Barack Obama is President

I have quite a few men and women from America's political and social history whom I take to be models, heroes, figures to admire or emulate or at least learn from. Of them, some--like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson--wouldn't have had the slightest idea what to make of Barack Obama. An intelligent, responsible, independent black man? Even at their best, I suspect they wouldn't have been able to see him as anything other than a trained monkey.

By contrast, others--like William Jennings Bryan or Jane Addams--probably could have seen him as an independent, even admirable thinker, I warrant. But his policies--and his presumption as a black man to go so far as to challenge the patterns of wealth and belief in this country--would probably struck them as unseemly and irresponsible, maybe even a little wicked. He could be the noble and learned black man in their coalitions and movements, but certainly not a challenger or a driving force within them.

Yet others--Christopher Lasch, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, even Ralph Nader, who ran against Obama for president on the ballots in 45 different states--would hopefully have been able to look past his race and engage his ideas, and perhaps be conflicted as well as impressed by what they found there. But none of them, I think, would have been at all likely to have picked Obama--with all his progressive notions, populist promises, and communitarian convictions--from out of the mix of liberal advocates littering the landscape, and seen in him a future president.

I guess that just goes to show.


An African-American president of the United States. My daughters will never grow up thinking such was impossible, or even out of the ordinary. It will just be...the way things are. Which is as they should be. Damn straight.

Obama and the Beautiful Day

It's a beautiful mid-autumn day here in Wichita. It's warm out (maybe a little too warm for November, but the wind is blowing, so it isn't too noticeable), the leaves are falling or have fallen from the trees (and are blwoing all around) and the sky is a marvellous blue. It's a good day to be an American, as Rod says, and a good day to vote.

Yesterday was equally nice, but I felt somewhat dark on the inside; my long (too long, as usual) rumination over the frustration--and, yes, the guilt--I feel as a religious believer opposed to abortion who is drawn to cast his ballot for Barack Obama really kind of depressed my mood. But today, at this moment, I don't feel it. I'm focusing on the class as half-full, right now--more than half-full, in fact; maybe even three-quarters. Obama is a good man, and he will make a good president, even if he isn't nearly as sensitive as he ought to be to tragedy of abortion in our midst. As much as I suspect my religious beliefs ought to incline me in such a direction, I just can't find it in myself to make such sensitives the primary measure of a candidate, at least not this candidate, on this wonderful day.

Obama is not a populist, or at least not my kind of populist. I'd like to believe he has elements of that old-school, radical, prairie perspective within him, and at times it has seemed to me he might. But no, his beliefs about our democratic system are those of pragmatic mainstream Democratic politician; he certainly won't be taking even baby steps towards a Jeffersonian or localist or populist conception of social and economic sovereignty.

Obama is not a socialist, and certainly not my kind of socialist. Obama has said--and has associated himself with people both past and present who have said--good things about consumerism, about class, about the social and cultural costs of progress, all of which partake of the original Christian socialist insight about the way a self-interested focus on rights and possessions invariably divides us and sets us against one another. But none of that means that Obama is anything except a capitalist, and one apparently content with the basic operations of today's state-based, globalized, thoroughly liberalized capitalist economic structure. The accusation that Obama's belief in the justice of "spreading the wealth" in an egalitarian makes him into some kind of socialist class warrior is, of course, complete nonsense, and John Holbo humorously and devastatingly explained. In truth, Obama is in some ways may be the ideal "liberaltarian" candidate, a liberal who has learned the libertarian and free trade lessons which the Clinton years presumably taught us all, and who is ready to follow through on what he was taught at the market-friendly University of Chicago in order to pull us out of the economic crisis. Perhaps. But I don't think so, and I have reason to hope for something at least a little more communitarian, a little more Christian, of him.

As so often seems to be the case, my unwillingness to reject modernity (meaning modern life, modern technology, modern ways of dealing with the diversity of people and information) entirely, as much as I recognize the harms it does to the cultural and religious forms of communal life that I think we all, as human beings, invariably need to sustain as a moral and psychological foundation, has the result of robbing me of the ability to hope for any "pure" populism or socialism, assuming there could ever be such a thing (and maybe there can't be). So what's left? Some kind of liberal communitarianism--or, given that Christian social democracy isn't available as a plausible electoral option in the U.S. right now, the compromise of progressivism. Under the banner of progressivism there are, to be sure, a host of possibilites. Mark Schmitt sees in Obama's progressivism a "soft, communtiarian populism," one that is "characterized by few enemies and very little talk of 'rights,'" with a focus instead on sustainable, inclusive policies expressed in a language that "invok[es] a sense of natural order in which all of us live up to our responsibilities, in service of a sense of national purpose." Peter Levine long ago argued that Obama's style of populism is really more of a progressive, egalitarian, civic republicanism, with an emphasis upon "deliberating together as a diverse population." Now, in the face of broad Obama victory, he has hopes for a new progressive era, but also hopes that the hints of a "Midwestern populist pluralist" perspective in Obama--a perspective that, even in the midst of global diversity, won't forget about the importance of having roots in a place, both spiritual and literal--won't be crowded out by the rush of events; "Barack Obama [should] stand on the side of his Midwestern Progressive forebears, people like Jane Addams and Robert LaFollette, as opposed to the technocrats of the Progressive Era." And as readers of this blog likely know, part of what enamours me in particular to progressives like Addams and LaFollette was their Christian sensibility was fundamental to the communitarian and civic improvements and reforms they worked to put into place.

The Democrats have been talking ever since the debacle in 2004, and the many arguments about religious values and American democracy which followed it, about the need to development a liberal language of the community, of civic purposes, of the common good. The ideas are out there, as are the debates over them; what was needed was an opportunity to put them into practice. With Senator Obama, I believe they may. It won't be the mixed-up, left conservative, populist, localist, Christian social democracy that I dream of...but it'll be something good, nonetheless. And it's a good day to vote for all that, yes indeed.

The Only Reason I Feel Conflicted About Voting Against McCain

Abortion. That's it.

(And yes, this is another long one. Cut me some slack; I've been tossing this back and forth in my head for months now.)

Please note that I'm not saying this because I believe that anything relevant to abortion policy is in any way going to be affected by my vote. I'm confident that won't be the case, because the possibility that my vote as a resident of Kansas will have any kind of electoral significance one way or another when all is said and done tomorrow evening is just ridiculously unlikely. (Check out the polls if you're curious.) Sure, sure, upsets are always possible, nothings over until the fat lady sings, etc., etc. But basically, I see this vote of mine as being entirely a matter of personal expression, of standing up and being counted for something, rather than being at all likely to contribute electorally to the direction of the country, much less the direction of abortion policy. Fortunately, self-expressive voting doesn't bother me; I've done it more than a few times before, after all.

Another note: I don't mean "abortion" here to be taken as a Trojan horse within which I am bundling up a host of socially conservative or "faith and values" views, so as to once again regretfully voice my by-now patented complaints about the lack of morally-traditional-and-economically-progressive voices in American politics; in this case, I really am just talking about abortion policy and abortion rights. That's not to say there aren't plenty of other areas where I could petulantly voice my frustration at the world's refusal to sign on to my old manifesto and appreciate what I see as the importance--both electorally as well as intellectually--of politically articulating a "left conservatism" or a populism than genuinely expresses both the religious and the socio-economic side of the communitarian sensibility which I believe makes for decent individual lives and a decent society. But this isn't about them. Some culture war battles (like those having to do with sexist body images and pornography), I think are extremely important; others (like the one my own church has heavily committed itself to in California), I simply nod my head in regards to, acknowledging the importance of the argument in the abstract, but finding the practical efforts involved in the issue often misconceived and directed against the wrong target (as usual, Noah Millman got this right long ago, observing that the question of divorce is a hundred times more relevant to a defense of tradition and marriage than anything having to do its definition). But in neither case do I usually see my singular cultural concerns as sufficient to trouble my overall electoral judgments. But abortion...abortion stands apart from all the rest. And as such, abortion frustrates me this election, enough to make me feel guilty for voting for the man who is, by practically every other measure in my judgment, clearly both the better candidate and the better man.

In 2006 I put my support behind the Democrats, and my concerns about abortion policy and rights really didn't trouble me at all; why are my feelings different this time around? Partly because that wasn't a presidential election, and while I may grouse about the imperial presidency and how the role of Congress has been eclipsed and how much better some things would be if ours were a parliamentary democracy, I'm hardly blind to today's reality that American presidents generally set the tone and agenda for American politics. Hence non-presidential elections get weighed differently in my mind that presidential ones. More importantly, I was able to focus on numerous Congressional races that year (Bob Casey in particular, but also Harold Ford, James Webb, and numerous others), in anticipation that, assuming they got into office, they might be able to contribute to a change in the party along the lines of my social hopes. Did that happen? Looking back at what I wrote following the 2006 midterms, I'd say the answer depends on your frame of reference--more than a few socially conservative and economically progressive representatives and senators did get elected, but did that suggest a movement in the Democratic party towards a greater acceptance of traditionalism and populism, or rather towards a kind of Perot-style "soft libertarian" nationalism? Or neither? Either way, 2008 and the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency is changing so much of what had been anticipated or calculated regarding the Democratic party; it's better to treat his candidacy and what he will mean and do as president on its own terms--and that means, for me at least, looking at his position on abortion separate from all that came before, and making a fresh judgment. Unfortunately, that doesn't making me feel any better.

I begin--and I know that for many of you this is old news, but bear with me--with the Democratic party's new platform language on abortion, language which Obama and his people helped to shape. It's language which drops the old Clintonian phrase about needing to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare," replacing it with an even stronger affirmation of the fundamentals of Roe v. Wade, while also making substantive, practical promises to assist women who choose not to have an abortion. As such, it's been praised by Democrats on both sides of the abortion divide. No one has done a better job at parcing than this language Steven Waldman, whose reporting--and conclusions--on this issue I've really come to trust. Here's his upshot:

It's classic Obama, really. Ultra-pragmatic, consensus-building, favoring incremental steps in the right direction over broad culture war battles....But the plank will end up as meaningless if Obama doesn't push the Third Way approach aggressively. He spoke a bit about it at Saddleback but it was overshadowed by his lousy answer on whether determining the beginning of life was above his pay grade. Dropping a sentence or two into Q&As is not going to do the trick, especially given the attacks against him as a pro-abortion extremist. The abortion issue is stuck in a particular groove. Both pro-life and pro-choice forces have something in common: they like to focus on questions about legal restrictions. Most Americans take a different view, wanting abortion to be legal despite thinking that it's wrong. The Democratic Party plank opened the door to a new abortion politics, but it's far from clear that Obama is going to plunge through the door and attempt to rally the country behind a Third Way approach.

What is the "Third Way" approach Waldman--and therefore presumably Obama--is referring to? In this case, it's the idea that arguments over abortion ought to eschew discussions of rights and restrictions, and instead treat the topic like a social problem, the sort that can best be resolved through changing the economic and health circumstances under which abortion as a choice enters into the discussion between a couple or between a woman and her doctor in the first place. Hence the argument, advanced by some (see here and here), that the Democratic party, under Obama's leadership, would do far more to practically advance the heart of the pro-life cause--namely, reducing or stopping or deterring abortion--than any amount of Republican braying about liberal appointments to the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade ever will.

Waldman, to his credit, is dubious about all this, and rightly so. The problem is not the proposals, all of which sound pretty appealing to me; indeed, the failure of the Republican party and the pro-life movement generally to think about social spending and instead to fetishize "life" as a slogan without thinking about the context within which it may be recognized as valuable in the first place is a huge failure on their part. But the same thing, only in the reverse, applies to Obama's Democratic party. In order for the "pro-Obama, pro-life" argument as a set of policies to be fully enacted, to even just be treated as a fully respectable policy option for a President Obama to pursue, there needs to be some recognition that the practice of abortion is, in the great majority of cases anyway, a wrong, a harm, one that may be and should be, however minimally, however subject to other civil rights and prudential concerns, a topic about which democratic and popular judgments which acknowledge that wrong or that harm can legitimately be made (as I've argued for before, and which, for all their limits and pitfalls, really do make a difference). And Obama's promises on the campaign trail, especially about the Freedom of Choice Act, would make that important element of pursuing a true Third Way, if not impossible, then perhaps at best only a little better than mere window dressing.

This does not mean that Obama has nothing at all to offer voters who, like me, consider abortion to be a wrong and a harm, and want to know if his apparent disagreement with or lack of acknowledgement of our considerations--at least insofar certain definitions of "wrong" or "harm" are concerned--means that our point of view is completely anathema to him, one with which there is no common ground possible. Such is not entirely the case, at least not insofar as I can tell. I'm not comfortable with the culture war language many others have used to describe the man; he doesn't strike me as an "abortion radical," if only because a great deal of the raw material used to construct that label depends upon extremely marginal evidence, such as his vote in the Illinois senate on the Born Alive bill. To be sure, the conclusions which can be drawn from Obama's vote against that bill, and the excuses he has come up for doing so, are pretty clear evidence on their own that Obama isn't often thinking seriously--when he thinks at all--about abortion. But to build a major case against the man on the basis of a legislative movement that is, to a great degree, a distraction and semantic trap, strikes me as a mistake, especially in light of his comments from the final debate, comments which, as Waldman insightfully observed, suggested an appreciation of those voters worried about abortion rights for reasons having to do with sexuality and responsibility and religiosity and dignity. Which really means me, I guess. (The fact that strongly pro-choice defenders of Roe v. Wade read his comments the same way suggests that I'm not wrong in seeing Obama's words in this light.)

But maybe all this just suggests that I'm the problem; that I'm looking for words and possibilities--not likely ones, but at least glimmers of potential ones, if nothing else--to put off having to put my own beliefs regarding abortion fully on the line, and measure them against a candidate I'm not crazy about, but whom, despite his flaws, I've nonetheless really come to respect. So maybe I should do that here.

But my own beliefs regarding abortion aren't the sort of thing which are really amenable to being put on a line, because they aren't black and white. Or rather, I believe that there are black and whites out there in the thicket of issues surrounding the practice of abortion, but they aren't always blacks and white which can be codified morally, much less legally. Sometimes they can be, and indeed, I would insist that perhaps often they both can and should be...but still, not always. I admire--and in some ways even envy--the serious but relatively straightforward electoral calculations that Ross Douthat describes abortion opponents needing to make here, drawing upon the wise words of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. But then, I'm not Catholic--I'm not even, as the words are usually used, "pro-life." I don't, to get right down to theological fundamentals, believe that after my death I will be confronted by the souls of the victims of abortion in the next life; Mormon theology just doesn't support a reading of the human spirit and its creation along those lines. Or, at least, it doesn't mandate such a reading. But I must admit it may be--for a variety of reasons, grounded in scripture as much as politics and culture and demographics--moving in that direction, and is therefore calling me out as a believer and as an opponent of essentially unlimited abortion rights to oppose Obama's candidacy, if only with my own symbolic vote here in Kansas. This is almost certainly would be the view of Mormon bloggers I respect like Adam Greenwood; I would be willing to wager it is similarly--and more importantly, for a believer like myself--is almost certainly the view of many, if not all, of the leaders of my church. Implicitly refuting the facile answer Obama gave at the Saddleback forum to a question about abortion and the status of the fetus (his "that question...is above my pay grade" comment, a comment which he subsequently admitted was too flip, but which hangs around his neck nonetheless), Elder Russell M. Nelson defended a basically Catholic/natural-law understanding of human development by detailing the growth of a person from conception on, and asserting that "to legislate when a developing life is considered 'meaningful' is presumptive and quite arbitrary, in my opinion." Moreover, rebuking the Obama's idea that abortion is a "moral and ethical" issue about which we need to respect the "profound struggles" which go into making a decision about abortion, Elder Dallin H. Oaks suggests that it is our obligation as believers to shape society positively, which means in particular in this case to "encourage righteous choices on matters [like abortion, which] God’s servants have defined as serious sins." And there are many more instances I could invoke besides these. Put it all together and it suggests a much more simple calculation--a calculation that may not involve a confrontation between our spirits and those which abortion killed whom we did not express ourselves on behalf of, but perhaps something close. Something much more substantive, anyway, than my own preferred mucking about with questions of responsibility and relationships and reduction. Something which--when set against Obama's honest statement at Saddleback that "if you believe that life begins at conception and you are consistent in that belief, then I can't argue with you on that because that"--seems to point towards only one conclusion.

And then there is this: just as above I admitted that the election of a president alters the way I prioritize voting issues, even though I don't think I should, it is similarly the case that discussions of Roe v. Wade affect me, even though I wish it were the case that the Supreme Court played a much smaller role in our lives as American citizens than it does presently. Because Roe v. Wade was, in my view, not just badly decided, but one of the most pernicious decisions the Supreme Court has ever given us, a decision which has had massive and mostly negative consequences for our collective ability--or even our willingness--to use legislatures to seek for the kind of democratic compromises which true self-government depends upon. In other words, again, I find myself nodding along with Ross Douthat: "returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life." (And again: "[A]ny middle-ground, 'compromise' position on abortion [worth being called such]...would have to entail returning control over abortion policy to the legislative branch, and implementing, at the very least, more European-style restrictions on second and third-trimester abortions.")

So perhaps that clinches it? It's a presidential election, and there is likely to be at least one--if not two or three or four--position on the Supreme Court that'll open up over the next four years. Shouldn't I vote for McCain, if only for my own personal satisfaction, so as to vainly gesture (vain because 1) McCain isn't going to be elected, and 2) McCain probably wouldn't be able to get a truly reliable pro-life judge past a Democratic senate) in the direction of a defeat of Roe v. Wade? Moreover, perhaps Obama's language regarding abortion is all therapeutic nonsense and weak promissory notes at the very most. Shouldn't I vote for McCain, if only as the only responsible candidate on my ballot who can receive a vote to register my frustration at being obliged to overlook many admirable things in order to be counted in opposition to one truly evil thing?

But no. To walk away from standing up for many good things in the name of speaking out against one great bad thing doesn't necessarily lead to McCain: it could just as easily, here in Kansas anyway, lead me to Charles Baldwin and the Constitution Party, or Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party, and then I'd be investing myself, however nominally, in a whole host of presumptions--social and economic, as well as moral--that run even further against my overall political philosophy than McCain does...there have, after all, been a few things that I've supported McCain on, once upon a time: national service, election reform, etc. (Of course, there's also Ralph Nader, who is pretty squishy on the whole matter of abortion, but I believe I'm going to arbitrarily rule that I refuse to vote for the same person for president more than twice. Anyway, when I look at that range of options, I demur. I just don't believe it--or a I don't want to believe it. Maybe, on some terribly insignificant level, my turning away from the strong likelihood that an Obama presidency will take stands on abortion that will make things, in my view, worse rather than better in regards to that one issue; my grasping at straws ("sexuality is sacred," the responsibility of parents, reducing the need for abortion through social spending, etc., etc.) in the face of the obvious conclusion that Senator Obama is, while perhaps not a radical, than at least, as Steve Waldman put it, "very, very, very pro-choice"; my denial, if that's what it is, is simply some evidence in favor of all those conservative Republicans who have insisted that Obama's celebrity, his "cult," has convinced people to abandon their good judgment in the name of "hope."

Well, I do have hopes for what a President Obama will do--a lot of hopes, in fact. And my fears regarding what his presidency will mean for the future of abortion in America do not outweigh those hopes. Perhaps this is because I guess I'm not fully a believer in my own church's stated doctrine (or, to be exact here, in the direction which that stated doctrine seems to be evolving, even assuming that my own interpretations and applications of said doctrine adhere completely with the ones promulgated by church leaders; in the meantime, the fact that my church officially distinguishes between "the crime of abortion" and "the shedding of innocent human blood" suggests that there is at least a little bit of ambiguity left yet). Perhaps this is because Obama's focus on the social and economic context within which choices are made--whether for aborting a child or for raising and nurturing it as one should--fits in better with my own basic understanding of how to build a more egalitarian world in the midst of diversity and poverty. Perhaps this is because my own grasp of the communal dimensions of human life and politics necessitates that any serious ethic in the service of life and families and tradition--which would include a deterrance of abortion--be joined with a concern for the common good which focuses on overall well-being, and not just one's "ownership" of that which one claims as one's own. (In this final analysis, the Republican party platform today is more obsessed with "rights" than the Democratic party one, and all the worse for it.) Perhaps this is because I really am more interested in social justice than social righteousness. Or, perhaps I'm superficial, and I just like the cut of Obama's jib.

In the end, I feel conflicted. I feel conflicted because it may very well be that in four or eight years, the movement to discourage or deter abortion will, in the face of a newly invigorated Roe v. Wade-supporting majority, have been ground down to nearly nothing, with the concomitant result that one of the most important obstacles, in my view, to the thorough-going commodification of our sense of human life, to the increasingly disposable way in which we view relationships and sexuality and the obligations they should entail, will be all but silent. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that all the good things that an Obama presidency may involve--a return to responsibility, a grasp of both the costs of and the need for genuine compassion and fairer taxation and better health in America--might rebound to make neighborhoods and families and jobs sufficiently more secure and stable as to make those same trends somewhat more minimal, or at least to hold them in place. And I hope, most of all, that my doubts are validated, and that when I die, my support in this election for a proponent of a terrible (perhaps very occasionally necessary, but still terrible) abortion regime, won't count against me at the judgment bar.

Scary Movies

I still haven't written my post(s) on the election. Is it pointless now? Probably not; it's all basically self-expression anyway, as I can't imagine anyone's vote being changed one way or another by what I write here, so why would it matter that I don't throw in my two cents until almost the very last moment? Anyway, would you believe I'm one of the undecided? Well, no, not really; but I am one of the conflicted. Thankfully, I still have the weekend and next Monday to bare my soul in that regard.

But today, something light--or, rather, appropriately enough for the holiday, dark. I surveyed some friends, asking a basic question: what's the most frightened you've ever been by a movie? Not exactly the same as asking what the scariest movie you've ever seen is; it's a little more pointed, and the responses were a little more diverse. Here are some selections:

Invasion of the Saucer-men: just another run-of-the-mill dopey late 50s sci-fi flick, but one of my friends points out the seriously creepy scene from the movie (which he saw on tv as a child) where the aliens pick a fight with--and murder--a cow.

The Wizard of Oz: either the moment where the Wicked Witch appears in the crystal ball, replacing the vision of Auntie Em and terrifying Dorothy, or the first appearance of the flying monkeys.

Wait Until Dark: of course, the climax when the screen goes black, and you have nothing to go off except the bumps and curses and screams issuing from the darkness.

Jaws: the "reveal scene," when Chief Brody is tossing chum into the water, frustrated at his shipmates and his task, and the shark suddenly appears. "You're going to need a bigger boat!"

The Night of the Living Dead (the original black and white version): several truly terrifying and dispiriting memories from this classic--the nerve-wracking attempted escape from the farmhouse, the zombie daughter feeding on her father's flesh in the basement, and of course, the horribly bleak ending.

Alien: very simply, the best haunted house movie ever. And, as such, it's the spooky "where-is-the-alien?" moments which work best...like when Dallas is hunting for the alien in the Nostromo's air shafts, and the alien find him.

The Blair Witch Project: the whole damn final 40 minutes of the film, but particularly the panicked, mad, disorienting, terrifying race through the woods to the abandoned house. I'm a grown man, and I swear, I had to turn on the lights, the movie was freaking me out so much.

The Exorcist: I have never been so believably persuaded of the fear communicated by actors in a film as I was--and still am; just for old time's sake, I rewatched this film last night, and the moment still captivates and terrifies me--when I saw the hunched, driven look on Jason Miller's face as Father Damien Karras joins with Father Merrin in the rite of exorcism. Absolutely haunting, absolutely transporting, and not at all in a good way. "The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!!"

If anyone reads this, feel free to share you favorite moments of personal terror at the movies. It is Halloween, after all.

I. Love. This.

From Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic:

I have not yet been asked for my vote by a candidate who represents the entirety of my convictions. I am not dismayed by this. Politics should not provide the most complete or the most profound of life's satisfactions. Voting is not an expression of the soul. Anyway, my convictions do not add up. I like taxes and I like the military. (The only thing Obama said in any of those dreary debates that delighted me was his muffled admission the other night that "I don't mind paying a little more" taxes. Taxation is a strong sign of membership in a polity; and the many calamities of recent years have confirmed to me that the government needs my money, because there are emergencies, within and beyond our borders, with which only it can deal.) I want universal health care and I want an interventionist foreign policy. I believe that the American president should help people in distress, at home and abroad--not all of them, but a lot of them. I like capitalism, but not religiously, and I feel the same way about diplomacy. I do not trust bankers to understand American values and poets to understand American interests. Taken together, these are political inconsistencies, but they are not intellectual inconsistencies. It is not my problem that the political culture of this country has made the liberalism that I inherited, and of which I was honored to become an heir, seem incoherent. Or maybe it is my problem: after all, I have to vote.

I wouldn’t have picked all of the same examples of "inconsistencies" which he does...but I would have picked more than a few of them. More importantly, I probably would have used different language than he does in regards to voting; as I've argued before, I actually do think voting is at least as much an "expressive" act as anything else, though I suppose I would agree that whatever is being expressed through one’s choice isn’t necessarily one’s "soul." But in any case, this is a great paragraph, one which sums up my general feelings when I approach the voting booth more succinctly and accurately than most anything I’ve ever read, not to mention anything I’ve ever written.

Well, twelve days until the election. I suppose if I have anything relevant left to say about the contest at hand, I'd better say it quick. I do have at least one more post about both Obama and McCain in the works; I'll try to get them done soon. In the meantime, as the saying goes, read the whole thing; even if you're not a likely Obama voter (which Wieseltier is), I think you'll find that it's pretty darn good.

Paul Farmer: Conservatism, Socialism, and Ambivalence

Via Rod Dreher, I see that Alan Jacobs has written in praise of Tracy Kidder's remarkable portrait of Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. I cannot agree more with what Alan has written: the story of Dr. Farmer--a Duke and Harvard- educated specialist in infectious diseases who has devoted his life to serving the poorest of the poor in Haiti's central plateau, as well as many other places around the world through numerous organizations his expertise and unflagging determination has led him to found or otherwise become involved in--is a beautiful and important one, one which challenges in a very direct sense what our priorities are. It is a book that we are reading here at Friends University as part of our First Year Experience for incoming freshman and transfer students. I wish I could say that all of them are appreciating the message--or at least are finding themselves slapped in the face occasionally by the message--of the story of Paul Farmer, but I'm not sure that's happening. But then again, as Alan points out, Dr. Farmer is himself sympathetic to the idea of the "long defeat," the idea that most battles will be lost, that most seeds which are sown are going to fall on stony ground, that most good deeds will (at best!) simply keep people alive and happy for one more day, until--perhaps--someday, maybe soon, maybe years and years hence, they will be remembered and will expand into a transformation of a person's heart and mind or perhaps even the society around them. Until then, you educate, you serve, you struggle.

A couple of things worth adding to Alan's and Rod's points. First, to get a sense of the man, and what he's all about, check out this recent 60 Minutes interview. It's on the maudlin and simplistic side--like all network television news, I'm afraid--but it gets, I think, the most important things about Farmer's background, drive, and daily life correct:



Second, let's be very clear on what Farmer has to say to all the rest of us. It is a message that focuses on 1) his belief in the absolute right of all human beings--including especially those perhaps 2.5 billion people around the world who survive on the equivalent of $2 or less day--have to basic sustainability and medical care, and 2) his deep conviction that fulfilling step 1) cannot be done through casual charity or even liberal redistribution programs (though both certainly help!): it's going to require genuine social and cultural sacrifice and change:

Just when you thought had the hang of his worldview, [Farmer would] surprise you. He had problems with groups that on the surface would have seemed like allies, that often were allies in fact, with for example what he called "WL's"--white liberals, some of whose most influential spokespeople were black and prosperous. "I love WL's, love 'em to death. They're on our side....But WL's think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that. There's a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It's what separates us from roaches." [MBM, pg. 40].

What about those who don't feel pity? I mean, isn't that one of the classic arguments for avoiding utopian or socialist thinking: the truth that in a free society--and we all believe in at least a little bit of individual freedom here, don't we?--there's going to be diversity and differences and disagreements, and as such any attempt to impose communitarian, much less any morally felt obligations of service and sacrifice is going to fail? Hence, we have to trust in the free market, or at most, in some egalitarian taxing and re-arranging of it, and hope that charity takes care of the rest. It's a strong point...but one that, as Dr. Farmer's constant, unending scrambling for funds and his unceasing labors in the field both make clear, still leaves millions of people dying from treatable diseases every year. (You want statistics? How about this: in 1995, "UNICEF estimated that the total cost of providing basic social services in the developing countries, including health, education, family planning, and clean water, would cost $30 to $40 billion per year. At the time the rich of the world were spending more than this on golf each year" [Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity, pg. 17].) Dr. Farmer's story--his life--teaches, in my view at least, a central truth about serving the poor: that a commitment to social justice will, and probably should, hurt. Indeed, being sensitive to that hurt is what can make you aware of, and willing to do something for, the society around you in the first place:

"If you're making sacrifices [Farmer once said], unless you're automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you're trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don't have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence." He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn't bristle, but his tone had an edge: "I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent." [MBM, pg. 24]

Farmer was raised a Christian believer, but only became truly committed during his years of going back and forth between Harvard and Haiti: "The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor--not just in Haiti but elsewhere too--made me even more convinced that faith must be something good" [MBM, pg. 85]. He became a fierce advocate of that element of Catholic social justice teaching that emphasizes giving preference to the poor, or the "option for the poor." For Farmer, this has meant liberation theology, and a thoroughgoing critique of the failures of the rich capitalist nations of the world to attend to the manifest and desperate needs of the poorest of the poor. Socialism? Farmer's not an economist, nor is he a theorist: he is, in his own words, "an action kind of guy" [MBM, pg. 79], and so he likes the untheoretical pragmatism of social justice in the context of a place like Haiti: socialism simply means prioritizing social goods, such as those support mechanisms whereby the poor do not necessarily die when they might be easily saved, and that means regularly providing sufficient for the poor to receive the service and remediation they require. Figuring out what role the state should have to do with it all comes along later, and probably would need to change as the times do.

Ambivalence--and the properly conservative understanding that, over the long haul, even one's best efforts in this fallen world won't add up to very much--ought to keep those who dream of perfect liberation and justice from trying to harden their revolutionary plans into a rigorous dogma. It is a hopeful, yet chastened, appreciation of what it means to be a Christian or just a decent human being, and thus feel obligated (to feel "oppressed," as I once put it) and serve the poor; an appreciation driven by ambivalence, and a sense of limits and of the tragic, and most importantly one focused on the personal and the local alongside the social and economic, rather than scampering off in search of easy ideological solutions. Those so-called "conservatives" who write off his vision as "abominable," as well as those "white liberals" who admire him from a safe suburban distance while they write him a check, don't get it. I can't say I fully get it...at least, not yet. But I'm trying.

Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford, You Moron

Via Laura, I have learned that, in this time of economic crisis, Saturday Night Live is way ahead of all of us, as usual:



And in case you're wondering, the title of this post applies at least as much to Melissa and I as it does to any likely reader, so hey, don't get offended, man.

Incidentally, Laura has written on this topic before, more or less; you can read my runimations on her thoughts, but it's better just to read her directly.

Not so incidentally, Laura's family has had some rough times lately, and the times may just get worse for them. So send some prayers and good thoughts their way, everyone. Thanks.

Bailout Questions from Kansas (Populist Alternatives, Socialist Realities, and Progressive Compromises)

This past Friday, I appeared on Kansas Week to discuss, among other things, the bailout bill which had finally passed the House of Representatives and been signed by the president just a few hours earlier. I can't imagine the readership of this blog and the viewing population of Kansas Week overlaps at all (except maybe for you, Caleb!), but in case there is someone out there who saw me on KPTS, and is a little confused about what I said there on the one hand, and what I said here and here on the other, let me see if I can elaborate just a bit more.

(I've sent a version of this post to the Wichita Eagle; we'll see if they ever run it. [Update: here it is.])

My main point during the discussion was that the remarkable amount of uniformity in the Kansas Congressional delegation's "no" votes (Senators Brownback and Roberts both voted no, in a vote that ended last week 74-25 in favor of the bailout package, and Representatives Boyda, Moran and Tiahrt--three out of Kansas's four representatives in the House--voted no not just once, but twice) needn't be shocking; it just needed to be explained. This was a huge vote, in political terms; the president, both major presidential candidates, and the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House and Senate all pushed for it. To go against that kind of pressure suggests either seriously political calculations, or serious convictions, or both. It would be nice, especially as four of these five people come back to Kansas to campaign for re-election, to be able to get them to elaborate upon what their votes meant. I think I got that point across, however briefly. But along the way, there were a couple of things said that needed more context. One was an unfair comment about some politicians engaging in "populist pandering"; another was my final observation that I would have liked the bailout plan a lot more if there had been more "honesty" about what it involved. Let me see if I can situate both comments a little better.

We all know that the debate over this bill was a contentious one. In the end, as is usually the case in our democracy, impassioned words and party directives were not enough, and the votes for this complicated, unpopular, and very expensive proposal had to be bought, with the final bill being sweetened with over $100 billion worth of tax benefits, federal guarantees, and outright pork, all to win over enough Republican and Democrat representatives for it to pass. (By which time, incidentally, it had expanded to an 460-page monster). And even still, five out of Kansas's six federal politicians said no. Why?

Was it simple political calculation? In the Senate in particular, that explanation is pretty believable. The U.S. Senate is, by design, a fairly elite body, and there was never much doubt that the majority of U.S. senators would be moved by elite financial considerations–crumbling credit markets, stock portfolios and retirement plans losing value, access to business loans drying up, etc. Running angrily against Wall Street’s "greed" always good politics, even if there’s no substantive populism or suggestions of reform laying behind one’s criticisms, and so it’s not surprising that Pat Roberts–who, on the basis of his record, doesn’t have a single economically populist bone in his body–took a look at where the votes stood amongst his colleagues, and figured that he could afford to rail against the bill for the benefit of Kansas voters, confident that it would still pass. The same kind of calculation could explain the second votes of Boyda, Moran, and Tiahrt; they could see that enough of their colleagues had changed their minds so as to make certain that a bill which most of the Republican and Democratic establishments were firmly behind, and so they could afford to vote to show off their anger for the folks back home. (And lets not forget the presence of your usual interest group quid pro quos: in both the Senate and the House, the Congresspeople who had received the most campaign support from the financial sector were the most likely to support the bill. You stratch my back, I'll stratch yours, etc.)

But perhaps all that is too cynical. After all, how to explain our representatives’ first votes? How to explain the vote of Senator Brownback, who isn’t up for re-election this year? Brownback, in contrast to Roberts, actually does occasionally make Huckabee-style populist-type arguments, and so perhaps his no vote was more principled; might the same be said for Boyda, Moran, and Tiahrt?

I don't want to pick out or particularly criticize this reaction; far from it. I am a populist--at least, of a sort--and I respect populist arguments. The problem is that so often populism is treated cheaply as a style, without any real thought of the costly (and, yes, often comprehensive) reforms that would be necessary to make a populist economics and politics substantively worth pursuing. And so, when I hear attacks on Wall Street, I want to ask: is the populist anger at and defiance of Wall Street which, perhaps, Boyda and Moran and Tiahrt showed, directed at contemporary financial capitalism itself? Do they have something substantive to say about today’s economic world, so heavily dependent upon credit, debt, consumption, investments, and constant expansion? Will they follow up their populist attack on this admittedly astonishing and desperate power and money grab by the federal government, with an attack on those citizens–the rich, surely, but also the middle-class–who have allowed economic sovereignty to slip through their fingers, leveraging themselves for the sake of ever bigger homes, ever nicer cars, ever more profitable investment and retirement plans, ever more expensive universities for their children? In other words, would they be willing to explain their no votes as an expression for contempt not only for the financiers as the top who sent Wall Street’s banks reeling, but also for those average citizens who put the tools for doing so into those financiers’ hands?

A couple of weeks ago, Rod Dreher kindly linked to this old paper of mine, which was one of my several attempts over the years to put populist thinking to work in addressing the practical social and economic problems which farmers and those who depend upon them--which means, of course, all of us--face in America today. Rod is a fan of the populist alternative, but he also recognizes that pursuing real social and economic sovereignty is going to require supportive communitarian values to sustain it, and he, perhaps rightly, that "our culture is too fractured to form any stable populist political coalition," adding that: "Are you really going to get people who are pro-life and pro-choice, who are for affirmative action and against affirmative action, who are for gay marriage and against gay marriage, to put all that aside and unite around a populist economic agenda?" He makes a good argument, an argument which, in terms of this blog at least, goes a long way back: all the way back to when, in the wake of the 2004 elections, I was talking in this post (and this one too) about how the only way a genuinely liberal egalitarian politics (which I've since come to believe necessitates a significant populist component) was going to survive was if we could create--or recover!--a left which could contribute to, and become more supportive of, the "conservation" of a common culture, including a religious one. Perhaps Rod's right that such is a lost cause; that any common culture America once had is irretrievable, leaving us with just the "Benedictine option" as our only alternative. I hope not, if only because, as much as I have learned from McIntyre and all the various types of "Benedictines" who are following the path he gestured towards, in the end I fear too many people--too many poor people, too many unpopular or marginal people--would be left behind if we all dissolved into such routes. But anyway, in the meantime I nonetheless keep an ear out for populist rhetoric...and when I suspect it's being used, I want the people using it to treat it with some respect, not just as cheap vote-earning ploy.

Back to the bailout questions. All this aside, perhaps there was nothing populist about all these no votes whatsoever: perhaps, instead, they were expressions of libertarian conviction that, in a free market, banks that take risks with their assets must be allowed to fail. Well, you know how I feel about libertarianism, especially in the context of the farming Kansas voters depend upon and ritually praise. Still, I would love nonetheless to hear expressions of such conviction from our representatives’ lips. I think it would take remarkable political bravery for politicians running for re-election to look in the eye small business owners, farmers, students, and all others who depend upon solvent banks and flowing credit lines to pay their bills, cover their inventory, and handle their costs, and tell them that if they took a risk--and that includes putting their financial needs and decisions into others’ hands--then they need to be able to deal with the consequences. I would really respect such an answer, knowing as it does that it would mean a rebuke to all the safety nets, both corporate as well as governmental, which the great majority of Americans have come to plan their lives around. I wouldn't expect politicians who gave such answers to have a very long career in office, but it would be good to hear such honesty while we could.

Of course, populist anger and libertarian conviction do not exhaust all possible answers our senators and representatives to give to us. One could have voted no because one wished to express discomfort with granting this kind of power and financial discretion to a thoroughly unpopular and discredited president, and preferred to wait (and let Wall Street wait) until a different administration was in power. Or, one could have voted no because one genuinely did not agree with the plan to empower the Treasury Secretary to attempt to jump start the credit market by driving up demand for the business of these banks through bidding and negotiating for their assets. (The lack of confidence in international and credit markets over the past couple of days suggests that, whatever else is true, the promise of the approved plan alone is no magic bullet to putting things back the way they were, assuming that is even possible.) Perhaps one voted no because one actually preferred a more honestly socialist response, in which the federal government nationalized these banks or their transactions, and thus made voters not just indirect beneficiaries of any money that might be recouped though the recovery of Wall Street banks, but actual owners of the assets in question themselves. (This is the approach Sweden took during a similar banking crisis in that country fifteen years ago, and it seems to have worked well, though I doubt the Sweden social democratic model was on the mind of anyone who voted on this bill last week.)

Let's talk about Sweden for a moment, not just because I've brought it up already, and not just because a whole bunch of other bloggers are doing the same, but because it goes to the heart of what I meant about wishing our Congressional delegation could have been more "honest" about what they were voting on.

Some time ago, Patrick Deneen (who was on the same panel at which I presented the paper linked to above...small world!) posted a bit of a screed on his blog about "progressivism." His basic aim was to attack John Dewey and show the connection between his belief that, when properly educated, a people through democratic action can rise up and distinguish themselves from the "savages" back home in their primitive communities, and the tendency for elites today to freak out when a cultural "throwback" like Sarah Palin comes onto the scene. He makes a decent point (though Dewey is a complex figure; alongside his easy dismissal of any kind of traditionalism is a thoughtful understanding of how communitarian practices and goods need to undergird democracy)...but in any case, it is a limited point. Progressivism's cultural sins were, from my point of view (and Patrick's too) legion; that I don't deny. You can't be a reader of Christopher Lasch and not recognize that. But one of the problems with such a condemnation of the progressive movement in American history is that it fails to acknowledge the fact that so many of the "savages" that rose up within their communities--communities across the American South and Midwest, communities in Kansas too!--and called themselves "populists" (whether they actually joined the People's or Populist parties or not) found a home for themselves, a decade or two later, in progressive movements with the Democratic and Republican parties. William Jennings Bryan is the best example here, but he's not alone. Of course, such populists could be called--and historically were sometimes called--traitors to the cause (and worse), but the fact remains: when populist reforms ran aground, Progressivism pushed forward many of their same aims, and then some.

I'm thinking here about Camassia's comment on the aforementioned post, in which she asked some pointed questions about economic sovereignty and social democracy and localism: how much is too much? How can you tell good local control from bad? Sweden is a fascinating site for thinking about the balance between community and populism and local cultural authority, on the one hand, and the desire to generate and spread some wealth, on the other. The reason why it's fascinating is because it is a thoroughly modern capitalist nation-state, but it is also rather small. I noted that in my post, and Tyler Cowen picked up on it as well, turning it into a point of critique: in arguing against the Swedish approach to managing this kind of economic crisis--basically, nationalizing the banks and taking public ownership of the assets in questions directly--he observes that "Swedish governance is in many ways of higher quality than American governance. It involves lower transactions costs, more social unity, and it is more inclusive of many different interest groups....The Swedish banking system is also "small as a whole" compared to surrounding markets; you can't say that about the USA....[Moreover, the] U.S. doesn't have any tradition of successful nationalization....The diffuse and highly federalistic American political system is lacking in accountability and thus it is poorly suited for such policy actions." These are an important considerations: the kind of decisions we can make in the face of huge, costly, complicated economic crises, crises of a sort that so many unthinking and everyday modern liberal capitalist presumptions and activities--presumptions and activities that involve one's home, one's workplace, one's children--are implicated in it...well, said decisions are going to be, by definition, shaped by our size and our self-understanding and our history. Which, of course, isn't a socialist one. And so, as much as I think it's obviously that socialist solutions are the only one's available to those a modern state (and a modern state of being) that, in pursuit of greater justice and equality and comfort, has already exchanged one form of (negative) liberty for another (positive) sort--Daniel Larison, whom Ross Douthat is quoting in the above link, is a great thinker, but he doesn't often appreciate that "freedom from fear" is a real liberty too!--it nonetheless may be the case that neither the populist alternative, nor the socialist reality, is really practical. So what is left? Why, progressive compromises of course. (Senator Obama to the rescue? Perhaps, perhaps not. But as Noah Millman put it, there's only one party whose leadership appears to be fully serious about the compromises were faced with, and it's not McCain's.)

In any case, these are the sort of political thoughts and questions which we Kansas voters ought to be following up on, and which our no-voting politicians ought to be answering. Just because the bailout finally passed doesn't mean the debate should be over; the contrary, it's only beginning. In the meantime, it's Tuesday, and I'm going to watch the debate tonight. Will I see any of this, one way or another, on display in Tennessee tonight? I doubt it...but you never know.

I'm Raising a Daughter from the 80s

I'm helping the other girls--ages 8 and almost-5; the 2-year-old is already asleep--pick-up the downstairs playroom before bed. In the background, our oldest--Megan, 12 years old--is doing some math homework.

At about 7:40pm, I realize Megan is playing some music in her room. The song? Van Halen's "So This is Love."

A few minutes later, I pick up on another song coming from her room: Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing."

"Megan," I ask her, poking my head through her open door into her bedroom, "why are you listening to this station?"

"I like it," she says. "It helps me concentrate."

She has an MP3 player, which she often downloads music for, whenever she can afford it. "Is there anything you'd rather be listening to?"

"No; I like what this station plays a lot." She looks at me curiously. "Is there a problem?"

"Not really," I say, hoping she doesn't listen to lyrics any more than I did at her age. "It's just, well, the songs this station is playing are pretty old. I can remember listening to them while doing my homework in high school."

"Oh." She shrugs, and looks back down at her math homework. "I hadn't noticed."

As of this point, the music from her room has continued: Prince's "Little Red Corvette," Steve Miller Band's "The Joker," Eurythmics's "Sweet Dreams," Bee Gees's "Night Fever," Huey Lewis and the News's "I Want a New Drug."

Apparently we are not only managing to raise an FM-station listening daughter from the 1980s, but one that is every bit as MOR as I was at that age. Thank goodness things never change.

Rosh Hashanah (Happy 5769, Everybody!)

It was a beautiful afternoon and evening today here in Wichita. A strong breeze was blowing, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying the late September warmth as I rode my bike home from work, watching the sun turn slightly orange as it approached the horizon. And then, when I got home, the smell of challah bread, fresh from the oven.

Four years and a couple of weeks ago, I wrote my first Rosh Hashanah post. At the time, we were living in northeastern Arkansas. Now we're living in south-central Kansas. Neither, as you might guess, are major centers of America's Jewish population. So while I have Jewish friends, we haven't ever had Jewish neighbors (at least, not so far as we've ever known) during our sojourn through the American South and Midwest. Hence, we've never been able to get caught up in, or even just catch a small glimpse of, this holiday in its full civic aspect. So why write about it, especially seeing as how I'm not Jewish and won't be attending synagogue tomorrow? Well, because it's a new beginning, and I'm nuts for beginnings...especially those that I can tie into the calendar, and to however small a degree, make into something about where we are, and where we're going. To paraphrase some of I wrote back in 2004:

Melissa and I incorporate just about any holiday we can plausibly conceive of a connection to into our family life. Traditional Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas, of course, but also various religious festivals connected to cultures and places with which we have some affinity: St. Andrew’s Day and St. Lucia's Day during the holiday season, for example. Then there are outright national, civic holidays: Independence Day, of course, but also German Reunification Day (seeing as how our lifestyle gets in the way of celebrating Oktoberfest to its fullest) and the Korean Thanksgiving, Ch'usok. And we celebrate Rosh Hashanah. We don’t doing anything special--talk to the kids a little bit about the history and experience of the Jews, and eat some of Melissa's excellent challah bread for an evening meal after sundown--and I won’t pretend that we’re somehow plugging into something deeply authentic by putting it on our own personal (Mormon, American) calendars....But I'm glad we do it anyway, and not just because it gives me the ability to take a nice early morning walk and, justifiably or not, lend the beginning of the day a certain (admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but nonetheless meaningful) significance.

Holidays are a way of putting ourselves in time, marking ourselves in relation to things that came before and things yet to come, people long dead and people yet to be born. Much communitarian thinking may, perhaps, be rightfully derided for being more a matter of philosophical anthropology than political theory, for failing to give any concreteness to the socially and morally necessary imperative to belong, but reflecting on holidays is one such area of inquiry where that accusation is, I think, clearly unwarranted. The calendric sense of recognition and orientation (not to mention the opportunity for association and celebration) afforded by holidays represents an affective binding at least as important, if not more so, than that associated with more explicitly shared beliefs, boundaries, or civic habits....True, few Americans today live a sufficiently pious or agricultural life for liturgical or seasonal holidays to much normative force; believe me, we've packed up the kids and gone to see a movie on Christmas, just like the rest of you. But the eclipse of a holiday’s traditional restrictive authority doesn't mean its ability to help us "authorize" a particular moment, or turn, or feeling, or resolution in our lives has been lost. On the contrary, it's still there. All we need to do is invest the effort to get into its rhythm, rather than letting the commodification and banalization which so many holidays have fallen victim to (President's Day, anyone?) excuse us from examining their significance.

I'm not Jewish. But I know that for millions of people, carrying with them a history of thousands of years, tonight at sundown a New Year began. The mere fact that for many of those millions that history doesn't matter much may be worth pondering...but it isn't, I think, an argument that the holiday can no longer be meaningful, in however small and simple a way, to anyone at all.

Life continues on: it's one damn thing after another, it's daily. More debt. More crises. More charges on the credit card. More bad times--but also, more good ones too. We get all the tomatoes out of garden, and now it's time to transplant the blackberry bushes. I get paid. Melissa gets a book review done. We have some friends over for dinner. The girls are getting older. We carry on. It's nice, in the midst of this, to pause, to mark an ending...and then, after we eat, to know that it's beginning all over again.