the results have ideological importance all the same: in having constructed a business without extensive dependence upon cross-country marketing or massive investment of capital, he's an example of the sort of practical economic self-sufficiency that could be actually achievable more broadly, assuming the corporate powers which dominate markets, buy off governments, and drive up the burdens and costs for small-scale producers could be, shall we say, persuaded to get the hell out of the way.

Or consider Phil Nisly and the Nisly's family farm, from which my wife and I have bought chicken and eggs for years, and which just this year took a step they'd been planning and saving for years for: setting up their own processing facility, so they would have complete ownership over the food that they'd built their family business upon. We visited Phil's facility a week before Thanksgiving, and they processed close to 200 turkeys that day. They were busy, to say the least, and they looked it. But he proudly showed us around the facility, talking about how he--just a local farmer--was tapping into not just available markets but specialized ethnic ones as well, all across the state of Kansas and beyond.

The real heart of Phil's tour began with their slaughtering shed. Their turkeys are free-range, raised from chicks, and haven't spent anytime (besides during the occasional stormy night or tornado threat) in cages up until the time Phil and the locals he'd hired for the day cut their throats. A couple of my students had a hard time dealing with what they were seeing, but it was good for them to see it--both in the sense of getting them a little more familiar with where their Thanksgiving turkeys come from (my family's turkey this year was one of those you see in these pictures), as well as enabling them to appreciate the difference between a process done by hand--and all the tools and strategies which the Nislys have adapted their work to so as to keep those practices functional even as the demand for free-range, local turkeys has sky-rocketed--and one that is done impersonally and mechanically.

Phil and I have often talked about how he has worked with state and local officials whose job it is to inspect his family's work; here, the on-site inspector is wearing the hard-hat, while Phil's wife Lucy (with glasses) and some family friends continue the work. Phil's a businessman, so he has his frustrations with accommodating the health, safety, and cleanliness demands of the state...and moreover, he recognizes that those demands in many ways come down harder on local producers like himself, because he--by choice and by necessity--does not rely so much upon the more easily (if less accurately) surveyed mechanical tools and assembly-line procedures which large agribusiness and meatpackers usually make use of. The upside, however, is learning how he and his family have developed friendly, trusting relationships with the inspectors over the years, and negotiated ways of keeping all of those interested in the process satisfied. (Interesting note: inspectors are harsher on the practices they are surveying when there are more than one of them in attendance; according to Phil, one inspector will make informed, reasonable judgments, whereas two will often end up trying to compensate for or over-inspect one another.)

I could go on with this--I could talk about the Borntrager's Dairy, and the strategies they (and their customers!) pursue to make it easier for those who want to purchase some fresh, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized milk to do so. There was Dwight Miller and his family, who see their commitment to provide local milk and produce to their neighbors and to produce all the income they need from their own small plot of land in terms of a "ministry" which they had been called to. And wherever we went, we saw the relative absence of the same thing: high levels of debt, extensive financing packages, and disruptive economic burdens generated by big corporate players. Not that economies of scale were entirely absent from these producers lives; that was hardly the case. (John Miller imports his perlite from Sweden, Phil Nislys gets his chicks from Missouri, and the DFA is a major buyer for much of the milk produced by the Millers and Borntragers--though note that the DFA itself is a farmer-owned cooperative!). The best of these local farmers were continuing experimenting with better ways to make use of, without being dragged down by, the culture of bigness which surrounds them. For the most part, they seem to be doing quite well.

I think for most of my students, the highlight of the day was sitting down to a simple--yet for all that wonderfully filling--meal with the Hershbergers, and talking about farm life, about different approaches to education and building a family and learning a skill and filling one's belly. Again, Leroy doesn't come off as a radical, looking to "occupy" the contested spaces of our national life for the sake of the 99% who are mostly left out of the economic decisionmaking and the financial benefits which the elite in this country jealously (if perhaps sometimes unconsciously) protect. But, for a man like himself and his family, and for all those with whom we have spoken to and learned from this year, what better description could their be? They are, in all their own various and sometimes compromised ways, fighting against a huge, petro-chemical-powered, debt-financed, corporate-governed food industry, attempting to resist its dominance of prices and regulations by delivering something healthy, local, and sustainable. The small English village which is aiming at total food self-sufficiency is doing this; the marchers from the Farmers Coalition who joined the protesters at Zuccotti Park were doing this; the young farmers who are making tiny but real changes in the long-term decline of agriculture in America are doing it. Shannon Hayes, of Radical Homemakers fame, expressed the hope embodied in what Leroy has helped me my students and I to see very well:

My experience at the Sunday rally was one of the most moving four hours of my life, surrounded by hundreds of people who cared about the same issues I do: food sovereignty, the need for city people to start building soil and growing their own food, the need for rural and urban folks to build better relationships with each other to sidestep the corporate food system. I met dairy farmers, meat producers, seed producers, vegetable growers….even some friendly vegetarians. I met food activists, senior citizens concerned about the quality of food for their grandchildren, community gardeners, college students who were trying to learn how to feed themselves ethically and healthfully. We saw American flags, held up high. One of them led our march. And I saw a side of New York City that I’d never seen before. New Yorkers hung out their apartment windows, came to sit on their steps, sat out at cafes and stood in front of their small grocery stores and food stands. They cheered and clapped as we marched by. They sang and chanted with us. We marched through community gardens reclaimed from abandoned lots. I stepped on ground that was as lush and beautiful as any earth I tread upon here upstate.

The most poignant moment for me, however, was when our march passed through a community garden and I heard cheers from up above me. I looked up and saw four urban teenagers standing in a tree house. They waved and smiled, then held up a giant sign for us to read: This land will live again.

This land will live again. It will live in America’s countryside, in her mountains and rivers, as well as in her cities. To me, that’s what the Occupy movement is all about--finding ways for all living things to thrive. And for those of us in the grassfed farming community, that’s what we’re all about too.

Small farmers like the Millers or the Nislys struggle, and our national addiction to economic practices which keep those who would keep local producers down and on the edge of bankruptcy is a primary cause of that struggle. (See here for more on that.) But in their struggles, they are also finding, here and there, ways to succeed and even flourish, because there are people like you and me who see people like the Hershbergers and recognize: living that way, eating that way, simplifying in that way, isn't a utopian dream--or even if it is utopian, it's not out of reach, it's achievable, its doable. All it takes is a willingness to explore different paths and make different compromises, to "occupy" a different way of thinking. It may not always be easy, but the results are simple, all the same.

Friday Morning Videos: "Driving Home for Christmas"

2011-12-23T07:00:00.008-06:00

Chris Rea has had a far larger career in Europe and his home base in the UK than he ever managed in the US; over here he's a genuine one-hit-wonder-maker, with his wonderful "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" from over 30 years ago. But this fine Christmas tune of his has made the charts twice in Great Britain, and I kind of like its reflective, whimsical sound this season. This video was made the second time the song charted in England, for use by the charity Shelter, and stars a bunch of British television stars and personalities, only one of which I can identify, I think. Seems like they all had a good time, though. Anyway, Merry Christmas--and if you're traveling, drive safely!

Pompeo Goes Populist (But Probably Not Populist Enough)

2011-12-21T15:44:00.005-06:00

Wichita's representative in Congress, Mike Pompeo, won his seat in 2010 by emphasizing again and again the most common of Republican talking points these days: lower taxes, less regulation, and most particularly the need to keep the government's hands off of businesses making the sorts of decisions which enable, in his mind, the free market to be such a wonderful source of wealth and job-creation. But in the wake of the news that Boeing, one of the largest employers in Wichita and a huge economic engine for south-central Kansas, is considering moving the work it was scheduled to perform on a huge Air Force refueling tanker contact out of the state, a contract which local, state, and federal politicians like Pompeo helped Boeing win from the Defense Department, Pompeo is sounding less like a conservative and more like a populist. This is appropriate for a Kansas politician, since the roots of the 19th-century Populist movement which challenged the disruptive and controlling effects which the decisions of large corporations had on farmers and tradesmen run more deeply in Kansas than in any other state. But I doubt--though I would be both surprised and gratified if I turn out to be wrong--that Pompeo has it in him to go populist enough.

He has certain made his frustration with Boeing clear; in a news conference, he emphasized the years of work which went it to crafting the package of tax breaks and other economic supports which Boeing felt it needed to be competitive in landing the KC-46A tanker contract, worth an estimated $35 billion (nearly $400 million of which would be spent here in Wichita). He insisted that Boeing needed to be clear on what their reasoning was for considering relocating the work to another state, and that there was a long "trail of promises" which they were honor-bound--via a "promise and a handshake"--to be true to. Then in a Wichita Eagle column, he insisted that "Kansas and Boeing are family," with decades of history behind the community's development of an infrastructure and labor pool which Boeing (among many other aircraft manufacturing companies here in the "Air Capital of the World") depends upon. To take this work elsewhere, Pompeo wrote, "under a cloud of broken promises, is beneath the dignity of this proud company." And in case pride doesn't change corporate cost-benefit calculations, Pompeo threatened the company with unstated consequences for looking to "violat[e] long-standing promises and obligations that arise from its commitments," as well as "knowingly mak[ing] false statements to the U.S. government or to federal officials during a bidding process." Hardly the stuff of radical socialism, but pretty harsh words for a business-friendly Republican.

Harsh words, though, or even impassioned pleas to the good will of Boeing, are unlikely to have the kind of effect that Pompeo--and thousands of engineers and machinists and other laborers in the Wichita area--wants them to have, simply because the corporate logic of comparative advantage and profit maximization have no room for them. Large business interests like Boeing have--or so we have been told again and again by apologists for the "creative destruction" which capitalism wreaks upon individual livelihoods and whole communities--obligations only to their shareholders, not to the communities which have supported them, not to the workers which make them function, and definitely not to the political bodies, whether local, state, or national, which make the policies that allow corporations to flourish wherever seems to them to be best. For Boeing to keep its promises to Kansas, when the present economic outlook suggests it would be best for them if they didn't, smacks of encouraging some sort of "social responsibility" upon the corporation.

In other words, if Pompeo and others like him want to go head-to-head with Boeing and insist upon them keeping their promises to Kansas, then they're going to have to be willing to think in terms that present the notion that Boeing is "integral part of [the] community fabric" of Wichita as something more than talk; they're going to have to see that notion as having real political meaning and force. They're going to have to, in other words, not just talk like a Populist challenging decisions made by distant corporate calculators; they're going to have to admit those Populists have a point.

This doesn't mean denying "Boeing’s right to run its business as it sees fit," as Pompeo wrote; it does mean thinking again about what is Boeing's business...and what, by contrast, is properly at least as much the business of workers and citizens and taxpayers throughout Kansas and beyond. It means being willing to think the way the Populists were thinking, when they were faced with railroad corporations which charged bankrupting rates across Kansas, after having encouraged farmers to move out along those rail lines by implicitly promising them ready access to markets for their crops. It means, in short, being willing to think about things like economic sovereignty--about the ability, and the right, as least to a limited extent, for communities to claim some ownership over the economic engines which they enable to function through their labor and to flourish through their tax codes and other corporate-friendly policies.

There is no easy or obvious way to implement or resolve these claims, especially when dealing with a huge, global corporation like Boeing, at least not without embracing a full-scale revolution in favor of employee ownership, economic socialization, and market decentralization (and as good and justified as I think such a revolution might be, it would bring with it a host of problems all its own). But if Pompeo and others, as they engage in the difficult fight before them to change corporate minds and save thousands of jobs, aren't willing to at least acknowledge the point of the old Populist vision, then they'll be setting aside one of the relatively few resources which Kansas politicians have at their disposal: a history, one even older than Boeing's in Wichita, of measuring the power of citizens defending their livelihoods against the impersonal demands of corporations, and determining that the power of "community fabric" ought not be so easily set aside.

It Is....Precious

2011-12-20T21:50:00.002-06:00

Forget the election. Now, 2012 really has something going for it.

But Speaking of Christmas Pop...

2011-12-19T09:17:00.002-06:00

...Stuart Elliot's "Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck" series of rock, jazz, and R&B tunes has been pretty awesome. Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Denise Lasalle, and the Sonics? I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. (Maybe this one, Stuart?)

The Five Best Christmas Pop Videos Ever

2011-12-19T07:00:00.003-06:00

If I can do it with television specials, I can do it with pop songs. Again, no claims to objectivity here; these are just my favorites. Remember, these are actual pop or rock tunes, not carols or hymns or traditional favorites funked up by some electric guitars. An arbitrary distinction, I know, because if "The Christmas Song" or "Jingle Bell Rock" didn't start out as pop songs, then what were they? So nothing older than the 1970s here. Also, please note: despite my acknowledged, unapologetic fondness for it, I'm not going to list "Do They Know It's Christmas?" here. (Though I probably should.)

Anyway, let's start with a sentimental 80s favorite...not because of Billy Squire (about whom I have no memories whatsoever) but because of Martha Quinn (about whom I have many, most of them involving late-afternoon period daydreams) right behind Billy in the choir.

Now some great old Elton John, with a song that I think still holds up today.

A lot of people probably prefer the U2 cover of this next song, and I admit it's quite fine, especially The Edge's spare, clean guitar work. But I've got to stick with the Brian Lake original, for musical earnestness sake if for no other reason. John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" may be more famous, but I don't think it can touch this.

Who doesn't love the Kinks?

And of course, we've got to finish up with the greatest of them all; a pretty much flawless melding of music, imagery, and story. If people watched this instead of Celine Dion, this would be a better world.

The (Not So) Radical(ly Conseravtive) Mormon Priesthood

2011-12-18T07:00:00.002-06:00

[Cross-listed to By Common Consent]

As any reader of this blog knows, I'm the sort of egghead who likes to speculate about what it means (or at least what it could mean, for purposes of questions of justice or community or whatever) to be something other than liberal. That is, in the philosophical sense, to be something other than an individualist, concerned first and foremost with rights and property and all that. Hence my continuing fascination with almost all things communitarian and utopian.

This arguably fits in well with my religion, of course. That Mormonism was at one time a radical movement which challenged dominant American liberal norms--most famously regarding marriage and sexuality, but also (and I think more importantly) regarding economics and government--is pretty well understood by most who have even a passing familiarity with Mormon history. (If that's not you, see here and here.) That Mormonism today--at least American Mormonism, at least if the dominant voting patterns and preferred modes of discourse amongst the majority of American Mormon wards are taken as evidence--is no longer much committed to radical communitarianism and egalitarianism, to radical re-organizations of social life, to radical distinctions in how one talks about sovereignty and loyalty, is also pretty well understood. (Again, if you're lost, begin here and here.) America is a different place than it was in the late 19th-century, to be sure, when the U.S. government invested considerable effort to imprison church members and break apart church operations...but then, we are also a significantly different church than we were then, far more at peace with, and far more aligned to, dominant American ways of socializing, making money, electing our leaders and living our lives. Sure, we could point to all sorts of contrasting evidence--but we're much more sexually traditional than most Americans! we challenge all sorts of trends regarding divorce and family! we're considered weird by people in Hollywood!--but all that is, I would assert, fairly circumstantial: fundamentally, for better or worse (or both), the "Mormon moment" has come, in all its multicolored variety, and its conclusion is: even allowing for our mostly traditional mores and mostly conservative politics, here in America we are, I think, undeniably a pretty modern mix of mostly independent individuals, just like nearly everybody else (or, more honestly, just like nearly every other mostly white, mostly suburban church in America).

Rosalynde Welch, one of the best thinkers the Mormon community has around, would presumably disagree with me: in her latest Patheos column, she calls Mormonism a "demanding, distinctive, and stubbornly un-modernized—possibly un-modernizable—church." I suspect our disagreement here is more a matter of our focus rather than our conclusions; I am talking about Mormon life, popular culture, and everyday practice, while she is talking about our institutions, doctrines, and forms or organization. This is an important disagreement, because in a church which presents itself in the lives of its members in such a comprehensive fashion, it's not always clear where (or if) one should end and the other begin. (Moreover, I think a good argument can be made that even our forms of organization have become increasingly professionalized and, as a result, assimilated to modern American expectations and practices in such a way as to challenge the thesis of Armand Mauss, who famously saw in the second-half of the 20th-century, at the same the time when a thoroughly correlated bureaucracy was developed throughout the church, a period of retrenchment into the unmodern and distinct. Mauss notes this critique and argues with it in the most recent issue of the Mormon journal Dialogue.) But that argument aside, Rosalynde's disagreement with me is one I take seriously, because in her column she focuses on one element of Mormon life which arguably has remained "un-modernizable": the way notions of "priesthood" leadership function in our community. That is not an easily challenged claims--indeed, I would hardly challenge it at all, especially given that she uses this observation to call attention to one of the greatest theoretical resources which Mormonism has, and one that is extremely appealing to me: namely, a familiarity with the costs and benefits which come from refusing the lure of the liberal meritocracy.

Rosalynde writes:

The hierarchical, authoritarian nature of the church, with its orientation toward group roles and obedience over individual rights and freedoms—that is to say, everything about the Church that rankles in the context of modern liberal democracy—can provide a set of emotional and intellectual tools with which to examine the buried assumptions of that liberal democracy....I want to suggest an example of this dynamic, by which the apparently illiberal features of a conservative church can usefully destabilize the silently-encroaching paradigms of modernity....[by floating] the idea that the all-male LDS priesthood enacts a critique of the notion of meritocracy that vibrates at the center of the American dream....

From some perspectives, an all-male priesthood is nothing more than an atavistic institutional carryover from the days of hard patriarchy, sexism pure and simple; from other perspectives, it's a divinely-ordained reflection of the deep cosmic order that secures and connects individuals in a harmonious chain. Either way, a male priesthood is difficult to explain, much less justify, in the language of liberal meritocracy. Indeed, an organization in which an arbitrary half of its membership has no access to institutional authority is the opposite of meritocracy; leadership is not a reward for ability, hard work, or worthiness—it can't be, since many of the most able, dedicated, and worthy members of the church will never hold positions of executive leadership simply by virtue of their female condition....

A male priesthood, then, stands as an enacted rebuttal to the idea that meritocracy is natural, inevitable, or necessary. The encroachment of merit-based thinking into a Christian community would be disastrously corrosive to gospel teachings on humility, love, dignity, and status; one can never win one's mansion above or compete for salvation. There are no merit-based scholarships to heaven....Spiritual meritocracy is poison. The all-male LDS priesthood, for which no merit-based explanation can be offered, reminds us of that the kingdom of God is not a meritocracy.

There are, of course, some problems with this insight of Rosalynde's. Most crucially, there is the reality that in this mostly voluntary church, despite our affirmation that merit and skill have little or no influence over matters of faithfulness and worthiness, the truth remains that some of the callings to service which are extended are, shall we say, more equal than others. (Please give me a ring the next time a deeply devout, unfailingly generous, but also unemployed, public-transportation-dependent Mormon is called to be his ward's bishop.) This point becomes all the more incontestable the further one moves into the Mormon church hierarchy, away from purely voluntary pastoral responsibilities and into the full-time ecclesia...which nonetheless remains, for all it's adaption to professional norms, also thoroughly committed to some understanding of priesthood authority. This trickles down into ordinary Mormon practice, which inevitably leads to situations where presumably merit-rewarded positions often carry with them traces of priesthood authority (as long as the holders are male), and conversely priesthood callings are often seen to carry some patina of intellectual or administrative competency or merit, so that we not infrequently see the overruling of technical or administrative decisions or policies made by non-priesthood (that is, female) workers who were, until they ran up against some unthinking, perhaps power-jealous individual, providing important service to the church.

For all that, though, her point is an enormously valuable one: in the pews and duties of everyday American Mormon life, hundreds of thousands of people, in millions of day-to-day ways, are arguably taking a break from the competitive, zero-sum, measurement-and-outcome-based meritocratic world they encounter and (unfortunately, I think) mostly take for granted as workers, students, employers, and citizens. Instead are invited into a world of grace, of gifts, through the example of a radically conservative institution--an all-male priesthood--which in principle refuses to acknowledge both the appeal and the dangers of turning every kind of authority into merit-based, process-bound, context-and-culture-be-damned, administrative procedure. That has to mean something--it has to be the sort of thing that could lead Mormons to recognize, even internalize, a critique of the modern liberal project, and open themselves up to alternative (even radical!) forms of organization and behavior, even at the cost of setting themselves against the American behemoth. Doesn't it?

Maybe not. To be sure, some have asked these broader questions. They've been discussed on blogs, and sometimes you even see them reflected in church leaders' warnings about trusting too much in accomplishment and forgetting about grace and gifts. But, in light of my general assertion above, I would continue to argue that Rosalynde's acute observation about the meritocracy-critiquing potential of the Mormon priesthood--a potential that it has by virtue of its radically conservative, and therefore illiberal, presumptions--does not travel: her "enacted rebuttal" to meritocratic liberalism enacts, and thus rebuts, relatively little. Why not?

Forty-five years ago, the social critic Christopher Lasch also wondered why Mormonism--which he didn't like and happily mocked, even while admiring it in some important ways--didn't (or, at least, didn't any longer) follow through on its embedded critique of modern American life. His answer: it's the federal government's fault (or, more particularly: it's the economy, stupid):

From the point of view of liberal Christianity, the Mormon experiment was impossible to understand....In Utah, under Brigham Young's leadership, the Mormons created a self-sufficient, cooperative, egalitarian, and authoritarian economy devoted not to individual enrichment but to the collective well-being of the flock....Cooperation and planning caused the desert to bloom, in marked contrast to the exploitive patterns of agriculture which on other frontiers exhausted natural resources and left the land a smoking waste. These practices of the Mormons, however--so successful both from a human and from a technological point of view--ill accorded with the prevailing drift toward laissez-faire....Beginning with the "Mormon War" of 1857-58, when federal troops tried unsuccessfully to break up the Mormon settlements, the government harried the Saints by a combination of military, legislative, and judicial action....The destruction of the temporal powers of the church put an end, for all practical purposes, to the Mormon enterprise...[though] the Mormon church continues to grow. It grows because it can offer special attractions of its own--more community sense, more social discipline, more mystique than other churches competing for lower-middle-class converts, a combination that is appealing to those reared strictly who find things falling apart. But the growth of the Mormons...has been achieved by sacrificing...the conception of a secular community organized in accordance with religious principles....From posing a challenge to the American way of life Mormonism has become a defense of its most reactionary aspects. (Lasch, "The Mormon Utopia," in The World of Nations [Viking Books, 1974], 66-68)

Lasch's observations are not nearly as careful as Rosalynde's, nor are they as accurate. For one thing, Lasch's comments were written before the 1978 revelation which thankfully ended priesthood discrimination against black males, and thus are historically dated (Proposition 8 notwithstanding, institutional Mormonism almost certainly cannot be legitimately awarded the "most reactionary" prize any longer); for another thing, Lasch fails to appreciate the spiritual important which we believing Mormons attach to our own history. But for all that, there is a sense in which Lasch here provides an important historical correction, or shall we say a complement, to Rosalynde's hypothesis. Lasch acknowledges that modern (post-polygamy, post-theocracy) Mormonism offers much of that Rosalynde herself mentions: "the rewarding communal experience of serving in a Mormon community, the trust, fellow-feeling, practical support, and, yes, the opportunity to practice forgiveness" which dwelling with a context of authority and solidarity may provide. But that isn't the aim of Rosalynde's piece; rather, she is looking for Mormonism, and particularly our Mormon doctrines of priesthood to "provide useful critical views of liberalism's unfinished or unfounded projects." The critical view may be present, but is there any sense of it being used by Mormons to articulate an actual critique of America's meritocracy? Given the accommodation of Mormonism with American public life, civil religion, and state power, I see little evidence of such. Lasch suggests that this absence is the result of the collapse of the Mormon church's temporal power over a hundred years ago, and while that is a simplistic answer, it has the virtue of making good sense. It's hard to rebut liberalism--which, as Rosalynde notes, is "firmly entrenched in the common sense that governs everyday experience in modern America"--when you don't have much of a place to stand apart from it. (This is, of course, a central problem with nearly all so-called conservative thought in America today--which, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted long ago, has become, since its embrace of the mobility and creative destruction of modern industrial capitalism in the decades following the Civil War, almost wholly a species of liberalism itself. For good and for ill, Mormonism was "radically conservative" once, in a way not dissimilar to how the Confederacy was radically conservative: because there were specific forms of community organization which it sought to conserve against modernity. Nowadays, not quite so much.) In short, Lasch's observation takes some (though perhaps not all) of the wind out of the sails of Rosalynde's argument about the Mormon priesthood: even if she is right about her reading of it--and I think she probably is--there is good reason to recognize that, given how our shared church currently constitutes its own place within the American liberal order, probably little will come of it.

Here's one final observation: would any American Mormon today, including Rosalynde herself, even want more to come of it? I frequently and happily express my preferences for a more populist or socialist or communitarian order, and think there is more to learn from radical utopian ideas than progressive ones (particularly in the Mormon sense)...but ultimately, I myself am mostly in favor of mildly distasteful progressive compromises with modernity, and I suspect that nearly every other Mormon I know who has benefited from the way the church has evolved over the past century would agree. Remember that if Lasch is correct, then probably the only way to fully enact Mormon radicalism would be through the re-establishment of real Mormon political and economic sovereignty and territoriality. To be part of such an establishmentarian project would obviously constrain us modernized American Mormons even further--and it would especially constrain women. As someone with real feminist concerns (if not an allegiance to any particularly aggressive feminist agenda), Rosalynde rightly worries about the costs involved in maintaining our radical(ly conservative) priesthood alternative, even if just on the level of theoretical argument: "even if some social good does come of the anti-meritocratic critique embodied in a patriarchal priesthood, who is to judge how that good might compare to the pain and confusion that some women feel as they try to make sense of their own identity in a patriarchal institution?"

This is the liberal side of all us modern American Mormons, peeking around and out of the church we have joined or inherited, filled as it is with much spiritual good and even truth, but also filled with remnants of a radical project--a conservative and authoritarian one, to be sure, but a powerfully egalitarian and communitarian one as well--that now exists mostly (if not entirely) as an echo. There's a part of me which is looking for that echo to once more sound robustly; I want an alternative to the liberal order. Rosalynde, more Burkean than I, isn't sure we should want that, and as one who feels the force of Mormon illiberality much more seriously than a white man like I probably ever will, her caution speaks more authentically than mine, I suppose. But still, thanks to her essay, the next time I sit in church and observe my fellow Mormons and myself go through our highly unmeritocratic ritual practices, I won't be able to do anything but hope that we're learning something.

Grammar!

2011-12-16T09:08:00.001-06:00

The second in an occasional series about how much we've all forgotten about how to use our own language.

Godspeed, You Brilliant, Thought-Provoking Ass

2011-12-16T07:20:00.001-06:00

Finally finished with finals, leaving me some breathing space to start getting caught up on some things that need to be said. And first up on the list comes the news this morning, that Christopher Hitchens has passed away, from pneumonia, contracted in the process of his twilight struggle against cancer. RIP, I say.

Why do I say that, about a man who I've never met and whose ideas I disagreed with more often than not? First, because wishing Hitchens's immortal soul Godspeed would piss him off, and he liked being pissed off. Second, because I'm a softy, in the way that Rod Dreher is a softy, who commented in a post of his, put up late last night, that he finds it "impossible not to like someone as, well, original and as gifted with the English language as Hitchens." (And gifted he was; there are many, many people who attempt to put on the mantle of George Orwell, and appropriate the attitude and emulate the skill demonstrated by the controlled fury and exacting brilliance of Orwell's prose: for Hitchens, unlike nearly everyone else, the comparison very nearly works.) But third, and most importantly, because in my disagreements with him, even more than my agreements, I came to understand something essential about conservatism, and about myself.

I read Hitchens's The Missionary Position, his ferocious screed against Mother Teresa, while I was working as a bookseller while still in graduate school. (He later repeated his basic thesis against Mother Teresa in Slate magazine, here.) After finishing the book, I realized something: I agreed with him. I agreed with his claim that Mother Teresa wasn't at all engaged in the humane act of healing the world which most of her admirers the world over imagined she was. Mother Teresa made Hitchens's angry, and he liked being angry, especially at anyone who believed in a God: she's just an illiberal authoritarian who cares more about building her little kingdom than solving any actual social problems!, his book screamed. (Or, as he summarized his complaint in Slate: "Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti, whose rule she praised in return, and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan.") My response to his attack, both when I read it originally and anytime I thought about it afterward, remained the same: You're right Hitch: Mother Teresa was concerned more with authority and God's kingdom...because she was convinced that that was where love and salvation and grace are to be found, not in anything so fallen, so liberal, as "society." Or as I wrote back then, with the help of St. Augustine:

Did criminals and murderers and wicked men contribute money to Mother Teresa's cause, hoping to gain something from their proximity to her? Very likely. Should that have troubled Mother Teresa? Not at all. After all, as Augustine reminds us, outside the City of God (and not one of us is fully in it, not now, not until the rest of God takes us), we're all criminals anyway:"What are kingdoms but great robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms?" (City of God, Bk. 4, Chp. 4) This is hardly a good way to interact with others in a political sense: we must seek out standards of justice, build communities that exclude and include, form principles of law, all so that the limited goods of this life can be shared, rather than made subject to raw power and wealth. This is solid Catholic doctrine, and solid Christian doctrine as well: "If you want peace, work for justice." And it's true. But it's only true right here, right now, and the final supreme good of the believing Christian is neither here nor now: it is the eternal peace which the rest of God promises. In the meantime, justice is, well, valuable--but, in a very fundamental sense, it is limited too. "What about justice, whose function is to render to each his due, thereby establishing in man a certain just order of nature, so that the soul is subordinated to God, and the flesh to the soul, and consequently the flesh and the soul to God? Does it not demonstrate in performing this function that it is still laboring at its task instead of resting in the completion of its goal?" (City of God, Bk. 19, Chp. 4) Justice, and all mortal concerns, are by definition incomplete. Holiness, by contrast, in wholeness. If one wholly adored God, then the moral complications of discerning between what some deserve and others do not, of working out compromises when faced with hard moral choices, of deciding between just and unjust wars, indeed of all the necessary vicissitudes of ordinary life, would not trouble you one bit--and, as Hitchens proved (to me at least), that describes Mother Teresa's lack of care for the "real world," or "the big picture," or "the long term" very, very well. In short, I think Hitchens helps us understand why Mother Teresa really was a saint--and why most of us don't want to be one.

This argument--both Hitchens's against Mother Teresa, and mine with Hitchens--simply underscores his similarity to Orwell, who was notoriously divided in his feelings on Gandhi, sniffing that "saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent." Hitchens always thought saints were guilty (like Gandhi too!), because saints are not of this (social, political, "real") world, and this is the only world which Hitchens every acknowledged. Whereas I, on the other hand, think any decent politics has to have at least some saintly involvement, at least sometimes, however convoluted or compromised the presence of that otherworldly (or higher-worldly) that saintlessly may be.

Hitchens unapologetic embrace of the "real world" also forced another realization of mine about conservatism, through the way he contributed to my own twisted odyssey over the war in Iraq. My support for it, as I've written a couple of times before, was almost wholly a creation of the theoretical framework which I embraced at the time (and still somewhat, to a limited degree and in a changed manner, hold to today): a kind of liberal (inter)nationalism, an emphasis upon the proper place for nations to exercise real world power in defense of culturally grounded expression of broadly liberal principles. Hitchens, who had been, up until the moment of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, particularly, the American-led invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq, an unpredictable but still fairly consistent man of the left and a critic of American imperialist power, all of a sudden became a vicious defender of almost all things Western against what he termed the "Islamofascist" threat. Hitchens--in retrospect simply bizarre--obsession with the righteousness of the Western liberal cause (and the power to Western liberal states to impose that cause upon whole populations that were presumably more concerned with feeding themselves than being on the right side of some political theory!) was one that, for some years, I had a strange admiration for. As I put it at a conference once:

What happened as some of us watched the World Trade Center come down on September 11th was the realization, for the first time in a very long time, that one could actually see a boundary, a limit: there really was this place called "America," and it had a culture and a way of life and a meaning, and there was something outside of it, something that wasn't a function of, or susceptible to, the abstract forces o globalization, but instead took the corporate Americanization of the world and shoved it all back into national, historically embedded terms. In other words, all of sudden we could see ourselves as a community, not just a site of media and market exchanges, and a community worth loving as well. And to the extent which the struggle with Islamic fascism and terrorism proceeded on those terms, terms which presumed (and, we fancifully imagined, even encouraged the growth of, despite Bush's refusal to ever talk about any real kind of sacrifice) a solidarity with and commitment to one's own....well, the neocons and liberal hawks ended up leading a number of us national communitarians and Christian socialists around by the nose.

What I didn't say at the time was that Hitchens was, perhaps, the most articulate and challenging (and, to be sure, the least balanced) exponent of this kind of theoretical attitude, but I didn't need to say it; almost immediately upon making my comments, one of the other discussants declared my thoughts a species of "Christopher Hitchens conservatism"--and he was absolutely correct. In a perverse way, the ideological hothouse that was the Western world in the early days of the Iraq War managed to turn leftists that like community, like me, or even just left-liberals who like the idea of punching illiberal God-worshipers in the nose, like Hitchens, into people on the right--into, in short, conservatives, even imperialists, of a fashion. I was wrong about that. Hitchens remained in denial about it, as far as I know up until the very end.

That's a sad ending for this little essay, and an even sadder ending to the brilliant (in the very literal sense of "brightness"--Hitchens obviously loved both being at the center of, and being a generator of, both light and heat) career of an enormously talented writer. I would hope that this judgment doesn't sum the whole atheistic, combative, pig-headed, awesomely informed and opinionated man up. (George Scialabba, a much more balanced but equally well-informed writer, has a wonderful summary of Hitchens's work here.) I'm afraid I can't agree with frequent the one blogosphere commenter, who wrote that, "[Hitchens] supported the war in Iraq. That, to me, disqualifies practically everything else." No, for better and/or for worse, this particular asshole contained multitudes. Part of what he was (and, to his great consternation, I will insist still is) spoke to me; part of that speaking isn't with me any longer, thank goodness, but part of it still is. Hitchens, who has nothing if not a constant partisan, would have liked that, I hope.

Anyway, requiescat in pace, Hitchens. You won't like being at rest, but God knows you probably really need some.

Friday Morning Videos: "Stay"

2011-12-16T07:00:00.004-06:00

I truly, genuinely believed it was Helena Bonham-Carter playing the Crazy-Death-Spirit-Seducer-Woman the first time I saw this one-hit wonder. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

TIME Gets it Right

2011-12-14T11:49:00.001-06:00

Time's "Person of the Year" feature has been so much of an institution for so long that I can remember comic story-lines that were built around it when I was kid, nearly 30 years ago. (I'm thinking in particular of one comic from the 1980s that had a futuristic Tony Stark competing to named "Man of the Year" by a Time-magazine-U.S.-military-industrial behemoth.) Mostly, it's just like every other feature produced by any major media outlet: it's a way to attract advertisers and sell magazines, or at the very least to catch readers and get people talking. Very rarely would the act of identifying someone, or some thing, as uniquely representative of a whole year be anything more than just a predictable stunt, and Time's annual issue is usually just that.

But not this year--this year, media cynic that I am, I have to give them credit; the choice of "The Protester" has put the finger on the essential, populist/anarchic/utopian/democratic vibe of nearly all left-leaning politics this year, and to that extent has successfully captured one of the biggest sources of genuine news in 2011 all the world over. Obviously those struggling in the streets against equality, austerity, and corruption don't even begin to tell the whole story of politics in 2011, and of course a great many--including thousands who will be writing letters to the editor in response to Time's choice--will argue that it not only isn't the whole story, but that it's a bad story as well, one that is basically boils down to a wrong-headed sideshow, distracting us from the "real" issues of economic growth. But they're wrong, and Time is right, at least this time. Three years after the global financial meltdown, and nearly two years after President Obama and the Democratic party managed to get through Congress the most extensive (though seriously flawed) social welfare reform bill the United States has seen in over 40 years, all the real energy on the left or liberal side of the political spectrum is focusing on the former, and dismissing the latter. The technocratic and neoliberal compromises with high finance, global capitalism, and foreign policy realism which have (ever since Bill Clinton and others, if not earlier) become predictable with all liberal and left-leaning political parties and ideologies, quite suddenly seemed bankrupt, useless, perhaps even counterproductive, as a way to challenge entrenched authority, corrupt practices, and a concentration of power that, for whatever reason, suddenly seemed beyond the pale.

Some of what Kurt Andersen wrote for the magazine is truly dead-on:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt--sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent mega-scaled crony hyper-capitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

A desire to build something something more democratic and grounded in local demands for justice and dignity, something more responsive to actual human beings rather than to financial derivatives, something that isn't "too big to fail": yes, that's what unites the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and much else besides. And moreover, the desire to see it done with participatory tools and technologies that privilege those that are on the ground, rather than those who are in elite positions of corporate influence. Is that a crazy, utopian dream? Possibly:

Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they've rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don't want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say.

A few years ago I would have laughed knowingly at this passage. Of course democracy is hard, and never more hard than in the essential community-building work of deciding who gets to talk and when and about what. Without such decisions being made--or, speaking more theoretically, without such constitutions or traditions or norms being in place so as to give some identity to the place and time of speaking--then of course democracy collapses into just noise. What is necessary, I would have said, is to, first, work with and reform one's institutions and one's culture, so as to move towards the kinds of moral/communal consensus and legitimacy which representative democracy ought to enjoy, even if that includes having more “authority” and less “democracy” in our lives. I’m not sure I wouldn't ultimately make that same response today, as well....but still, I wouldn't make it so dismissively. I've become a little more anarchic, localized, and decentralized in my communitarianism; I have come do better appreciate what I've long known intellectually: that a truly radical challenge to inequality and authoritarianism has to draw something from a different mode of action and a different (probably not only liberal!) set of priorities. The protesters in Cairo and Madrid and NYC know that, whatever else it is that they do not (yet?) know. Many kudos to Time for getting that much right about our global conversation at this moment, at least.

Friday Morning Videos: "Shattered Dreams"

2011-12-09T07:00:00.003-06:00

I like actually like jazz, Johnny, but whatever. (Oh come on, someone had to make the joke, you know?)

And the art deco American version...

Japan Says "Arigato"

2011-12-09T06:47:00.002-06:00

I think it says something truly profound about East Asian--and particularly Japanese--cultural norms and attitudes that this is the sort of thing which emerges six months after the worst disaster that nation has experienced since WWII, a far greater disaster than anything the United States has experienced in my lifetime. It's a sweet, simple, sincere, and heart-wrenching video, from a devastated (but recovering) people to all those who assisted them, in ways large and small, in their time of need. My thanks to Yumiko and Dave Jenkins, who passed it along.

The Five Best Christmas Television Episodes Ever

2011-12-08T07:00:00.001-06:00

Well, no, obviously they're aren't "objectively" the best; I'm not going to pretend to be able to make that kind of claim. So let's amend that purposefully provocative post title to simply read "Some Favorite Christmas Television Episodes of Mine." Note, though, that this is a serious list, unlike the one I shared three years ago. No special one-off television extravaganzas, no network holiday broadcasts, and nothing fake: just plain old actual, regular "Christmas episodes" from series that I watched and loved (or at least liked enough to keep watching). In chronological order:

Happy Days, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," broadcast December 17, 1974. I was never a particularly big Happy Days fan; it just wasn't one of those shows that had much impact on me. And the Happy Days which I did follow came later in the 1970s, in the era of Mork from Ork, Chachi selling his soul to the devil, and, yes, Fonzie jumping a shark (I actually remember watching that episode in its original broadcast). But I caught this classic episode in reruns, and it's stayed with me for years. Ignore the hideous laugh track (which the series ditched the following season) and just enjoy the sentiment. The whole thing is on YouTube; watch it here, here, and here.

M*A*S*H, "Death Takes a Holiday," broadcast December 15, 1980. M*A*S*H, on the other hand, really was a big influence on my life, or at least as much as any television show might be. This episode was from the ninth season, and by this time things were slowing down (I don't think the show ever recovered from the departure of Radar, myself). You can see the heavy-handedness in the dialogue, and in particular in the overwrought conflict between Hunnicutt and Father Mulcahy, and the speechifying by Houlihan, all over their rival claims to a dying soldier's life. But the personal journies through Christmas memories and charity exhibited by Winchester and Klinger ring true. Watch it here.

SCTV, "Christmas (with Catherine O'Hara and Andrae Crouch)," broadcast December 17, 1982. I didn't catch SCTV when it was originally broadcast; for me, it was a program shown occasionally on a local PBS station, around 11pm, before they would switch over to Monty Python's Flying Circus. But they did their best to show episodes in order, as seasonally appropriate, and this one, which I suppose I watched sometime in December 1986, put me on the floor I was laughing so hard. I really couldn't say why; I suppose it was just the over-the-top, idiotic banality of it all. Unfortunately I can't find the whole episode itself online, and the clips available from it on YouTube don't include the best bit: Johnny LaRue's desperate quest to find Santa Claus and beg for a new camera crane, so he can get the only thing he's ever wanted: a "crane shot." But Count Floyd's "Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas" is pretty awesome in its weird, relentless, lunatic way too.

Magnum, P.I., "Operation: Silent Night," broadcast December 15, 1983. I adored Magnum, P.I., though I would be very hard-pressed to remember more than a couple of specific plots. But I'm probably in the same boat there with every other white male American boy in the early to mid 1980s: we watched the show because it had Hawaiian seascapes, fast cars, guns, scantily-clad women, fistfights, emotional drama, tons of running gags, and not-infrequent-fourth-wall-breaking by Tom Selleck, his eyebrows, and his mustache. With all that, who needs to remember plots? But still, I do remember this one. It has the whole Magnum mixture: somber references to WWII, an annoying-yet-ultimately-decent-hearted military authority figure, a dream sequence, plus T.C. as the hysterical voice of reason, Rick as comic relief, Higgins as a source of both wisdom and windbaggery, and Thomas Magnum himself as the generous everyman trying to survive through it all. Watch it here.

Community, "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," broadcast December 9, 2010. Twenty-seven years in between this Christmas episode and the last one; why is that? The lack of quality holiday programming? No--I just stopped watching lots of network television by the time I was getting into my late teens and then went off to college and then later graduate school, and throughout those years and ever since my focus on one program or another has been pretty intermittent. (And those shows which I did watch regularly rarely had Christmas episodes at all, or at least not memorable ones; I'm just not coming up with anything holiday-related and worth mentioning from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Homicide.) So why Community? It's excellent television, but I confess I'm not a faithful watcher; basically, I just catch episodes here and there when my friends all pester me to check them out online. Anyway, I did so last year for this episode, and I can't thank my friends enough. The remote-controlled Christmas pterodactyl is only the start; by the end, you've had a perfectly snarky, multicultural, pop-culture-reference-drenched laugh-fest, with an unexpectedly honest and even slightly touching moment from Pierce along the way. Watch the whole thing here.

Okay, so those are some favorites of mine. Any recommendations, readers?

"He is Mad Who Trusts in the Tameness of a Belly-Pinched Wolf!"

2011-12-06T16:36:00.000-06:00

Not the funniest comedy bit I've ever heard, but the funniest I've heard in the past few weeks, anyway. The American jingoism at the end is a bit much, but you get the point long before then.

And a Very Beatles Christmas to You Too!

2011-12-06T11:06:00.001-06:00

So this was completely unexpected discovery: via my good friend Scott (may his gianduia always spread smoothly), a complete collection of the special, limited edition Christmas fan-club singles which the Beatles released from 1963 to 1969. This is a small but wonder treasure for any Beatles fan, especially ones like myself who discovered their talent, genius, and whimsy much too late to have ever been on a fan club list and receive one of these usually rather goofball 7-inch singles to put under the tree. All hail the Aquarium Drunkard for assembling this delightful stuff. As he notes, its a particular delight to observe the changes in the cover art, as well as the quality and style of the Beatles' banter and music as the decade went by. (Of course, they arguably both began and ended the Sixties, so that's appropriate.) One thing which really struck me, which AD doesn't mention, is just how casually sophisticated their lunacy and mockery could really get, particularly when they weren't thinking about a major release, but instead just knocking something low-key out for the fans. George Harrison once told his friend Eric Idle that Monty Python, with their Flying Circus, had absorbed or inherited the mantle of thoughtful weirdness that he felt the Beatles had carried throughout their existence; these nutty little exercises in holiday cheer prove that in spades. Click on the dates to listen.

From December 6, 1963, Christmas greetings from all, a rendition of “Good King Wenceslas,” and the chorus from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

From December 18, 1964, a rendition of “Jingle Bells,” individual greetings from the band, and an ending jingle “Can You Wash Your Father’s Shirts?”

From December 17, 1965, renditions of “Yesterday,” “Happy Christmas to Ya List’nas,” “Auld Land Syne,” the Four Top’s “It’s the Same Old Song” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year.”

From December 16, 1966, a fictional Christmas pantomime, with “Everywhere It’s Christmas,” “Orowanya,” “Please Don’t Bring Your Banjo Back” and “Podgy the Bear and Jasper Visit Felpin Mansions.”

From December 15, 1967, a mock show, including “Christmas Time is Here Again,” “Plenty of Jam Jars” (performed by the fictional band "The Revellers”), and John’s poem “When Christmas Time is Over.”

From December 20, 1968, renditions of “Happy Christmas, Happy New Year” and "Once Upon a Pool Table," with John’s poem “Jock & Yono.” Tiny Tim appears on “Nowhere Man.”

Finally, from December 19, 1969, John and Yoko in their home, Ringo plugs his movie “The Magic Christian,” and Paul sings “This is to Wish You a Merry, Merry Christmas.”

So Just Who Are these Freedom-Hating Muppets that this Fox News Doofus is Worried About?

2011-12-06T09:52:00.000-06:00

Look, I'll grant this Murdoch-compensated flunky a couple of valid points. Like take Zoot over there in the corner; it's hard to deny that he'd line up to support any hemp-defending liberal on the ballot (assuming he wasn't so stoned on Election Day that he forgets to vote). And Sweetums in the back? Definitely your stereotypical, public-school-loving, Elizabeth-Warren-supporting, English-degree-holding, holding-down-crummy-jobs-while-working-on-his-thesis, liberal softie. But what about the rest of them? Okay, so maybe, maybe, you could go after Dr. Honeydew and Beaker as a couple of liberal eggheads. But you know, half the contracts at Muppet Labs probably come from some secret government agency; I mean, who else besides guys working long days on a nuclear submarine would need a nuclear-powered shaver? And the rest? Sam the American Eagle is obviously a Tea Party Republican. Gonzo the Great is admittedly a bit of a lifestyle libertarian, but the movie demonstrates he's an entrepreneurial genius all the same. The Swedish Chef? A hard-working immigrant who happily adapts to the American taste for hot dogs. Walter is too new a Muppet character for us to make much of a judgment about, but Fozzie Bear? Come on! Patriotism swells in the heart of the American bear.

Friday Morning Videos: "The Politics of Dancing"

2011-12-02T07:00:00.003-06:00

Who doesn't miss the Cold War's aesthetic? You know I do.

Not the sort of politics I normally teach, though not for lack of trying. (I wonder how much they had to pay the kids from the local roller-skate rink to come and wheel around for an hour?)

Friday Morning Videos: "What About Me?"

2011-11-25T07:00:00.002-06:00

Yeah, what about me? There's not even a single turkey wing left? Oh man.

Thanks Everybody

2011-11-24T08:05:00.003-06:00

I’m sitting here, paging with a suspicious eye through a few carefully selected Black Friday flyers from this morning’s paper, thinking about the turkey we’ll be putting in the oven in a little under an hour, and about the ward’s “turkey bowl” a little after that, where I’ll go through my annual ritual of pretending I can actually play American football, and also about our “thankful wreath,” a collection of statements from Melissa and I and all the kids that we write on cut-out leaves and hang up, listing things were thankful for (Alison used up two of her leaves expressing gratitude for whales), and listening to recordings of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” on the laptop, and suddenly the quotidian power of it all made we want to write something.

I have so many people to thank for all the good things in my life. Mostly those with whom I have family or church or work connections, to be sure, but also just everyone, whether old and dear friends or near strangers or something in between, whom I've read or listened to or learned from over the past nearly-43 years. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, who have, whether they realize it or not, made me who am I today through their sharing ideas, arguments, jokes, and just snippets of their own struggles and triumphs with me.

Maybe it’s an odd thing to be grateful for: all this talk. But I’m a man of words, and probably will be until I die. For that reason, thanks, everybody. And happy (American) Thanksgiving Day.

Take your pick of recordings, and enjoy!

Wishing You a Very Shatner Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T13:34:00.002-06:00

video platform video management video solutions video player

Surely, this is the only true kind of Thanksgiving anyone should have. Fry safely, everyone. The Captain is watching. (Hat tip: Kathy Soper)

Mormonism and Progressive Utopian Politics

2011-11-21T17:00:00.001-06:00

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I don't mean to make a habit of responding to Matt Bowman's essays in The New Republic, if for no other reason than that the man's scholarly chops and writing skills are both impressive and intimidating. Both those talents are fully on display in his latest piece, which thoughtfully postulates a link between Mitt Romney's technocratic worldview and organizational acumen (as well as his occasional history of deviating from quasi-libertarian, Tea Party-conservative Republican orthodoxy) and Mormonism's history of progressive-style responses to social problems. But there's a problem with Bowman's essay: what he identifies from Mormon history and culture as a variation upon "classical American progressivism" isn't really, or at least isn't at its roots, despite his claims otherwise. In fact, the affinity which Matt sees between Mormonism and progressivism is actually just an echo of an ever deeper, more radical historical parallel and inheritance--one which, I'm sad to say, Mitt Romney (like most American Mormons) shows little sign of having been influenced by at all.

Bowman presents this affinity as emerging at the beginning of the 20th century, "when the [progressive] movement itself began," which in a way tips his hand. He is presumably assuming--not without a good deal of historical warrant, to be sure--that progressivism's genesis was concomitant with the collision of several particular forces and transformations in American thought and practice a little over a century ago: the rise of the Social Gospel; the example of European (particularly German) models of scholarly research, public administration, and technical expertise; the increasing complexity of the industrial economy; and the many political controversies resulting from the ethnically and racially fraught corruption which characterized political parties and governing bodies throughout America's immigrant-packed cities. This is a good story to tell about progressivism--but it ignores the enormous historical influence which the many populist and communitarian movements of the previous century, particularly the last thirty years of it, had on the progressive movement's moment in the sun. Bowman unknowingly acknowledges this debt with this early progressive agenda owed to the Populists when he talks about "influential progressive leaders like William Jennings Bryan" visiting Salt Lake City--Bryan being, of course, more generally and accurately known as a progressive only by accident and association, as the agrarian populist movement he'd helped to lead into the Democratic Party in the 1896 and 1900 elections slowly adapted both itself and its titular leader to more urban constituencies and priorities. 19th-century American populism--with its borderline utopian insistence upon economic sovereignty and the virtuous potential of the "plain people" organizing themselves without the assistance of monied and corporate elites--is too often wrongly understood as a kind of primitive dry-run at the more successful political reforms of the later progressive era, and Bowman's piece unfortunately perpetuates that understanding, by eliding the deeply communitarian roots of those Mormon practices which supposedly make Romney into something of a progressive himself. The story is more complicated than that.

It is true that throughout the first half of the 20th century the Mormon church built (or, in the case of the Boy Scouts, borrowed) a large number of social organizations for its membership, culminating in the construction of the extensive Church Welfare Program, which enlists the time, effort, and financial support of both the church itself as well as its individual members to provide basic necessities and opportunities for productive work to all whom local church leaders reach out to as potential recipients of aid. But to what extent were these organizational and charitable reforming institutions and practices "progressive," in the sense of seeing a grand alignment between emerging standards of economic and technological efficiency and the moral goal of charity and general human uplift? The actual history suggests that the connection was negligible. The ideal of the "Mormon beehive"--which to this day remains the symbol of the state of Utah--wasn't associated with the competent management of the Social Gospel, but rather with the kind of cooperative organization that presumably would characterize a devout, consecrated, and sovereign community of equals, of the sort that we Mormons attempted to build repeatedly in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and finally Utah, stymied at every juncture by our own failings and the relentless hostility of state and national governments to Mormon separateness and communitarianism. This old egalitarian Mormon attitude--mostly abandoned long ago in the face of legal challenges over plural marriage, but echoes of which remain in Mormon culture and practice today--isn't progressive, but utopian. And moreover, not utopian in the way Matt stretches to associate that idea with the early progressives' tendency to conflate good administration with moral virtue; rather, it was utopian in the way most of the radical and populist experiments of 19th century were utopian--that is, it aimed challenge the inequities and ugliness of capitalism and competition, and replace that system with one more cooperative and divine. Indeed, the Church Welfare Program itself was not understood by those who created it as solely some kind of work-centered charity program designed to "cultivate habits of thrift and industry"; on the contrary, as longtime church leader J. Reuben Clark (ironically, a man who considered himself a strong conservative opponent of any kind of socialism) put it, "the Welfare Plan has [within it]...the broad essentials of the United Order," in which all would contribute to, and may, as needed, be "given portions from the common fund." The organizational world we Mormons move through, and which Romney spent years administrating on various local and regional levels, is a world haunted by something much grander, much more populist and egalitarian and community-minded, than the progressivism that Bowman points to.

This is not to say that the progressive perspective in America, as it flourished and developed into a technocratic, generally (if not deeply) egalitarian, and regulation-friendly liberalism through the New Deal, World War II and the Cold War, and up through Romney's youth in the 1960s, didn't maintain an important hold on the Mormon mind. It absolutely did, and Bowman's essay makes important points in its second half as he observes how typical Romney's "white collar, well-educated" leadership style is of the American Mormon elite today. It is indisputable that, to whatever extent we wish to look at Romney's Mormon inheritance as a way to understand the manner in which he will likely frame in his mind the social problems, fiscal dilemmas, or moral controversies that he'd encounter as president, he will probably exhibit "a profound faith in the efficacy of organizations." (A common Mormon joke, riffing on both the thirteen "Articles of Faith" originally penned by Joseph Smith and the language of Paul from the Letter to the Corinthians, is to speak of a fourteenth Article: "We believe in all meetings, have endured many meetings, and hope to be able to endure all meetings.") But it is wrong to suppose that the tangential, historically vitiated moral connection between utopian populism and technocratic progressivism, as important as it may be for appreciating the development of liberalism in the 20th century, provides a legitimate story for seeing parallels between progressives "who fought for workers’ rights and organized private charities" and the political priorities of Mitt Romney. The egalitarian aspects Mormon politics have deeper, more radical, more communitarian and utopian roots (and potential!) than that...and for better or worse, they play a far smaller role in the majority of contemporary American Mormon political discourse than any circumstantial progressivism might happen to. Mitt Romney is definitely a moderate, but to make him out as influenced by progressivism is, I think, to leverage Mormon history towards the wrong target.

Friday Morning Videos: "Too Shy"

2011-11-18T07:00:00.005-06:00

Kajagoogoo, present!

A fun song, but it you think Limahl's deserves even more attention, there's this. (I should have fit that into my Summer Soundtrack FMV series.)

Special 11/11/11 Double Friday Morning Videos: "Goodnight Saigon" and "Hell Hole"

2011-11-11T07:00:00.004-06:00

A brief respite from one-hit-wonderism this morning, in honor of both Armistice/Remembrance/Veterans Day, as well as the pressing need we all have, sometimes, to take it up to 11.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which video goes with which occasion.

Five Years and 8000 (or 10000, or More) Miles on my Trek

2011-11-09T08:58:00.007-06:00

I took my bicycle into Bicycle X-Change, the place where I've always taken it to get it fixed up, last week for some minor repairs. My rear fender had come loose, jamming up the rotation of the tire, and my brake pads had worn down and needed to be replaced. While there, Mike Scanga, the sagacious owner of the store, asked me if it was one of theirs. It was, I told him: some months after moving to Wichita in 2006, once I'd realized the kind of commute I'd have from our west Wichita home to Friends University, I decided I needed a different kind of bike, traded in my old mountain bike, and bought a brand new Trek 7100--hardly a serious long-distance bicycle, but one perfect for regular street commuting. I had a memory of riding my old bike down Wichita's streets in the snow, so I thought I probably hadn't bought my Trek until the spring. But Mike looked up my bike, and there is was: November 2006. So I guess I've hit my fifth anniversary with it. There are, as I understand it, marriages that don't last that long.

I don't have an odometer on my bike, though I suppose I ought to, given how much time I've spent trying to figure out how many miles I've put on it over the last five years. A six-mile commute into work and then back home again, basically five days a week, basically twelve months a year (yes, I come into work during the summer; Melissa hates me working at home), for five years? That adds up. But of course there are vacations and holidays, there are days when I'm running late or sick, there are days when the rain is pouring down or there's snow on the ground...and the truth is that while I've commuted on my Trek on all of those sorts of days at one time or another, there have been many more when I haven't. So what's the likely total? Almost certainly over 8000 miles by now; perhaps even 10,000, or 12,000, or even more. Enough to have traveled from California to Maine and back again at least once, maybe even twice. Not too shabby, methinks.

Anyway, I love my Trek, and happy that's still in good working condition. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it that way for years and years to come.

Think About It for a Minute; You'll Get It.

2011-11-09T08:55:00.003-06:00

You've probably already seen this on Facebook, but it's too good not to pass on. (Hat tip: Jacob T. Levy.)

Friday Morning Videos: "Turning Japanese"

2011-11-04T07:00:00.006-05:00

On the basis of the past couple of weeks, I appear to have fallen into a bit of one-hit-wonderism. So how about I keep that up, hmm?

(Also, for old SCTV fans, there's this.)

Finding the 1%

2011-11-02T08:48:00.002-05:00

If you, like me, are sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street, but you don't live near Wall Street or Zuccotti Park, where do you go to be most likely to find those who enjoy membership in the top 1% of America's wealth gap? Thanks to this map from the Brookings Institution, now you know.

Looks like Dallas and Houston are in the race, so clearly oil and real estate banking money still matter. Los Angeles is there, of course; Hollywood and mainstream media money are anything but down for the count. And obviously you've got Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC in play as well. But in the end, it's pretty clear that OWS has rightly targeted where most of the truly wealthy reside: the financial capital of the world, where the hedge funds and credit card companies and investment speculators play: the greater New York City area, including Long Island, Fairfield County, CT, and most of New Jersey.

So there you go. I like and support the local Occupy Wichita movement here in my corner of the heartland, but it's undeniable where the real action is, and rightly ought to be. In the meantime, maybe I'll head down to Dallas over the holiday break--at least the protesters probably won't be dealing with much (if any) snow there.

Getting Our Jack On

2011-10-29T16:32:00.007-05:00

As is probably obvious to anyone who has spent any time following this blog at all, the Foxes take our holiday traditions seriously. There are things that we have to do together (or at least as together as we can manage), and there are ways we need to get it done (though the sequence can vary a little form year to year), or else the whole routine just won't be as meaningful as it might. Halloween included! Sometimes it doesn't work out, of course--but this year, I have to say I'm pretty proud at how our Jack-o'-lantern carving orgy turned out this year.

You can't do it too long before Halloween, because prolonged exposure to the elements will give you collapsing and, often, stinky pumpkins. (I've sometimes wondered about carving some other kind of gourd, to see if they have better holding power through unexpectedly hot days and/or freezing and/or rainy nights, but I've gotten around to trying.) But of course, waiting until the day of their display really defeats the purpose; you won't get any enjoyment out of them then. So we always find an evening three or four days before the holiday, and we all dig in. (This evening we were joined by a friend of Alison's, who joyfully joined it.)

I doubt we're particularly unique in this family carving night, but I do think we have one twist that is a little peculiar: we always have It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown playing while we do so. I'm not sure how it started; I suppose I or someday else decreed, years ago, that we had to watch that show (it's my favorite of all the Peanuts specials) every Halloween, and so doing it on carving night made the most sense. I can recall that in distant times, long ago, we would actually haul the television set and the dvd player into the kitchen, or else move our carving to a table in whatever room our one tv sits in. So chalk one victory up for technology, I guess.

Anyway, they turned out great--mine in particular, he says rather smugly. (Though one of our tiny carving knives broke while we were working on it; we'll have to replace it with a new one once all the Halloween stuff goes on discount sale in three days.) Fun times at the Foxes, for one and all.

Friday Morning Videos: "Life in a Northern Town"

2011-10-28T07:00:00.006-05:00

Scotland, northern England--it's all good. With Halloween around the corner, and fall having finally begun around here--it was actually a little chilly a couple of mornings ago!--well, after our exhaustingly hot summer, a little cool weather melancholy fits my mood quite well.

And just because it's awesome, version two:

I actually can't remember which of these two versions I remember seeing first when I was 16. And I had no idea who Dream Academy was singing about; I wouldn't learn about Nick Drake until another decade or two had gone by. Sad, but true. The things you miss out on...

Has it Been Ten Years Already?!

2011-10-27T17:26:00.003-05:00

Nearly ten years exactly since I got together with all my brothers at a movie theater in Sandy, Utah, and took in the first of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films. My first thought after the movie was done: damn, I really need to get a dvd player.

Well, I got the dvd player, and I've watched all three films, over and over again. All the family has. And are we waiting for The Hobbit? Yes, indeed we are. But this is a nice little blast from the past. Thanks, Empire Magazine! Getting the gang back together indeed.

Finally Weighing in on the Jeffress-Romney Thing...

2011-10-25T06:37:00.002-05:00

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

(I've no deep interest in the whole current morass of Republican party politics and anti-Mormonism, partly because I've gone through the whole thing before, and partly because many others have weighed in with thoughts much better than my own. Still, last Friday I sent this editorial off to my local newspaper, responding to a piece by Robert "Mormonism is a cult" Jeffress which had appeared that morning, and today they actually ran it, though I had to cut down my essay to under 600 words, which was simply criminal. Anyway, here's the original, longer version of the piece. Read and enjoy.)

The Washington Post opinion piece by Robert Jeffress in Friday’s Wichita Eagle (“A candidate’s faith should matter to voters”) got me thinking. Jeffress was defending the political legitimacy of some negative comments he’d made recently about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, in which he labeled Mormonism a “cult” and suggested that mainstream Christians are to be preferred by voters over supposed cult members. Those sorts of comments--and the debates over their proper place in electoral politics--aren’t at all new; I heard them all throughout 2007 and 2008, when Romney ran for president the first time. And there is, I agree, some legitimacy to them. But since I share Romney’s religion, and since Romney appears likely at this point to win the Republican presidential nomination, and since that means my many non-Mormon Republican friends and neighbors here in Wichita are probably going to be faced with the prospect of voting for a Mormon for president in a year’s time, I figured it might be worth responding to him just a bit.

Jeffress’s essay implies--among other things--that in making those negative comments he was enacting an important democratic principle: namely, that citizens are free to take whatever issue they wish, including concerns about a candidate’s religious faith, to be relevant as they decide who to vote for. I agree that is an important point--but draping himself in that principle shouldn't protect his comments from criticism, in particular because he is misleadingly making himself out to some kind of constitutional martyr while doing so.

To be sure, there are many people who are confused or ignorant about what the Constitution says and does not say about religion. (The simple answer is: it says almost nothing.) This ignorance and confusion occasionally leads to nervousness when people like Jeffress, or anyone else for that matter, starts suggesting connections between a candidate’s faith and their vote-worthiness. And admittedly, sometimes this confusion or ignorance is strategically cultivated; after all, if you work for or are committed to a candidate, like Romney, who belongs to a small and somewhat unpopular religious faith, you might want people to be nervous about and thus hopefully to turn against critics like Jeffress.

And there are also, of course, many committed liberals or principled secularists who do honestly and completely reject the idea that a candidate’s religious faith ought to be discussed as part of the debate over whether or not they deserve a voter’s support. (I've tangled with one of them, my friend Damon Linker, several times before.) But for the majority of my fellow Mormons--who tend to be, in America at least, generally rather conservative, values-centric voters, people who are mostly at peace with making judgments about a candidate’s moral character part of their decision-making process--the complaint with Jeffress is not the fact that he is saying what he is saying, but rather that what he says about Mormonism is misleading, and thus benefits from the aforementioned constitutional confusion.

When Jeffress talks about Christian and non-Christian candidates in the public arena, pitching his message to fellow Republican primary voters, he is relying upon some well-established, broadly agreed upon, rhetorical concepts. Scholars have usually described these rhetorical concepts under the label “civil religion.” America’s civil religion--the religious aspect of our political culture--has been grounded in a familiarity with the Bible, an acceptance of fundamental Judeo-Christian ethical principles, and an association (whether devout or merely distant) with the Christian worldwiew and its general moral aspirations. This is the civil religion of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, of the line “In God We Trust” on our currency, of the sort of “ceremonial deism” which continues to be fought over in our federal courts as American society becomes ever more diverse. Like it or oppose it, this is what presidents are doing when they conclude their speeches with “God bless the United States of America.”

Jeffress has absolutely no basis (really, none at all) to affirm that there is anything un-Christian, in this civil sense, about Romney’s Mormonism. Now an argument could be made that Mormonism presents a certain kind of challenge to our civil religion, and some scholars have in fact advanced that argument, but doing so requires one to dig deep into matters of political theology and the nature of our liberal democracy. But in any case, that is plainly not what Jeffress is doing. Instead, he is making a broad civil claim, but one grounded solely upon pretty narrow issues of sectarian Christian theology: Mormons are a non-Christian cult because of their distinct understanding of the Trinity, because of their particular religious ordinances and practices, because of their notions of the Judgment and the afterlife, etc. There are, no doubt, some tiny number of Republican voters who are likely to think it important that their elected representatives have an orthodox, mainstream Christian notion of God, or else their prayers will not be answered. Now if Jeffress wanted to influence those voters, he could make use of that kind of theological language. However, he surely also knows that the number of such voters is utterly marginal: on the contrary, the values which the huge majority of Republican voters are likely to care about are those basic Christian principles--the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the sovereignty of God--identical with America’s civil religion. And so he must speak a civil language, calling Mormonism "non-Christian" in the broadest possible terms. It is perfectly legitimate for him to do so. But it is also, in the context in which he speaks, wildly misleading.

Can someone legitimately speak out against a candidate for sectarian theological reasons? Or course they can. Citizens may legitimately be motivated by all sorts of reasons. But just because an act of reasoning is acceptable doesn't mean it is responsible or wise (or likely to gain much popular support). In 2008 there were apparently a small number of people--not many, but a few--who voted against Barack Obama because they didn't want an African-American as president. That is, to put it plainly, allowed. Yet of course, voting against a candidate for reasons of race has been broadly accepted as stupid and wicked. Now voting against a candidate because of sectarian theological disagreements may be a bit more complicated an idea than that of opposing them due to their race, if only because religion is still somewhat relevant to our culture and government in a way which race (thankfully!) increasingly isn't. But still, the general point holds. Several generations ago, Catholic beliefs were considered outside of America’s civil religion; as a result “papists” were marginalized in American political life. In time, this came to be recognized as what everyone--especially most values-motivated conservative Republicans!--now knows it to have been: a theological disagreement between Christians which pushed a misleading, stupid, even wicked judgment upon voters. Whether in this election or in the next, the same thing, I think, will ultimately be recognized about Mormonism.

Jeffress has every right to press his theological case, but when he dresses himself up as one doing his civil duty, he ought to be called on it. When he says a candidate’s faith should matter to voters, he’s right, but when he claims (without ever explaining how) that Mormonism's particular Christian theology has all sorts of civil implications, he’s simply wrong (or at the very least, really stretching things). Maybe Jeffress would like American elections to be more openly sectarian, with Catholic and Mormon and Protestant and Jewish political parties competing with one another? He wouldn't be out of bounds saying so; he could easily advance the argument that only an orthodox, mainstream Christian candidate, with theologically correct ideas about God, can effectively create an alternative to the "moralistic therapeutic deism" which some see as sapping the strength of our culture. Of course, he obviously realizes that he'd be speaking to nearly empty halls if he did that, and so he doesn't say so; he doesn't present his sectarianism honestly, but cloaks his words in the Christian rhetoric of America's civil religion. He ought to be called out for doing so, for implying something otherwise than what he says, and relying upon our religiously open-ended constitution to do his work for him.

Friday Morning Videos: "Big Country"

2011-10-21T07:00:00.003-05:00

There are some faculty members planning a trip to Scotland. Who wouldn't want to go with them? I sure would.

Friday Morning Videos: "Red Red Wine"

2011-10-14T07:00:00.002-05:00

Before you say anything, yes, you're correct: I can't relate to this song at all. Can't relate to most ska or reggae or punk songs, for that matter. Still like them though.

George F. Will and the Decline of the Tory

2011-10-12T13:38:00.002-05:00

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

I don't know how many people in the conservative public sphere read George F. Will closely any longer--maybe lots of them do, but as I don't particularly identify myself with that sphere, I wouldn't know. Perhaps he's long since been filed away as predictable, establishment, whatever. But I'm pretty certain there was a time when the pronouncements of Will in his weekly columns carried a good deal of weight. They certainly did with me. Back in the 1980s, as a smart little Republican, I devoured the man's writings. I had collections of all his old columns, never missed his bimonthly missive on the back page of Newsweek, and imitated his style whenever I could. I watched "This Week with David Brinkley" whenever I could, because Will was on there; when he showed up on "Donahue" or "Late Nate with David Letterman" (yes, he actually appeared on that show), I caught that too. Here's how much of Republican intellectual dork I was back then: in my senior picture in our high school yearbook, I'm visibly clutching a copy of Will's Statecraft as Soucraft: What Government Does, which remains his best book.

Unfortunately, also his only good book, and one that I doubt he could write today even if he wanted to, which clearly he doesn't. (I say unfortunately because it's a great book; I use it regularly in classes of mine today.) I don't know when Will's weekly pontifications lost their appeal to me; perhaps during the first Bush administration, when his irrational dislike for George Herbert Walker Bush came through in his arguments almost palpably. In any case, by the 1990s my evolution towards the left end of the political spectrum was well underway, and there came a time when running across a Will column would remind me that I hadn't checked out his writings for years. I wonder how much that remains the case for conservative activists today. Certainly, from what I can tell, most of those on the left don't even bother attacking his by-now exceedingly predictable, however erudite and intellectually sophisticated arguments any more; by the Clinton years Will was, with all his eloquence, still just another pretty reliable straight-laced Republican voice, and despite occasionally expressing some dislike of different elements of this or that aspect of the second Bush administration's policies, for the past 15 years he's remained that way.

It's been interesting, then, to see Will's recent attack on Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor who helped design the Obama administration's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and has just announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, receive such a thorough trashing in different parts of the mainstream media. Response from E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, or Bill Galston in The New Republic perhaps aren't surprising, but for Rod Dreher to spend not one but two of his posts on the American Conservative website addressing the weakness of Will's argument against Warren has to raise at least a couple of eyebrows. I don't see a need to rehash all of this; suffice to say that Will's attacks on Warren as a closeted collectivist, seeking to promote a government which will "socialize--i.e., conscript--whatever portion [of people's wealth] it considers its share," thereby "intimat[ing] the impossibility" of an individual being able "to govern oneself," are frankly stupid. If Warren genuinely was an advocate of some kind of democratic state socialization, with an agenda to subject financial institutions like banks to nationalization, and to raise redistributive tax rates to those which exist in Sweden, that would be genuinely interesting. But of course, that's not the case. Instead, what we have is an apparently quite smart but nonetheless standard technocratic liberal making exactly the sort of populist noises that us on the left have been wondering why Obama hasn't been making for years. For Will to claim that Warren is part of a continuing movement to undermine the traditional liberal basics of the social contract, he has his work cut out for him.

So what's most interesting here isn't Warren, but Will. Because the man who wrote Statecraft as Soulcraft made it very clear that he wasn't particularly enamored with the "traditional liberal basics" of the social contract either; on the contrary, he consistently pursued, in that book and through his columns and other writings, a much more classically republican or Tory position. Galston touches on this, reminding Will of his often-quoted Burkean argument that the social contract is much more than just protecting whatever wealth an individual has been able to accumulate (there are, for example, generations past and generations yet to come to consider...); and Dionne brings up the book itself, quoting Will on the fact that a reflexive anti-government attitude leaves us with a sense of community that is pretty thin. But the real decline of Will from a fairly unique (at least amongst the mainstream media) exponent of an "Oxford Movement"-style conservatism (the label which Will said in that book best describes his own views) to a position today which is perhaps only a step or two above the socialist-mongering common amongst the contemporary Republican party...well, it's a little tragic to behold.

In Statecraft as Soulcraft, he thoughtfully argued:

Common sense, reason and history all teach that "strong government conservatism" is not a contradiction in terms....I will do many things for my country, but I will not pretend that the careers of, say, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involve serious philosophical differences. Reagan's fierce and ideological liberalism of the Manchester school and F.D.R.'s mild and improvised social-democratic program are both honorable persuasions....They are versions of the basic program of the liberal-democratic impulse that was born with Machiavelli and Hobbes. Near the core of the philosophy of modern liberalism, as it descends from those two men, is an inadequacy that is becoming glaring. [Anti-government] conservatism is an impotent critic of liberalism because it too is a participant in the modern [liberal] political enterprise (p. 23).

In other words, as many writers at Front Porch Republic have noted, American conservatism is simply a variation upon a particular, rather individualistic take, on the idea of the social contract which is common to the United States, both left and right. Will, at one time, could have made a criticism of Warren, and President Obama as well, from that basis--but perhaps too many years on the inside of the Republican party has shifted him towards a default libertarianism, in which the individual's prerogatives, at least insofar as the entirety of their property is concerned, are to be privileged at the outset, a shift which allows him to characterize any discussion about taxation and regulation as "collectivism." He used to know better than that.

[I]t is a non sequitur to say that because the state has a monopoly on legitimate coercion, its essence is [therefore] coercion....Proper conservatives proclaim, as Burke did, the gentling function of government. Proper conservatism teaches that...government exists to frame arrangements in order that they may, over time, become matters of trust. The enlargement of the realm of social trust does not presage the withering away of the state. But it does conduce to an increasingly comfortable fit between [government] institutions and the public, which, like a flowing river, is both a shaper of and shaped by the institutional "banks" between which it flows....[A] river without banks is incomprehensible; it is a contradiction in terms (pp. 95-96).

What about the argument that those banks have grown too large and are crowding us, that the political agenda of people like Warren and Obama are preventing individuals from building up those intermediate and democratic institutions which are the sort of banks real conservatives ought to praise? Today, it seems likely that Will might say exactly that; 30 years ago, he was willing to say something a little different:

[I]nstitutions that once were most directly responsible for tempering individuals--family, church, voluntary associations, town governments--with collective concerns [imagine: "collectivism"!] have come to seem more peripheral. Using [the central] government discriminatingly but energetically to strengthen these institutions is part of the natural program of conservatives. Far from being a rationale for statism, the political orientation I praise envisions prophylactic doses of government. It involves the use of government to prevent statism by enhancing the social competence of citizens....One way the government strengthens such institutions is by not usurping their functions. But that is not the only way. Government can plan positive inducements to vigor (pp. 151-152).

Now what we see here is the outlines of genuinely interesting argument, an argument between an American-style Tory and a progressive American liberal: is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--or, for that matter, President Obama's Affordable Care Act, or any kind of social insurance or income redistribution program, whether Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or the Veteran's Administration or just about anything else--a government program capable of "strengthening" citizens in their ability to contribute positively, through various local institutions, to the development of their communities (including the American community), or is it an instance of individual responsibility or local organizations being "usurped," thus contributing to the degradation of the citizenry? Presumably, the answer would differ in each case, because in each case we would be looking at a distinct government program with a distinct agenda serving a distinct population and funded through a distinct system of taxation. The Tory conservatism which Will used to endorse (and--who knows?--perhaps still does, behind the closed doors of his columns' words) would have quickly acknowledged this kind of prudential judgment. But today, to admit, much less to intelligently engage, in that kind of argument requires one to acknowledge that there is more going on in contemporary politics than those who want to defend the One and Only True individualistic take on the social contract, and those who hate individual freedom and thus want to change the contract. Politics isn't that tidy, and we shouldn't pretend it can be.

Will ended Statecraft as Soulcraft with warning: that if conservatives were going to be able to add anything to this kind of argument over the balancing of various prudential demands and needs, they needed to face up to the fact "that government, although of human manufacture, is 'natural'...as natural to man as clothes and shelter because it serves needs that are natural to man" (p. 160). There is an argument going on this country, to be sure, and it is an important one--but those who take the Tory side are few and far between. That's a loss, and not just for a columnist who used to regularly have interesting ideas to go along with his very pretty words.

[Note: I just noticed that Scott Galupo made this same argument, months ago--though as a self-identified conservative, he may be able to make it much better than I. Check his take on Will's decline out here.]

Help Me Like the Man who Will Probably be Our Next President, Everybody

2011-10-12T10:28:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning, thinking about last night's Republican primary debate, and had a premonition: there's a very good chance Mitt Romney will be inaugurated on January 20, 2013 as the 45th president of the United States of America. So maybe I should just start getting ready for that probable result right now.

The election is, of course, more than a year away. The nominating conventions themselves are still 10 months away. Millions of things could happen between now and then. Candidates could die from heart attacks. Game-changing issues could rise to the forefront of public debate and throw dominant campaign strategies into an uproar. Last-minute candidate secrets could provide all sorts of scandalous fodder for attack ads. Greece could invade Florida. Jesus could return to earth. Etc., etc., etc. But of course, as anyone with the ability to do more than just scan a couple of headlines knows, there are political structures in place in this country, both formal and informal, both implicit and explicit, which put fairly severe restrictions upon unexpected, unanticipated events having the sort of radical, surprising effects which we all occasionally fantasize about. The simple truth is that it is extremely, even ridiculously unlikely, even with the Republican party base more fired up with anti-government conservative ideology than they have been since 1980, or perhaps even since 1964, that anything like an even tiny majority of Republican primary voters will fall behind a candidate making truly unconventional economic and political promises. The majority of big money donors will not support any of them, and ditto for the life-long party operatives, the influential media figures, and the masses of committed-but-not-ideologically-locked-in GOP voters. Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, even the (to the Republican establishment) potentially threatening Ron Paul, all of them: the media-acknowledged and party-anointed front runners, the Rick Perrys and Mitt Romneys, would have to make serious mistakes, and national and world events would have to develop in truly unlikely ways, for any of those non-establishment figures to get the nomination. In short, it's probably just not going to happen. (In retrospect, it's rather astonishing that the establishment-challenging Mike Huckabee got as far as he did in the Republican primary contests of 2007 and 2008.) This is a Perry vs. Romney slugfest, and Romney is almost certainly going to win it.

And what does that mean? That means a good-looking, moderate (even, arguably, somewhat liberal!) technocratic Republican, one with excellently spinnable private and public executive experience to draw upon, is going to be able to run against a moderate, technocratic Democrat, who has been unfairly--and more importantly, inaccurately--tarred since the beginning of his administration as a socialist revolutionary (if only!). And all this during a time of significant economic pain that, by all accounts, has almost no chance of going away anytime soon. To be sure, the resources--again, both formal and informal, both implicit and explicit--which benefit sitting incumbents in our system, perhaps especially an incumbent president, are significant. But they are, as things stand now, quite unlikely to be enough to overcome the depressive effects that declining incomes, disappearing pension funds, and high levels of unemployment have on both voter turnout and incumbent support--and all that doesn't even take into consideration the often frustrating, and sometimes downright poisonous, atmosphere which has dogged the Obama administration through the health care debate, the stand-off over the debt ceiling, and so much more.

Very simply, things don't look good for the man I voted for--and if he runs against Romney, as he probably will, then things look even worse, because many of his most-plausibly-vote-winning lines (the GOP will steal your Social Security, the GOP will dismantle your schools, etc.) will be difficult to connect to him once he escapes--as he probably longs to--the ferociously overheated Republican primaries and starts his national campaign. So yep, maybe I ought to start making my peace with the likely front page news 15 months from now as soon as possible.

For example, I could take some joy from the fact that Mitt Romney, despite having stated repeatedly that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, probably doesn't really believe that would be a good idea, especially given the fact that some of Romney's top people worked closely with the Obama administration in crafting the ACA. He would probably wants to see elements of the program tweaked and restructured, and he probably wouldn't mind if the Supreme Court found the health insurance mandate unconstitutional and thus removed the whole issue from his plate, but by and large I can't see him as a deep enemy of the whole idea. Except that there's a pretty decent chance the Republicans will have control of the Senate in 2012, and the odds of the Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives are very long. Which means we'll have a moderate (liberal?) technocratic Republican who has made a career of, shall we say, adapting his views to fit the needs of his audience...and his relevant audience will mostly be a bunch of health-care-reform-hating conservative Congressional Republicans, so who knows where he'll come down?

Reid and the Democratic minority will still be able to cause a lot of obstructive trouble through the ridiculous rules of the Senate, of course, and I suppose there may be the possibility that some sort of Deep Inner Mitt will come through, as he sits down, Mormon to Mormon, with the likely Senate Minority Leader. And there is that--maybe I should just be happy one of my co-religionists is probably going to be elected president? Not that I think that will help the country much, though. Give me some help people; I'm coming up mostly dry here.

Cat-Haters, All your Prejudices Have Been Confirmed

2011-10-07T09:14:00.001-05:00

While biking into work today, I passed a dog (looked like a German Shepherd mutt) happily leaping about, while tearing up an old plastic kids' swimming pool. It put me in mind of this secret document, which I recently discovered.

The Dog's Diary

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Dinner! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

The Cat's Diary

Day 983 of My Captivity

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a "good little hunter" I am. Bastards!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of "allergies." I must learn what this means, and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try this again tomorrow, but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released, and seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded. The bird must be an informant. I observe him communicate with the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he is safe. For now ...

Friday Morning Videos: "Mirror in the Bathroom"

2011-10-07T07:00:00.002-05:00

Okay, if I'm talking ska, I can't ignore this one.

Global Warming, Local Farming, and Naomi Klein: A Trip to the Land Institute

2011-10-06T12:57:00.017-05:00

[Cross-Posted to Front Porch Republic]

A couple of weeks ago some fine intellectuals, political figures, journalists, and activists associated with Front Porch Republic gathered together to talk about localism, and specifically how one might discover in our local communities resources for pursuing the common good in an age of globalization. I wish I could have been there. But at the same time they were meeting in Emmitsburg, MD, I was spending time with some students in Salina, KS, listening to Naomi Klein and a couple of earnest agronomists and botanists, and in a sense they were all talking about the exact same thing as was being discussed at the Front Porch Republic conference: how a particular sort of local work and community investment is inseparable from any serious pursuit of that which is the common good of us all. So perhaps, ultimately, I didn't miss anything at all. In any case, it was a delightful day.

This is the second year that I've made it out to the Land Institute's annual Prairie Festival, and like last year, which featured a presentation by Wendell Berry, I came away last Saturday with a dozen different ideas about how I could push my students to think a little more critically about how the food they eat, the cars they drive, and the lives they live all impact the natural environment upon which we depend, and either add to its potential sustainability or contribute to its destruction. That may seem like a somewhat stark distinction, but it was central to Klein's presentation, and my students in "Simplicity and Sustainability"--a course I've invented and am teaching for the first time--needed to hear that starkness, so as to perhaps shake them out of their complacency, and maybe even help them recognize that the simplicity I've been trying to point them towards is being undermined by the ever more abstract and complex (and self-justifying) systems we allow to be constructed around us, or help to build ourselves.

Klein's presentation was, in many ways, a tribute to starkness of vision: particularly that vision which characterizes global warming deniers of all varieties, whether they be the corporate powers that be or conservative foot-soldiers in the Tea Party. Klein praising the Tea Party? Yes, that's what she did, repeatedly, in her hour-long presentation. Because, as she insisted again and again, "they get it." They get that the stakes in this battle--a battle between, to speak broadly, essentially unrestrained technological growth on the one hand, and a fear for the trampling of essential limits, disciplines, and attachments which a fundamentally self-interested gospel of expansion teaches us to ignore on the other--are nothing less then our basic economic system itself. In their paranoid accusations against President Obama--that he is not "really" an America, or that he is some sort of radical post-colonial socialist at heart--reveal their confused but fundamentally sound grasp of the central matter: if the arguments which make the case for global warming are accepted, then our whole way of life--primarily, its reliance upon non-renewable energy sources like oil for easy mobility, cheap goods, anxious consumption, irresponsible levels of waste, and a casual and inattentive relationship with the planet we live upon and the food from it which we eat--must change. Capitalism must change. And that, Klein argued, I think rightly, is a stark challenge that most self-identified liberals (though maybe "neoliberals" would be a better description) and environmentalists just don't appreciate.

Klein discussed the months she has spent researching her current project, a project that took shape most particularly through the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where she said that, in looking at videos of that "hemorrhaging wound" in the ocean floor, she was struck more viscerally than she'd ever been before by how much collateral damage our highly technical, highly complex, global capitalist system is willing to allow to be built into into one or another corporation's profit/loss statements. She said that she felt that the overwhelming message of that disaster is how pointless, and counter-productive, the technical efforts of many who simply want to modify our current extractive practices really are. Well-intentioned liberals and scientific experts, studying just how much of a temperature increase existing staple food crops can handle, geo-engineers thinking about ways to seed the atmosphere with certain compounds that could more effective absorb existing thermal outputs, talk about "solar radiation management": it's insane, Klein felt (and the crowd--a bunch of people who all believe in exploring what can be done with the planet, not to it--loudly agreed). Such a mentality--the mentality of "green technologies," and the promise of a transformation of our current consumptive patterns into ways of building and spending which can absorb all the changes we have unintentionally introduced to the planet around us--may have honorable intentions, but in the end it just leaves us all no different from those who drill the dirty deep-sea oil wells: it leaves us as mere consumers, finding entertainment and validation in our supposed individual ability to "slap mother nature in the face."

And so, Klein called for starkness--for recognizing that global warming is not something that can be fixed or moderated or addressed by us; it is, rather, something that, if we want to survive as a civilization and a species, demands something of us. She said her tentative title for her next book is "What Climate Change is Telling Us About How We Must Evolve"....and she credits the global warming deniers for at least recognizing that demand for what it implies. In the same way powerful corporate interests attack unions, push for deregulation, insist on the legitimacy of their habits of consumption, praise globalization, denounce all forms of protectionism, and defend their wealth from the demands of the commons, they also fight the science of global warming tooth and nail--because to give it credence would be to invite a fundamental economic transformation, one that would undercut their position of privilege entirely.

What would that transformation entail? Not, Klein believes (and again, I tend to agree with her) a "green Keynesianism"--that kind of state-heavy redistribution, or even industry nationalization, may have its place in some areas of our social lives--and may even be have to be relied upon as the only tool powerful enough to turn the profits of the world's largest energy corporations towards paying for the transition to come--but by and large that vision of the world would depend (as E.F. Schumacher presciently noted long ago) on the same sort of acquisitive, growth-centric capitalist mentality which created the conditions of the problem in the first place. And the needed transformation must certainly not, Klein insisted multiple times, take us in the direction of state socialism, which is the only economic system worse for the planet than a corporate-friendly free market (she noted with some humor that, looking at long-term environmental trends, the single best news which the planet's supplies of breathable oxygen and drinkable water had received in the past thirty years was the collapse of the Soviet Union). No, what we need out of the necessary economic transformation which faces us is a recovery of the lost art of "decentralized planning": of turning our knowledge of the planet towards diverse ways of tending to it, locally and sustainably. (If you think that sounds like a kind of anarchism or mutualism, you're probably not wrong; Klein is enough of a radical democrat to be hanging out in New York City with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, arguing that there is something to be said for putting yourself bodily into a struggle, given that voting doesn't always seem to be enough to make changes these days.) Which is what bring us around to the vital--and very practical, hands-on, and bodily--work being done at the Land Institute itself.

After listening to Klein, and speaking with some "sustainable community" organizers and urban farmers visiting from St. Louis, we took a tour with a couple of enthusiastic graduate students, who showed off to us all, and talked about the prospects for further developing, their experiments with sustainable agriculture. Their goal is to use such native perennials--often more commonly known as "weeds"--as Illinois bundleflower, switchgrass, Kansas sunflowers and others, as resource for creating hybrid food crops (grains and legumes, mostly, with particular attention paid to wheat and sorghum) that will require minimal irrigation, need few or no pesticides or herbicides, have deep root systems (thus cutting down on the soil erosion experienced during every harvesting season), and--most importantly--produce sufficiently high yields to be able to feed local populations without a heavy reliance upon the networks of contemporary agribusinesses. This is not, to be plain, easy or easily rewarded work. In attempting to work with only those resources that the Plains states provide (most of the work of the Land Institute is, of course, done in Kansas, but they have research programs working at locations in Minnesota and elsewhere as well), they are looking to turn agriculture away from the oil-based industrial basis that has been assumed as the only route to making it sufficient for current population levels and ranges for more than sixty years, if not longer. This doesn't just mean developing more perennial options; it also means changing our expectations for food productivity and food consumption itself. (For example, one of the problems with Illinois bundleflower is that, though potentially a wonderful food staple, with a high nutritional content, a minimal environmental footprint, and excellent climate resistance, it tastes so terrible that most birds won't even eat it.)

There have been successes, like the development of an edible perennial hybrid wheatgrass called Kernza. But those successes don't come quickly or easily, and no one should expect them to: Wes Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute, has called the quest for sustainable agriculture a "10,000 year problem". There is a reason why human communities the world over have, for centuries, been drawn to the appeal of cheap energy and rapid growth, even if such does involve them in increasing complex and corrupt economic and political systems which distance them from any real stewardship over the very goods and goals they were trying to achieve and produce in the first place. But in this little corner of north-central Kansas, there are people both talking the talk and walking the walk that a revival of sustainable, local, environmentally wise and democratically achievable stewardship. I wish I could have seen all there was going on at the Land Institute that weekend (see here for an additional write-up); I wish I could take my students up there every other week. I do think a liberal arts education in the principles and practices of politics, philosophy, religion, science, history, economics, and more is a good thing...but then again, this is Kansas, and learning a little bit more about how, seed by seed or provocation by provocation, we can wean ourselves away, or teach others how to get away, from a capitalism which is imperiling the globe and exchange it for the humbler work getting most of what human beings need from the resources they have on hand...well, that may be a better and more appropriate thing altogether.

I've Never Wished to Have HBO More than I Wish We'd Have it Next Week

2011-09-30T12:05:00.002-05:00

The story of the greatest Beatle, told my America's greatest living director. About time, I say.

Friday Morning Videos: "Someday I Suppose"

2011-09-30T07:00:00.004-05:00

Now this early-90s bit of ska-punk really takes me back. Utah Valley, the home of Provo and BYU, was bizarrely also the location of a pretty serious ska scene back during my undergraduate years, with fine local bands (Swim Herschel Swim, Stretch Armstrong, tour appearances by some great contemporary acts (the Crazy 8s, in particular), and even major reunion tours (The Skatalites, Special Beat) stopping by. It was pretty intense, if you got into that stuff...and Melissa and I certainly did.

Getting Everything Wrong (Even What He Gets Right)

2011-09-27T14:03:00.003-05:00

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

The October 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine features as its cover article a lengthy, provocative, at times insightful, but mostly wholly tendentious anti-Mormon screed by Chris Lehmann, entitled "Pennies from Heaven." Lehmann's thesis basically boils down to 1) Mormon doctrine conveys a particularly pure version of the "prosperity gospel," in which the tightly organized collective acquisition of non-speculative wealth (mostly gold or land) is held up as the ideal characteristic of God's chosen people, and 2) this ideological mix of piety and material plenty has spread through the Tea Party movement and into the mainstream of the Republican party, with Mormon presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman being exemplary contributors to this continuing economic conversion. This thesis--both parts of it--is, to put it plainly, complete balderdash. At one point Lehmann, in criticizing the Tea Party, speaks of their "tortured and largely confabulated vision of the Founding Fathers" (p. 36); the exact same sentence could be used to describe how he treats what he calls "Mormon economics," or indeed how he treats Mormonism itself. Even when he touches on an important point or two that could contribute to a thoughtful story about the unfortunate alliance between much of contemporary American Mormonism and the G.O.P.'s free-market fetishization, he still manages to get the actual argument wrong.

In short, Lehmann's piece is the very model of the modern, high-brow anti-Mormon essay: one which purports to wrestle with a heavy and challenging thesis, of the sort which the much-discussed "Mormon moment" makes relevant to public discourse, and while so doing does manage to generate a fair amount of insight...but then shines that illumination in overwhelmingly false directions, ones that the author apparently has neither sufficient awareness nor ability to be able to double-check. Alan Wolfe's "White Magic in America", a fascinatingly wrong-headed excursion through Mormon history from more than a decade ago, in which Stephen R. Covey's organizational mantras presented the theological key to understanding the faith, is another example of such intellectual confusion; Lehmann unintentionally aspires to that level of baseless, high-powered thesis-mongering, and he very nearly reaches it. Rebutting Lehmann, therefore, requires more than just pointing out all the ways which many of his claims are wrong; you have to talk about how he misunderstands, or just plain misses out on, all the claims that he actually gets right.

Not to say that you can't write a long piece focusing just on what he gets wrong; Hal Boyd did just that for the Deseret News, and he did a thorough job of it too. Very simply, Lehmann's reading (assuming he actually did read it, which is doubtful) of the "prosperity cycle" in the Book of Mormon is patently ridiculous. Even if some libertarian economics professor with good Mormon connections says that the dramatic tale of the Nephite people developing themselves economically, and then suffering tragic reversals as they grow in pride and selfishness, and then ultimately ending their existence as a people in, as Boyd puts it, "utter destruction," is really just an example of the "business cycle" in operation (p. 34)...well, that doesn't make it true. It's just not true, on any reading of church history, that Joseph Smith's purported "awe of gold" (forgive me for not taking seriously such thoroughly discredited works as those of Fawn Brodie and John L. Brooke here) became part of "a theology of New World abundance" (p. 35). The Book of Mormon can, of course, be read in all sorts of diverse ways, as any scripture might be. But Lehmann is simply making stuff up when he draws connections from the Book of Mormon--building upon such misreadings as the notion that Jacob 2:17's reference to "your brethren...[becoming] rich like unto you" is comparable to some Kiwanis Club notion of corporate do-gooding, whereas it is actually a condemnation of wealthy Nephites who dressing in fine clothes, putting on airs, and failing " to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted" (Jacob 2:19)--to the idea of a whole religion that draws its adherents together through a promise of God's approval of material wealth. The fact that the American Mormon economic thinkers he cites "don't really experience any such tensions" over the idea of wealth accumulation (p. 37) is an indictment of those Mormon thinkers themselves and the American Mormon political culture in which they are doing their thinking (and not even an accurate one, at that; Lehmann makes no mention of influential Mormons like the liberal Democrat Harry Reid or the quasi-socialist Hugh Nibley), not an indictment of the religious texts at the heart of the faith. Lehmann's statement that "one scours the endless, incantatory pages of Joseph Smith's revelation in vain for any suggestion that wealth complicates the lives of believers" (p. 34) only demonstrates, as Boyd shows at length, not only Lehmann's utterly flawed grasp of what "Joseph Smith's revelation" includes, but also that the man probably never so much as cracked open one page of the Doctrine and Covenants (which is, you know, only part of the standard works for the church).

Well, I could go on, but the point is made: there is no solid foundation to Lehmann's allegations about "Mormon economics." What is more disappointing, though, and what makes a particularly frustrating example of high-brow anti-Mormon writing, is that he's not just making things up--there is something real to what he's observing. American Mormons do tend, by and large, to think about wealth in ways that are different from many other Christians, to say nothing of many other Americans. For reasons that have at least as much to do with our church culture's development through a history of political persecution and geographic isolation as with anything in our scripture, many American Mormons are infatuated with ideas of self-sufficiency, individual responsibility, and independence from government. Lehmann aligns this perspective with the prosperity gospel and the Tea Party (pp. 36, 41), and in making that alignment he's advancing an electorally plausible, if theologically flawed, argument. But it's the wrong argument to make. The right argument to ask--and which he would have asked, one suspects, if he hadn't been primarily interested in simply holding up Mormons as money-obsessed villains at a time of great economic distress and disagreement--is why that alignment has any plausibility at all, given the distinct groundings which separate Mormon economic thought and practice from most of modern-day capitalism. Asking that kind of question might have opened up important lines of inquiry about both Mormonism and capitalism itself--but of course, doing that wouldn't have given him much of a punch line.

What are the "distinct groundings" that I'm talking about? Lehmann asserts, repeatedly, that Mormons festishize tangile, material assets: Joseph Smith hunted for gold and set up a bank; Brigham Young set up vast business cooperatives; and Mormonism produced the flaky and bizarrely high-selling economics guru Howard Ruff, who has been urging people since the 1979 to fight socialism by investing in land and gold (pp. 35, 37, 39-40). There is something to that, of course: my father surely wasn't the only Mormon conservative who read Ruff and Cleon Skousen, picked up material from the John Birch Society (strongly promoted by former church president, Ezra Taft Benson), and as a result invested in a small canvas bag full of gold and silver bars which sat in our basement for who knows how many years. But he's missing the point, even when he all but states it clearly. The economic thinking which has emerged from the Mormon church in America has tended to be "deeply corporatist," full of joint-stock companies and cooperative welfare plans, and premised upon a kind of pioneer ethic: Lehmann quotes Kim Clark, former dean of the Harvard Business School, as saying that his whole outlook begins with being brought up in a home where the children were expected to "make our bed, do the dishes, do our chores, and go to Church" (p. 38). You do what you're supposed to do; you remain part of what you're supposed to remain a part of. What is all this? It is, in a word, non-speculative. It is a vision of an orderly and sustainable and faithful and economically sound life that doesn't admit much, if any, of the sort of risk, ambition, complex creativity, and appeals to profit upon which modern finance capitalism mostly operates.

Lehmann essentially passes over the Mormon church's entire history of cooperative economics and attempts at local consecration practices; he reduces it all to a couple of sentences about how one early Mormon leader, before his conversion, had been an evangelical socialist. That's a huge flaw, one of many such flaws, in his article. However, consider what he does identity from out of those decades of Mormon economic history: the fact the the Mormon church has a tradition of binding its people together, and together they build things. Real things. Irrigation canals, food banks, welfare farms--indeed, hundreds of communities all throughout the American West. Well, now if you want to believe there is such a things as "Mormon economics," and that those Mormon economics fits right in with the paranoid, anti-government, economic-independence mindset of the present-day Republican party...doesn't that present something a little strange? Why all this joining up, and building up, of fairly staid corporate forms? How does that fit into a modern capitalist state when most of the wealth being created in the country is being done under the terms of (and, for that matter, most of it exists in the hands of) institutions of speculation and investment and rapid growth and turn-over? Since the financial meltdown of 2008, if you've been willing to listen to some of the confused voices of the left, or listen even more carefully to some of the most marginalized voices on the right, you'll will have heard this exact point made again and again: the real problem isn't so much (or isn't just) capitalism, but an unregulated, over-sized and over-grapsing, too-big-to-fail, government-entwined capitalism. This would seem to suggest that the Mormon economic argument, if there really is one (and some of us would desperately like it if our fellow church members recognized or remembered that there is such an argument out there), ought to be one that uses its supposed "obsession" with material, practical, personal and possessable and shareable wealth to critique the world of Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs from the right (or even from the left, though that ship has, unfortunately, probably sailed). I mean, we are talking about a world where economics has become an abstract and elite game in which we all are, in essence, expected to embrace our dependency, and--whether we admit it to ourselves or not--pathetically beg for either big government to let loose with money to save the banks and hence our credit card interest rates (because I'm buying all my groceries on credit now anyway), or for big business to free itself from public obligations and redistributive taxation (because who needs libraries and school teachers and public parks anyway?) and start some of that wonderful "job creating," preferably right here where I live. No, neither of those attitudes seem particularly Mormon--at least, not the corporate, cooperative, tangible, practical, material, debt-avoiding, pioneer-oriented Mormonism that Lehmann unintentionally touches upon in his article. And that suggests an even greater paradox: the prime Mormon candidate for president, the focal point of so much of this attention, is Mitt Romney, who...made his millions in equity-fund management? Who pioneered a whole industry of leveraged buyouts, corporate take-overs, and economic restructuring? And who, of course, strongly supported the TARP bank relief bailouts in 2008? How odd. How...un-Mormon, perhaps?

Alan Wolfe did a slightly better job with a later, second high-brow essay on Mormonism, "Mormons and Money," which plowed somewhat similar ground to Lehmann's. But in that essay, Wolfe didn't dig into--and thus, like Lehmann, unintentionally (if wrongheadly) expose--any kind of purported Mormon economic ethic. He focused on the notion that Mormonism is a practical religion, a "this-worldly" religion, and hence that we tend to be organizational people, people who build, and thus like those who build well. Romney has certainly built well--and, if he becomes president, he'll no doubt be able to build even more grandly. Lehmann's clumsy attempt to show that the crackpot right-wing is, in some fashion, irreducibly Mormon, accomplishes really only one good thing: it presents the thought that maybe, just maybe, not all economic building fits into the corporate vision (a vision which, I would insist, even if Lehmann leaves it out, includes a healthy dose of equality and humility) of Mormonism. Which would imply, if you can believe it, that Romney's financial success, and his possible success in winning over Republican party primary voters, may be happening exactly to the degree he, and the people who are supporting, have forgotten an important lesson of this hypothetical "Mormon economics." Now that would have made a fascinating, provocative article. But Lehmann would have had to have actually done some reading first if he wanted to write that one.

"We Have Seen Strange Things To Day"

2011-09-25T14:07:00.005-05:00

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I recently finished reading through the four canonical gospels (the KJV versions). I didn't embark on this scripture study project because we Mormons are studying the New Testament as part of our gospel doctrine curriculum class this year, but because, after having completed both another family and a personal read of the Book of Mormon, I thought I should do something different. I thought about reading the Old Testament, which I've never completed all the way through (the closest I ever came was more than 20 years ago, on my church mission, when I made it all the way to Lamentations before I just gave up). I thought about the Doctrines and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, but the truth is they're my least favorite books of scripture; much better, to my mind, for occasional study, both historical and theological, than for devotional reading. And that's what I've come to view my own scripture reading as: an act of ritual and repetition, a brief, daily, meditation upon The Word. The New Testament presented the obvious text of choice. And in reading through the gospels, one point seemed to me to be clearly hammered home by the text, again and again: Jesus seriously freaked people out.

Consider the story that prompted the passage that I use in the title of this post, in Luke 5:16-26. The word of Jesus's healings and miracles have spread like wildfire from one small village to the next, and rumors abounded about Him. People were leaving their fields and homes and places of work, following Him about, pleading for healings and desperate to hear whatever controversial thing He may say next, and Jesus had to travel into the wilderness to find some peace and quiet in which to pray. Local authorities passed the word when He was spotted teaching, and showed up to watch and challenge him.

And, behold, men brought in a bed a man which was taken with a palsy: and they sought means to bring him in, and to lay him before him.

And when they could not find by what way they might bring him in because of the multitude, they went upon the housetop, and let him down through the tiling with his couch into the midst before Jesus.

And when he saw their faith, he said unto him, Man, thy sins are forgiven thee.

And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is this which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?

But when Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answering said unto them, What reason ye in your hearts?

Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up and walk?

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power upon earth to forgive sins, (he said unto the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy couch, and go into thine house.

And immediately he rose up before them, and took up that whereon he lay, and departed to his own house, glorifying God.

And they were all amazed, and they glorified God, and were filled with fear, saying, We have seen strange things to day.

Fear, amazement, confusion, curiosity, hysteria, awe: those emotions seem to be a constant in the gospel narratives. In reading those texts for the first time in many years, and eschewing all commentaries or debates over authorship and intentionality, what I saw, again and again, were ordinary people feeling a kind of panic, desperate to stay near this man who was demonstrating such power, hungry for His miraculous touch, begging for His approval and forgiveness, ecstatic over feeling the divine amongst them, and slightly terrified at what Jesus's words and actions seemed to imply. It was very difficult for me to avoid thinking about how I would have responded--or not responded--to the appearance of a savior, a god, in my own midst. No doubt I would rationalize, contextualize, and express my doubts. But if I saw it, with my own eyes? I would like to think I would have a presence of mind to speak honestly and directly, as the story has Peter doing just a short while the aforementioned story: "When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me: for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (Luke 5:8). But more likely I would be found in the admiring, demanding, wary crowds surrounding Him, praising God for every good thing and asking for more, but fearful of whatever unexpected, unaccountable, outrageous, miraculous thing might come next.

I substitute for our regular Sunday school teacher today, and took a class of about 40 members of our congregation through Paul's letter to the Romans. There is so much in there--it is one of the few New Testament epistles that is truly all about doctrinal teachings, as opposed to resolving ecclesiastical problems and offering pastoral care--that obviously one can only scratch the surface in a single day. But if anything, I hope those in the class came away with an impression of the deepness, the power, and mystery of what these men, living and writing in the first couple of decades after Jesus's death and resurrection, we're trying to make sense of. Grace, law, spirit, flesh, death, righteousness: all strange things indeed. I've mentioned before Romans 8:38-39, as perhaps my favorite passage in the whole New Testament. I love it, because of its finality, its comprehensiveness: it's a passage that, in our very act of reading it, reminds us simultaneously that we are invariably not seeing the whole program, the big picture...and that we, strangely enough, somehow have a place in it all the same.

Reviving the Review

2011-09-23T16:40:00.001-05:00

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

When I began my university education at nearly 25 years ago, Student Review, an independent, non-correlated, student-run newspaper at BYU, was a year old. I'd never heard of it before, but when walking through the parade of booths set up by clubs and other student organizations during Freshman Orientation, I spotted a man with a beard. Since this was Provo, that was, of course, unusual. I walked to him, and learned he was Bill Kelly, the publisher and one of the three key founders of the newspaper. (He had to shave the beard the next week, when the semester officially began.) I'd worked for student newspapers before, and like the--admittedly, rather self-congratulatory--feeling of being a bit of a rabble-rouser, so I immediately signed up. And that was it. For all the rest of my time as an undergraduate--throughout my freshman year in 1987-1988, after I returned from my church proselytizing mission in 1990, and until I graduate in 1993--Student Review (or "SR" as we near-universally referred to it) was one of the defining elements of my education.

At different times I, along with a constantly changing cast of dozens of talented volunteers and the occasional talentless hanger-on, wrote for the paper, edited it, did lay-out and design for it, sold ads for it, conducted meetings for it, delivered it to the printer and distributed it, and towards the end of my time in Provo briefly served as publisher of it. You can't be involved in something--especially something with as much financial stress and emotional angst as SR--for that long and not have conflicted and even intense feelings about it, and that certainly describes me. Consequently, I felt some genuine regret when, long after I left BYU, Student Review finally, after many close shaves and attempted re-boots, officially closed shop. And when I learned that a group of BYU students we're reviving SR, with an all-new look and a snappy new website, there was no question about how I felt: it was fantastic news.

I say that with almost no knowledge whatsoever about who these students are or what there plans are of if they even really know what they're doing. BYU is, for certain, a very different place than it was when me and my generation of SR conspirators were there; at the very least, the economics and mechanics of creating an open news and artistic forum are so different than they were in the 1980s-1990s that the very notion of actually putting out a paper with newsprint on it strikes some of us as pretty bizarre. But still, unless BYU is an entirely different sort of place today, then almost by definition an alternative media source is a good thing, a valuable thing.

Why? Because BYU's official student newspaper, The Daily Universe, as much as I enjoyed working there (until they fired me, that is), still isn't and probably never can be a truly broad campus voice, which means that there always going to be folks on campus who will want to add to the "official" story; because Provo, UT, despite all the changes of the last quarter-century, still isn't a particular diverse place whether speaking religiously or ethnically or ideologically, which means that there are all sorts of opportunities for sparking ideas and insights that students will miss out on; and college life, no matter where it is or who is involved, is still something that can use a little dissent and mockery once in a while. In retrospect I have no illusions that, in being part of the Student Review, I was engaged in some grand struggle over freedom of thought or the validity of the First Amendment; but at the time, and in that place, contributing to an alternative voice seemed really important. I don't doubt at all that such a need still seems important to hundreds, if not thousands, of twenty-somethings in Utah Valley today. There are many things that I did during my BYU years (often for SR-induced reasons) that, today, I feel rather conflicted and embarrassed about; Student Review is not one of them.

There are lots of stories I could tell about SR, but thinking about it now, most of them seem like dated in-jokes, tales told by a 42-year-old to other 30- and 40-somethings, laughing loudly and rolling our eyes and muttering regretfully over this outrageous editorial, that audacious bit of plagiarism, this disappointing discussion, that insightful interview, this hilarious bit of art, that party which got completely out of hand. But let me point you to some other stories: check out this fine Mormon Matters podcast with Bill Kelly himself, one of the ringleaders of the current SR revival, Craig Mangum, and two of the more famous/notorious SR alumni, Joanna Brooks and Matt Workman. Or check out this delightful reminiscence (and entertaining comment thread) by Kent Larsen, another member of the founding triumvirate, and the organizational rock upon which the financial success of the first few years of SR were built. Or just check out the Student Review itself online, and send some fond thoughts to those working to bring it back to life. In the meantime, here's a selection of some other points of view from a few SR alumni I've stayed in touch with:

Matt Workman--

As for as the Student Review is concerned, it was my college experience. With about two exceptions, my classes at BYU weren't worth showing up to. But at the Review, I learned how to become a writer (something I didn't even know I wanted to do), I learned how to write on a deadline. It was like a boot camp for humor writing. And it was fun. Some of the most fun I've ever had doing anything. One of the most fertile creative periods of my entire life.

Sean Ziebarth--

Back in the early '90s Student Review was to BYU what the Island of Misfit Toys was to Rankin & Bass's Christmas classic. Most of us didn't fit in anywhere else. And it wasn't for our lack of trying (I for one gave BYUSA the ol' college try, but just couldn't stomach their Big Brother practices). Student Review gave me the voice to explore my quirky tastes in art, music, fiction, gospel doctrines. That voice was powerful. In our heyday it lead to a radio show of the same name and eventually an entire AM station run by BYU students during a brief but unforgettable summer. Many of us used our new-found SR friends and skills to launch companies and careers. Not only did I meet some of my best friends in the world through the Student Review, I can trace every job I've held since back to my work with SR.

Matt Stannard--

Each generation is free to define what they believed the general philosophy of SR was. Our generation was far more openly political--not predominantly left OR right, but predominantly political. Of course, the very fact that we included left perspectives in our plurality opened us up to the charge of being "leftist" in the campus community, because any disruption of homogeneity will tend to seem subversive. But we published pieces for and against the Iraq war, for and against free markets, etc. I think different periods of time have relative luxories of being apolitical or political. If we hadn't published our pieces for and against the war while the nation was at war, that would have been inexcusably irresponsible. If we hadn't published feminist pieces at the dawn of VOICE and in the midst of sexual assault scandals on campus, we would have been irrelevant. If we hadn't run editorials discussing capitalism at a time (the early 90s) of waves of massive layoffs and increasing labor activism around the country, we would have deserved to be labeled ignorant, white privileged Mormons. I still consider the time I spent at SR to be among the most relevant of my life. And the friends from BYU I keep in touch with are almost exclusively the SR crowd, many of whom continue to write provocative, relevant commentary, now to a wider audience, with skills they honed at SR.

Kent Larsen--

The original Student Review didn’t have any agenda except giving voice to BYU’s students, and as long as its efforts were limited to that, instead of some other agenda, it had the ability to stay successful. So most of Student Review’s content was simply what the students in its audience wanted to hear—a lot of humor, arts coverage and discussions of campus life. I hope the new Student Review will maintain that focus.

Friday Morning Videos: "Sabotage"

2011-09-23T07:00:00.002-05:00

Also not quite punk. But who cares? The Beastie Boys started out that way, after all.

I want to be Sir Stewart Wallace.

Saved by the Fall

2011-09-22T23:06:00.004-05:00

We've had a couple of truly beautiful weeks here in Wichita--temperatures in the 70s and 80s, clear blue skies, and some nice cool mornings (not quite cool enough yet for my tastes, but still, you take what you can get). I've soaked it all up as I've been riding my bike into the Friends University campus every morning, and loving it. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the only time I've been able to love it. Because ever since the semester began, it's seemed as though every spare minute I'm not on my bike has been spent in my office, preparing for one event after another, desperately trying to get everything squared away so I can actually enjoy the start of the school year and what is, in some ways, my favorite time of year.

I have no one but myself to blame, I know. I was the one that, after we returned from our wonderful, three-week long sojourn through the eastern United States, pretty much let the terrible heat which we, along with most of the Central States, suffered through during the second half of July and all of August, just about kill me off. Summertime is a wonderful break, of course, but for an academic and a teacher, it's a good time to get things done as well. Book reviews, lecture preps, syllabus changes, all of that stuff. I had a good five or six weeks to be productive and move ahead on various projects and get ready for events that I knew were going to crowd up right at the beginning of the semester...and I didn't. And then school started, and I had to get things done, and that meant buckling down and plowing through all the stuff which had piled up, just as the weather finally turned nice.

Well, anyway, enough of that moping. It's late and I need to sleep, but tomorrow is the first official day of autumn, and I'm feeling on top of things, at last--for the first time in weeks my desk is cleared, my schedule is made, the checkbook is balanced, the assessment tools and evaluation data have all been submitted...I can actually begin enjoying the fall a little bit. Yes, yes, just in time for me to start getting reading for midterms in only three weeks, I know--but give me a minute to celebrate finally getting to where I should have been a month ago, all right? September comes better late than never, I suppose.

Friday Morning Videos: "Tubthumping"

2011-09-16T07:00:00.003-05:00

I think this may the most recent video I've ever posted on this feature--it's not even 15 years old! Nor is it especially punk. But it has a bit of that spirit, I think.

"That a Country as Vast and as Various as Ours May Still be Experienced as a Community"

2011-09-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I acknowledged the communitarian danger lurking about in some powerful words which Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a year after the attacks on 9/11. I also acknowledged that it was that very dangerous frisson--a thrill of reading words which made one aware of suddenly belonging, of feeling committed and conscripted and captivated--which, I think, made them powerful. Wieseltier's comments a few days ago, at "An Evening of Remembrance and Reflection", a beautiful memorial concert given at the Kennedy Center the same night we at Friends had our small commemoration, said much the same thing, though perhaps more wisely, less dangerously, though no less meaningfully (hat tip to Damon Linker):

Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation. The indifferent do not grieve, the uncommitted do not grieve, the loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we have valued, and in this way mourning darkly refreshes our knowledge of the causes of our loves and the reasons for our values. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness to people and to principles. It is the yes of a broken heart. In our bereavement we discover how much was ruptured by death, and also how much was not ruptured. These tears lead directly to introspection.

Here is what we affirmed by our mourning on September 11, 2001, and by the introspection of its aftermath:

that we wish to be known, to ourselves and to the world, by the liberty that we offer, axiomatically, as a matter of right, to the individuals and the groups with whom we live;

that the ordinary lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day of work and play can truthfully exemplify that liberty, and fully represent what we stand for;

that we will defend ourselves, resolutely and even ferociously, because self-defense is also an ethical responsibility, and that our debates about the proper use of our power in our own defense should not be construed as an infirmity in our will;

that the multiplicity of cultures and traditions that we contain peaceably in our society is one of our highest accomplishments, because we are not afraid of difference, and because we do not confuse openness with emptiness, or unity with conformity;

that a country as vast and as various as ours may still be experienced as a community;

that none of our worldviews, with God or without God, should ever become the worldview of the state, and that no sanctity ever attaches to violence;

that the materialism and the self-absorption of the way we live has not extinguished our awareness of a larger purpose, even if sometimes they have obscured it;

that we believe in progress, at home and abroad, in social progress, in moral progress, even when it is fitful and contested and difficult;

that just as we have enemies in the world we have friends, and that our friends are the individuals and the movements and the societies that aspire, often in circumstances of great adversity, to democracy and to decency.

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.

My Favorite Written Text for Remembering 9/11

2011-09-10T13:01:00.001-05:00

The Fall
Washington Diarist

Leon Wieseltier
The New Republic, September 9, 2002

I have been reading collections of writings about September 11, and they are wearying: so many bruises so feebly expressed, so many people searching for a poem to protect them. Dickinson #341, perhaps? Literariness is a kind of sedative, I suppose, and in this way it differs from literature. There are circumstances, of course, in which unoriginality of feeling or form is not a shortcoming, in which the really advanced statement is the modest expression of a common sentiment, in which banality is a guarantee of decency. In a huge volume called September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, I encounter a letter by Richard Wilbur written a few months after the catastrophe to the book's editor, declining the invitation to art:

Dear Bill,

The only thing I can say right now is this. There is no excuse for the cold inhumanity of 11 September, and there is no excuse for those Americans, whether of the left or the religious right, who say that we had it coming to us.

Dick

The poet's disinclination to make a poem is affecting. It is the truest thing in the book. But elsewhere in this book, and in the other books, there is only banality in the bad sense, and remaindered habits of dissent, and the occasional hilarity, as in the observation by Avital Ronell that when George W. Bush remarked that we were tested on September 11, he "reverted to a citation of pretechnological syntagms that capture the auratic pull of the test." Surely the syntagms were his staff's. But now it is the anniversary, and it is Elul, and I must be forgiving. I am prepared even to agree with Stanley Fish that postmodernism did not destroy the World Trade Center.

But as I leaf through A Nation Challenged, the "visual history" of the catastrophe that has been produced by The New York Times, I gasp at the sight of the picture that frightened me almost out of my mind when I saw it in the paper a year ago. Here it is again, the size of a page, and in color. It is the photograph, taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press, of the man falling to his death from the north tower. His head faces the earth, his feet face the sky, but there is no earth in the picture and no sky, there is only the striped geometry of the "exoskeleton" of the building in the background, still intact in its spurious attitude of invincibility. The lines of the faade look like ladders without rungs. The tower is half in shadow, half in light, and the man is dropping between the shadow and the light. There is no sign of his velocity. His physical integrity is extraordinary. He is standing in the world but the world is upside-down. He does not appear to be wounded. He seems composed, a stoic in the air, except for the tails of his white shirt, which hang from his trousers like snapped wings. His hands are smartly at his side, his legs look as if they are marching. It is almost possible to make out his face. It is an African American face, a full, tender face. I do not see panic on the man's countenance. I see thought. I shudder that he may have been thinking. I do not impute philosophy to his face, only mindfulness. I suspect that his eyes are open. His direction is clear.

In our souls, we are vertical; or so we have been taught to think since the beginnings of spiritual speculation in the West. "The way of life is upward to the wise," Proverbs advises. Heaven is above, hell is below. We seek the top, we fear the bottom. When we are worthy, we ascend; when we are unworthy, we descend. The good will rise, the evil will fall. We look up to our betters and our rulers, they look down on us. The "ladder of ascension" is a central myth of salvation in Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam. (God is "stably and permanently at the top of the ladder," Maimonides instructed.) And in the later inversions of the traditional teachings, in the almost irresistible doctrines of redemption through sin, according to which the depths are as spiritually attractive as the heights, the dream is still a vertical one. I have often worried that the grip of this directionality upon our souls is owed simply to the fact of our physical bearing. We aspire to paradise in the manner of upright beings. Levinas thought otherwise. "Height introduces a sense into being," he wrote. "It is already lived across the experience of the human body. It leads human societies to raise up altars. It is not because men, through their bodies, have an experience of the vertical that the human is placed under the sign of height; because being is ordained for height the human body is placed in a space in which the high and the low are distinguished and the sky is discovered." And we not only dream high, we also build high. The vertical conception of human greatness is nowhere more apparent than in architecture. Was there ever a structure so "ordained for height" as the World Trade Center? These buildings were extravagantly consecrated to the proposition that glory is celestial. Visitors to Windows on the World used to marvel about its God-like view of the city. A philosopher who visited the World Trade Center in the 1980s remarked upon "this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more." To escape one's finitude, one had only to take the elevator to the 110th floor.

These associations I use to defend myself against this picture of this man who did not escape his finitude. I look at what an AP photographer brought back from the inferno—the actual one, not the one peddled by clerics—and I see an emblem of what used to be called soteriology. Too many books, I guess; but this is a way of insisting upon the scope of the horror in New York a year ago. It is also a way of turning back some of these spatial superstitions. For there is something inhumane about this metaphor of the summit. The heights can be fatal, and the exhilaration can be cruel, and this man falling from the tower is falling for no reason except the evil in the hearts of other men, and wisdom is not in the clouds, and God is not in the sky. Surely our minds can develop a view of the world that is not merely a corollary of our bodies. I would rather be ordained for truth than ordained for height.

The remarkable thing about the falling man is that he is not looking down. He is looking straight ahead. And as I say, he is in the stance of a man who is marching. There is, in other words, a strangely horizontal quality to him, which may account for his terrifying dignity. He seems to be fighting his vertical doom with his horizontal dignity. What matters to his gaze is not what is above, but what is ahead. Turn this picture of the upside-down world upside- down, and he appears even to have a sensation of purpose. He is not on a ladder, he is on a track. Regarded in this way, he looks like nothing so much as a soldier. Regarded in this way, his testament is plain.

*****

Why is the my favorite written text, out of the millions of words that have been written, from immediately in the wake of until a full decade afterward, about the attacks of September 11th? This essay was much attacked, as I recall, for taking such a horrible photograph--capturing a mere millisecond out of some doomed soul's journey towards death, a death that he didn't ask for, a death that perhaps he chose to hasten by jumping from the tower, rather than remaining to be burned alive or blown to bits--and turning it into a work of art, of philosophy, and yes, of propaganda. I confess, those are exactly the reasons why it has likely stayed with me for so long. (I didn't save a copy of the essay, and had to search to track it down for this post; but some of the Wieseltier's lines--especially "His direction is clear"--have never left my mind.) For better and/or for worse, in the days and weeks and months and years after this tragedy, we made from it something, as we always make something of all our experiences and memories, both good and bad. By the time this essay was written, the making which a majority of Americans had voluntarily contributed their memories to was mostly one of propaganda: those who died on 9/11 weren't unfortunate victims, but the first casualties in a war--they were, in essence, all soldiers, and their heroic deaths were a witness to the rest of us soldiers to get on with our duty. There was something, for me at least (though certainly not just for me; millions of others agreed with me), appealing about that kind of ideological conscription--something Rousseauian, something republican, something honorable and communitarian and good. It was abused, to say the least. But in re-reading this piece, I can still feel the pull--I can still hear a voice that tells me "Make sure the Falling Man did not jump in vain!" Wieseltier's voice is a dangerous one, even if there is really nothing necessarily dangerous in his intentions or his language (though perhaps there is). But regardless, it is perhaps that frisson of danger--of having witnessed something much larger and deeper and more meaningful and more deadly than our own lives, and in having witnessed it, having been conscripted by it as well--that makes his beautiful, thoughtful words hauntingly, dangerously attractive at the same time.

My Favorite Video Text for Remembering 9/11

2011-09-10T13:00:00.000-05:00

"We're told that they [the terrorists who hijacked the planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers] were zealots, fueled by religious fervor. Religious fervor. And it you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any goddamn sense?"

*****

Why is this my favorite, most memorable bit of video, from the no doubt millions of hours of footage, news, and commentary from the hours, days, weeks, and months which followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? Partly because it's David Letterman, a man whom, though I hardly ever watch his show anymore, once had a big influence on my outlook on life. Partly because I can appreciate it on the meta-level; I can see David Letterman, the man, struggling to speak beyond "David Letterman," the personality, though not fully escaping him, because the personality and the man are too closely entwined, and besides, the man knows that it's the personality that people want and expect to see. Partly because Letterman is one of the quintessential voices of New York City; his love and sorrow for his city is real, and that comes through. But mostly, I think, because it's so very, very much of the moment: a moment of sadness and fear and confusion and resolve, a moment desperate for direction and leadership (Letterman's, in retrospect, over-the-top praise for Rudy Giuliani isn't at all much different from the way most of us in those days were looking all our elected leaders and suddenly seeing, because we wanted to see, more than was actually there), and most of all, a moment of realization that, when tragedies strike, you're probably just going to have to make up your own kind of courage, as you go along.

Would You Shoot (a Computer Image of a Zombie) Sarah Palin?

2011-09-09T12:45:00.008-05:00

Back in January, when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, and six people were murdered, during a rampage by your stereotypical gun-toting, conspiracy-believing, drug-addled, psychologically-imbalanced, maladjusted lunatic, I--like a lot of people--kind of lost it. I got mad, I searched for blame, and I found it, in an advertisement put out by Sarah Palin during the 2010 midterm elections. As part of her campaign to defeat Democratic politicians that had won election in previously Republican districts, and had gone on to support the president in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Palin used gun sights, and spoke in speeches about the need to "take out" those who were part of what she considered to be an atrocious, presumably socialist, presumably unconstitutional bit of legislation. Over-the-top, violent political rhetoric, combined with armed and impressionable crazies, equals murder. QED.

So I wrote a post making that claim...and was pilloried for it. And rightly so--and not just because as more information emerged about the man who attempted to assassinate Giffords, the more and more obvious it was that there was almost no chance his murderous intentions were inspired by or even connected to Palin's vicious (but, let us be frank, pretty standard) rhetoric. No, I was pilloried because I was taking a tragic, actual event, and quickly, emotionally, and irresponsibly targeting one person as responsible. As I put it in my apology, "in writing what I did, I became part of exactly what I was truly responding to: not the horrible news out of Tuscon (to which there was only one decent reaction, namely one of mourning and sorrow), but more largely the environment within which this shooting happened to occur." Rather than responding carefully to a terrible event, I piled fuel on the rhetoric fire. That was wrong.

I was thinking about all this yesterday, when a local television station called me up, and asked if they could talk to me for a bit about the latest appalling bit of "entertainment" coughed up by an internet economy which naturally sees such rhetoric as a commercial opportunity: a video game where you get to kill as many "Tea Party Zombies" as possible, including such luminaries as Palin and the Koch brothers, before they "teabag" you.

My comments in that news piece were brief and innocuous, I suppose. There were just a tiny segment of a 15-minute conversation, mostly dealing with the difficult balance that any society which respects free speech (which, frankly, I think we respect a little too much) has to strike between actively discouraging speech which is grossly inflammatory, on the one hand, and not going overboard--as I have before and as we all usually will at one point or another--over some whatever new and appalling bit of language or imagery shows up which offends our sense of propriety or decency or security. I told the reporter a joke which I can remember going around on Facebook months ago, one which made my wife livid: its punch line involves President Obama being thrown off an airplane. He laughed. And why shouldn't he? It's just a joke, right? And Charles Koch shouldn't be concerned that some anonymous twerp looking to have some fun--or some liberal with a rather ugly sense of humor, or both--has created a game in which players get to shoot a two-headed zombie-version of him. It's just a game, right?

The best thing I said to the reporter--which, of course, also didn't make it into the piece--was a few thoughts drawing on things which Cass Sunstein and Jay Rosen have both argued at length: that the internet has mostly resulted in our ways of sharing and receiving information being broken apart, atomized, sealed off into separate bubbles. We live, too many of us anyway, in various blog-anchored echo chambers, chatting endlessly on Facebook with our selectively chosen friends. Of course everyone has always created in-groups and out-groups; that's nothing new. But the internet has really ramped it up...and if you combine that with all the stresses and breakdowns our democracy is currently experiencing (an almost wholly dysfunction Senate, major parties that no longer share much of any kind of incentive to actually govern responsibly, etc.), then it's not hard to suspect that there has been an increasing in violent rhetoric in American politics, because it's just so easy for everyone in all their little bubbles to continually egg each other on, say the same jokes ever more loudly and ever more fervently, develop a shorthand of humor and rhetoric that is perhaps completely innocent but nonetheless, in retrospect, perhaps is also thorough dehumanizing, angry, and contemptible. Step out of your bubble, if only for a moment, and ask yourself: would you really proudly display your liberal hunting license or your President Obama urinal target, or whatever else the endless free-flowing invective of the internet encourages folks with sick minds to appeal to, if you weren't just displaying it where only your ideological comrades-in-arms will see it? Would you really enjoy hacking a video image of Sarah Palin to pieces on your home computer, if it was anything for you except a private joke between friends? Perhaps not. Now ask yourself this question--is anything on the internet capable of remaining private for long? Also a negative answer, except in that case I don't think there's any "perhaps" to it.

Some liberals, at least, are trying to get ahead of the usual cycle of blame (which, I confess again, I've been part of before!), and calling for boycotts of the game. Good for them, though I wonder what difference it will make. The genie--a genie of anger and contempt, fed by a technology that simultaneously encourages people to act out within their little boundaries as well as makes certain no boundaries truly last--is out of the bottle, and fear that, absent a profound political change which leads people to accept that our democracy can function, that government can listen, and that the rules and procedures and methods of elections and parties can be taken seriously, there's nothing that will get it back in. I'm as much at fault as anyone, I suppose. But I can at least refuse to play the game. We could all do that much, at least.

Friday Morning Videos: "London Calling"

2011-09-09T07:00:00.003-05:00

Keeping up with the punk theme. Sure can't hurt (though I think it's supposed to).

Remembering the Day

2011-09-08T18:23:00.002-05:00

In about an hour, I'll be conducting a gathering here at Friends University, to commemorate that terrible day, nearly exactly ten years ago, in which close to three thousand people died in less than an hour, as planes crashed into buildings which burned and subsequently, horrifically, collapsed. 9/11 changed America in many ways, many of which--perhaps most of which--came out not so much because of the attacks, but because of our grief, terror, paranoia, and overreaction to what had just happened. The territory of the United States of America had suffered a horrendous terrorist attack, in which our own passenger jets, and our own comparative ease and freedom of traveling, working, and communicating, had been used against us. It was--to be brutally frank--a brilliant, audacious, even (Bill Maher notwithstanding) courageous attack. Also, and more importantly of course, a desperately, totally evil one. There's no apologizing for or justifying of it, and while I am more than happy to apologize for all the unfortunate ways I let my own anger and--again, to be brutally frank--my own ideological opportunism (at last, America can speak as one community, as a carrier of Western civilization, as something with an enemy which can pull us together!) stampede me into agreeing, even if only theoretically, with the notion that our "War on Terror" justified acts which bordered on quasi-imperialism...the attacks themselves still remain. I don't mourn their author's execution at the hands of American troops. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands more found their lives torn apart and perhaps ruined, and millions around the work have felt the political and social and military consequences, because of what Al-Qaeda's particular form of radical Islamic jihadism, because of what Osama bin Laden and others like him promulgated. On September 11th, 2001.

I've told the story before. How the Wold Trade Center was hit by one plane, and then another, as I went about my business of getting ready for another day at my first teaching job, at Mississippi State University; how by the time I'd biked into campus people were already spreading rumors, and watching in silence CNN on televsion sets being hastily set up in classrooms and corridors, listening to the radio (how primitive that must seem to readers today, thinking about those dusty old pre-smartphone years!); how I was on the phone to Melissa on and off through the whole day, as we learned about the strike on the Pentagon (and desperately tried to contact friends in Washington DC, from which we'd move only weeks before), and swapped what little we knew (me from constantly hitting refresh on the New York Times's, the Washington Post's, and Andrew Sullivan's websites; her from switching between all the channels in our cable-enabled apartment), and absorbed the horror the the fifth largest building in the world (at the time) collapse in smoke and dust and noise. That's our story of the day; everyone has one. Except, perhaps not all the students we (myself and other faculty members) hope to be able to speak to tonight. One of my students worked at the Center for American Progress over the summer, and one of his projects was to develop a program to reach out to people like him--"Millennials," the "9/11 Generation," those who were children or adolescents or barely out of it, kids that were in high school, middle school, elementary school, the day the planes flew out of the sky. In a sense, they all have stories too--of lockdowns and tearful school assemblies, of prayers around the flagpoles and boastful claims by those looking forward to a fight. But their stories are limited, I suspect, because for the most part the aforementioned grief, terror, paranoia, and overreaction have been mostly all they've known. Multiple wars? Military tribunals? Taking off your shoes before you get on a plane? Did it really used to be different? Actually yes--maybe not entirely, but mostly, yes, it was.

So we want to tell stories, to help them appreciate the change, to help them remember the day. And, maybe even more importantly, the day before the day. Only by remembering both, I think, can we really hope to learn what 9/11 changed, and what it didn't, and what it needn't, and what perhaps we really need to change back again.

Friday Morning Videos: "Rise"

2011-09-02T07:00:00.006-05:00

My friend Dan Weingarten reminded me of this kick-ass tune a few weeks ago, and it put me in a very punk mood. Not a bad mood to be in these days.

I never even knew this song had a video. Maybe it Johnny Rotten was just too controversial for NBC?

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough"

2011-08-26T07:00:00.007-05:00

It's pretty much impossible to describe what a ridiculous, embarrassing, borderline offensive mess this monstrous video is, so I'll just let you watch all 13 minutes of it, and then I'll call it quits for this feature. Classes started this week, anyway; high time I got back to normal around here. But first, part 1:

And now, part 2 (yes, the music is essentially the same in both videos; I don't know what they meant to accomplish in doing that):

I read somewhere that Cyndi Lauper actually hates this song. Oh well.

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "Live to Tell"

2011-08-19T07:00:00.001-05:00

Madonna's greatest vocal work? Christopher Walken's greatest performance? A case can be made for both, I think.

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "Danger Zone"

2011-08-12T07:00:00.008-05:00

Melissa and I actually watched this film a couple of weeks ago, in honor of its 25th anniversary. I swear, there's like 30 minutes of plot in the whole thing. I rest of it is all watching planes fly, watching plans land, watching motorcycles drive, watching cars drive, watching people burst angrily in and out of doors...you get the idea.

My Nerd Reading, Exposed

2011-08-11T14:40:00.005-05:00

So, being both 1) a good liberal NPR-listener, and 2) a nerdy science-fiction/fantasy/horror fan (though not nearly as much as I was back in my high school and college years), I, of course, voted in NPR's survey to pick the Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books. You can look over the list there; here, I'm going to do what you're supposed to do with these lists: go through the whole thing, and mark the ones I've read. Everyone can play along! But let's make this interesting: give yourself one point for each one you're read, and let's compare scores. And so...

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert--part credit, here: I read (and loved) the original Dune, read (and grew increasingly disappointed in) Dune Messiah, attempted to read (but abandoned) Children of Dune, never even tried to read the fourth "official" book in the series, God Emperor of Dune. So, give me about one-third point for this one.
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson--I think I should double-credit here, since I read not only this first trilogy, but the second one as well. I haven't read any of the books from the final, recent trilogy, though a couple of friends of mine insist they're worth their weight in gold.
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart--excuse me, but this is absolute nonsense: you're only going to rank a single volume of Mary Stewart's masterful Merlin series? You're not going to give any credit for The Hollow Hills or The Last Enchantment (or, for that matter, the later, "addendum" to the series, The Wicked Day)? Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this. I insist that those who haven't read the whole series decline to give themselves a point for this one book.
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

So, I end up (counting my protests about Dune and Thomas Covenant) with 32.3 points. How about you?

Actually Mitt, No, They're Not

2011-08-11T11:43:00.007-05:00

While visiting Iowa, Mitt Romney calls corporations "people"--then goes on, amidst heckling, to elaborate, as best as I can figure, that his point is that corporations are made up of people, that all the money they make goes into the pockets of people, that really they're just all about people, if you know what I mean, etc. Judge for yourself.

There's a lot I could say about this--in particular, regarding the appalling Citizens United decision that forbade legislatures, on First Amendment grounds, from treating corporate bodies any differently from, you know, actual citizens when it comes to contributing to political campaigns, which is where the whole "corporations are people too!" meme really got its legs--but I'm too exhausted and frustrated and brain-dead right now to do a lot of writing. Suffice it say simply this: even if you think Romney is substantively correct in defending the rights and interests of corporations by seeing them solely in terms of the citizens who own stock in them, work for them, and buy products from them, and ignoring the structural power they exercise and the warping effects they have throughout any capitalist economy (and as should be obvious, I don't), at the very least it ought to be acknowledged that the "people" whom the large corporations Romney is talking about are mostly identified with happen to be, generally speaking, quite wealthy, quite powerful, and quite privileged people, legally and socially and economically. Hence, defend corporations as "people," and all you've really done--leaving aside the theoretical and moral puzzles which that equivalency poses--is defend rich people as "people" too. Which is all right, I suppose, but not generally the sort of thing that plenty of ordinary folks during a continuing economic recession really want to hear.

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "We Don't Need Another Hero"

2011-08-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

Loved this movie--the previous installment was a better film in almost every way (its final scenes gave us pretty much the perfect Platonic form of a car chase), but still, it didn't have Tina Turner. Post-apocalyptism never looked or sounded so good.

Summer Storms Have Consequences

2011-08-04T13:54:00.002-05:00

This is what we saw when we woke up this morning, after a night of terrific winds, lots of lightning, and some blessedly needed (though still not nearly enough for drought-stricken Kansas) rain. Weeks of 100+ degree temps, now this. It was a nice tree too, dammit. Oh well. Someone lend me a chainsaw.

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "When the Going Gets Tough"

2011-07-29T07:00:00.005-05:00

This one was hard to find too, and the movie wasn't really worth the effort. But for the all-around awesome Danny DeVito, any price must be paid (give it time to load).

"So, this Debt Ceiling Thing is Routine, or the End of the World?"

2011-07-27T11:07:00.002-05:00

Ah, Toby Ziegler, where are you when we need you?

Debt Ceilings and Democratic Despair

2011-07-26T11:21:00.000-05:00

My wife rarely gets engaged--must less enraged--by politics. This isn't because she doesn't have any concerns or lacks informed opinions--she has plenty of both--but because it fundamentally doesn't interest, much less fascinate, her; she's just not drawn to investing much of her time and energy into something that she often finds, on the surface at least, both perplexing and frustrating. But sometimes there's an issue which strikes her as so desperate or so obvious or so crazy that she overcomes her usual apolitical stance, and can't help but become engaged. And enraged. The ongoing crisis over the raising of the federal government's debt ceiling--which came to a head with President Obama's and Speaker of the House Boehner both speaking last night at length about why the opposite side hasn't accepted their respective plans--has brought our family to one of those times.

This is what Melissa wrote on Facebook: "I never get political (odd, considering who I am married to), but this whole debt ceiling thing is making me increasingly more disillusioned with the American government. It. Doesn't. Work. I do not believe there's a single elected individual who has anything but his or her own best interests in mind. The greatest country, my a$$. I'd move to Canada in a heartbeat, if I could."

I sympathize with her--in part because, just three months ago, Canada had an election which looks to have meaningful consequences for moving the country (though whether forward or backward or neither depends on your point of view, I suppose). This stands in contrast to the US, which has seemed plagued by ever-increasing paralysis, gridlock, and mutual distrust ever since Obama's election in 2008 (with even the Affordable Care Act, which should have been a game-changer for our country, having instead just left at the very least a slightly bitter taste in almost everyone's mouth, and a constitutional controversy that doesn't seem to have any conclusion on the horizon), and which has now given us, quite possibly, the Worst Congress Ever. But I also sympathize with her because this whole debate over the debt ceiling strikes me as having been taken over by two utterly maddening realities. First, there is a contorted reading of the fiduciary responsibilities which the federal government is granted under that Constitution which is, from what appears to me to be any kind of sound accounting perspective, absolutely bonkers. Second, there is a game of political chicken driven by the mutual incomprehension possessed by two entirely distinct types of parties: the first, the one led by President Obama, being a historically normal American political party, with all its usual problems and dynamics, while the second, the one being led by Speaker of the House Boehner (if he is really in control, which ultimately may not be the case; some Republicans may simply have gotten to the point where they lack "the emotional capacity to accept a bargain that they don't see as a humiliation for Obama") that has apparently committed itself to an fiscal ideology that is, at the very best, seriously half-baked. Let's take them in turn:

1) Here's the basic nonsense with the debt ceiling, as I read the situation. Step one: the federal government passes a budget. Step two: that budget authorizes the federal government to spend a certain amount of money. Step three: the federal government then goes forward spending that money. Step four: as the budget authorized the federal government to spend more money than it had on hand, that money must be borrowed. Step five: the federal government borrows the money. Except wait! We have apparently talked ourselves, over the decades, into a rather bizarre accounting situation: the president, having signed the budget which Congress has passed, apparently has the constitutional authority to spend X amount of money, but he doesn't automatically possess the constitutional authority to obtain the money which Congress has already appropriated for him to spend! It's as if you got a paycheck, deposited it in a bank account, made a budget with your spouse which included plans for spending that money, your spouse agreed to it, but then when you went to pay your bills found that you needed additional approval for the money to actually move from the account to wherever you wanted it to go. Plain crazy.

If you've followed this debate, then you'll recognize that I'm on former president Clinton's side in agreeing with the "constitutional option"; the very idea that money could be appropriated, that a budget could be set, but that the money so approved could not actually be obtained without additional Congressional approval not only appears to me as simply nuts, but also a violation of the president's responsibilities to honor public debts under the 14th amendment. To force the US government into default by elevating a dubious fiscal procedure into unalterable constitutional doctrine is the sign of a people who actually think defaulting is a good idea.

2) And speaking of actually wanting a default, here's a nice analogy from Tim Burke, who, like many of us, is tearing his hair out at the madness coming from the supposed Party of Fiscal Responsibility:

[My Congressman's story] gets you right here, in your Little-House-on-the-Prairiest places: “Every day families in southeastern Pennsylvania make tough decisions in order to live within their means. Many are forced to cancel their family vacations, put off a car repair, or cut out purchases they can no longer afford. When it comes to our country’s bank account, however, both parties in Washington have not been practicing these same responsible habits.”

But why stop there? Let’s take the analogy a little further, because you know, the cuts that have been proposed by the President and rejected by his Republican opponents go a wee bit beyond canceling your family vacation or putting off a car repair. What do families do when their incomes are cut dramatically and abruptly, say, when one or both income-earners lose their jobs, Congressman?

Let’s finish your story of what happens every day. Why, sure, first Mr. and Mrs. Smith cut everything that’s a luxury. Vacations, cable, subscriptions, leisure, eating out. They defer maintenance of cars, houses, and their own bodies. Golly! I guess that means that people who were making the things that the family used to buy are going to have a bad story of their own to tell soon! And gee, I hope the story gets better soon, because when you don’t maintain cars, houses, and bodies, they break and then they’re really expensive to fix. Or you can’t get to work, you end up homeless, or you end up dead, I guess the story could go that way too! Oh, dear. This is turning into a bad story indeed. This is a story of how people who were very well-off become people who are poor....

Now there are other stories we could tell about the Smiths. Sometimes that family goes and gets several new jobs, none of them as good as what they had before, and brings in enough money that they only have to cut a few things, juggle their budgets. You know, they bring in new revenue. They look for jobs, they try to get back to where they were, because they’d rather be well-off than poor. But my Congressman doesn’t like that story for America! Sometimes that family takes on more debt in the short-term and works its way out of that debt slowly rather than drastically. all the while looking for new revenue. My Congressman doesn’t like that story either!

Look, obviously the analogy--neither Congressman Meehan's, nor Tim's--is perfect. Governments are different from families or businesses, and the rules for each do need to be different. But folks...seriously. What are we looking at here? We are looking at the federal government defaulting on its debts. Maybe that won't be a complete apocalypse; in fact, it almost certainly won't be. And moreover, I'm not blind to the possible upside here; nobody who tends to prefer saints over neoliberals, as I do, could ignore that maybe it would be good for the country to be a little poorer, a little more restricted in its choices, a little less aggressive overseas and less ambitious at home. But the evils that would likely come along with that upside--a desperate, vindictive, retrenchment, in which the expansive nobility of FDR's social justice ideas, however compromised they may have been and however many pathologies they may have inadvertently introduced, is replaced for the foreseeable future with an abandonment of any interest in working comprehensively for a more equal society--are enough to make me, as usual, fall back on hoping (as I did three years ago) for some progressive compromises here.

But it appears that any kind of discussion of revenue is officially off the table, and the Republican caucus in Congress continues to press forward, now selling the implausible fantasy of tying any kind of deal with the President to a constitutional amendment which would, in theory anyway, permanently cap all federal spending. I suppose I can't blame them: they are acting like a proper parliamentary party, advancing the interests of their platform, except that they are doing so confident of the knowledge that, if they get punished in the next election, they'll still control enough veto points in our government to prevent the Democratis from doing the same. Default, and democratic despair seem the order of the day.