Friday Morning Videos: "What About Me?"

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

Thanks Everybody

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

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

[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"

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"

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

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.

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"

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%

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.