Disney Does It Right

I agree with the film critic from The Telegraph: this is the best work of animation from Disney that I've seen in years. I saw it twice in the theater--the kids enjoyed Wreck-It-Ralph, as did I, enough that we went to see it two times during the holiday season. Both times this little film which played before Ralph, like the best short cartoons, simply melted us with its humor and beauty. The technique behind it--read the above article to learn about the new software used in making Paperman, or read this interview, or watch this video--is fascinating: actual hand-drawn flourishes animated on top of the CGI base. There's a wonderful style to it, and reading through the comments on the blogs reveals all sorts of at first unnoticed touches: the shape of the characters echo Aladdin, the paper airplanes hearken to the opening of Fantasia: 2000, and the hero's boss looks like no one so much as Bryon Brassballs from Dark Knight Returns. Endless levels here--which is what the best art is supposed to provide. Anyway, enjoy.

"Our Crab Guys, They Don't Have Meat."

Very nice, and the Beyonce is a serious improvement. But honestly, if these chaps had any real guts, they would have gone after the Inaugural Poem. That really needed it.

Glenn Beck Gives Utopia a Bad Name

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So Glenn Beck has proposed his grandest scheme yet: the construction of separate planned community, literally built around (in terms of architecture and overall design) the idealization (and arguably the idol-ization) of what he understands to be "quintessentially American" principles, to be called "Independence, USA." It'll be built somewhere in Texas, at a likely cost of over $2 billion, but Beck is not deterred; this is something, he says, the God is inspiring him to do.

Mockery ensures, of course, and at least some of that is deserved. If you watched his whole presentation (and I urge you to do so, starting here), it gets rather difficult to be sure exactly where Beck's ideas for a theme park end (so much of his vision apparently being preoccupied with the creation of media centers which will tell entertaining but "true" stories, beginning this year with the creation of a multi-media extravaganza about, it seems, the epic American battle of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, told from the point of view of the moon), and where his ideas for an actual living space begin. At one point in the presentation, while talking about the need for real self-sufficiency in Independence, Beck gestures at a picture of some powerful wind turbines built on a hill over the community, but then later says they were a mistake, inserted by the sneaky employee at Blaze TV just to piss Beck off, leaving the question of how this community will obtain its energy unresolved. He apparently likely imagines it being built somewhere in north Texas, but how many people will live there, or why they will move, or what they will do there, is similarly in need of more detail.

I'm sufficiently in sync with the cultural preferences of my mostly left-leaning academic tribe that such mockery of Beck comes easily to me; I've done it before, and will likely do it again. But in truth, I find Beck's utopian dreaming more fascinating than ridiculous. For starters, what kind of community does he have in mind here? Most of those who have reported on his grandiose vision have labeled it "libertarian" or "Ayn-Rand-inspired," comparing it with such paranoid ventures as The Citidel or, more ominously and meanly, Jonestown. Obviously you can't dismiss that kind of motivation; Beck has never pretended not to be inspired by the radical libertarianism/constitutionalism/individualism of a John Galt or a Ron Paul. And the problems with this kind of extremism, a real fetishization of personal liberty, are obvious; as Peter Levine tartly observes, if you truly take this kind of rejection of all forms of collectivism seriously, than "you secede from the corrupt, liberty-forgetting society around you and raise your kids in a setting where they will turn out to be libertarians (unless they rebel against you and define themselves as anti-libertarians, but even then you will have shaped them)...if you succeed, you will have forced them to be free." But Beck can't really be placed entirely within that category. If you listen to the whole presentation, and especially if you're familiar (which, as a fellow member of the Mormon church like Beck, I actually am) with the pious, family-centered devotional tropes he frequently makes use of, then you hear so much more which isn't exactly libertarian. He wants "wisely" planned living spaces, where all the streets are underground and everyone lives on a cul-de-sac, so people will get out of their homes and enjoy their neighborhood. He wants a marketplace where there is "no Gap stores, no Ann Taylor," but only craft-based businesses which offer apprenticeships, and don't require any "Ivy League" diplomas. He wants a local, sustainable food system. He wants, basically, a community which celebrates "simpler times." Sounds more Front Porch Republic than Galt's Gulch.

Jesse Walker call's Beck's vision "populist-utopian," but I think he's wrong there too. I mean, I suppose if one imagines "populism" in explicitly (and solely) Jeffersonian terms, that description might work--but in reference to the actual Populists, or the way the term has been used since then, there is little what Beck lays out here which suggests an attack on the powers that be or a restructuring of society around increased economic democracy and sovereignty. Indeed, aside from a few arguable swipes against corporate capitalism (which I suspect Beck is either unaware of or would deny that he made), the only thing which is attacked here is our education system. And this is where Beck truly comes alive, and truly reveals his dream as being, whether he realizes it or not, as being more about Plato's Republic than anything else. He essentially, if unintentionally, speaks of creating a civil religion, with an all-glass, sunlight-reflecting, impressively spired building at the center of the community (forgive the Mormon in me for immediately thinking "temple" and "Zion") which would be a repository of historical documents and artifacts from throughout history, so that whenever someone is confused about what America's real principles are, they can come to Independence, be "deprogrammed" from what is taught in America's universities, and "be shown the truth!" (Beck repeats that about three times.) I can't help but think of people being led out of the cave by the philosopher-kings, and seeing the sun (the Declaration of Independence! the Constitution! portraits of the Founding Fathers! and...other stuff, I guess) for the first time.

Years ago, I noticed a similarity between Glenn Beck and James Gordon "Bo" Gritz, another Mormon (though only for a short time) conservative who became convinced of conspiracies and truths which, somehow, his ideological fellows nonetheless weren't captivated by. (Look at all you fans of Glenn Beck: sure, you voted against Obama, but are you teaching your children the Mayflower Compact? Have you stopped shopping at the Gap? Why not?!?) And this led Gritz, as it is apparently leading Beck, to want to proselytize, to redeem, to create safe environments of learning that troubled people can flee from. Again, this is easy to mock, but I don't want to. I don't want to, because there is, at the heart of this impulse, a longing for a yeoman independence and interconnectedness, for communities of solidarity, for the truth which can be known when people are fully enjoined in their civic spaces. Populism was a way to communicate that idea, whereas libertarianism is, I think, too often a corruption of it. Either way, though, there is a transformative, utopian impulse here, and the impulse is which animates all the best kind of home-making and community-building. Too bad Beck's is so warped--and, frankly, kind of stupid--that he's apparently incapable to making the kind of critique of liberalism which would open up to him the real, plausible, communitarian alternatives out there, whether distributist or anarchist or social democratic or all of the above, in one fashion or another. Like Gritz, Beck knows what he wants (well, sort of, anyway), but he's unwilling to think carefully about what's really stopping him from having it (his own fellow citizens and the genuine appeal and logic of the liberal order, being a primary one). Thus does he make utopia a source of snide mockery. Like I said, a fascinating process, though a frustrating one as well.


I confirm the subscription of this blog to the Paperblog service under the username russellarbenfox.

Cats Are Smarter Than Dogs. Period.

I strongly suspect, on the basis of a totally unsupportable stereotype which I unfairly invoke solely on the basis of the annoying voice recording on the video, that this particular cat may be smarter than its owner too.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and the Ground on Which Communities Are Built

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The final sentence in Behind the Beautiful Forevers--Katherine Boo's wonderfully written, devastatingly detailed narrative of several fascinating, despairing stories that took place over the period of a couple of years in a Mumbai slum called Annawadi--sums up the message of the whole book as well as any concluding sentence I've ever read does: "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits is uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?" There is a deep truth, and a challenge, in that sentence: one which I was already cognizant of, but which, having just finished this much-praised book, will remember that much more firmly. Anyone concerned about the way in the shape and foundation of one's home or community may either open up or foreclose possibilities for justice or freedom or virtue needs to remember it--and reading this fine book is a good way to help that remembrance along.

The obvious referent of the final sentence is the wretched tale of Abdul Hakim Husain, a young man (perhaps 16 years old, perhaps 19--"his parents were hopeless with dates") whose tragic story forms the primary backbone of the book, though his life is only one of dozens whom Boo skillfully introduces us to. Very briefly, Adbul is the primary earner in his family of eleven, a scavenger of refuse whose skill at picking through and sorting different types of trash to later be sold to recyclers had given his family, through years of work, a tiny amount of financial stability and hope. They had been able to afford rejected bricks (the slum was surrounded by rapidly constructed luxury hotels, designed to serve the newly rich of Mumbai flying in and out of the nearby international airport, on whose land the slum sat) for their hut, making it the sturdiest dwelling along their makeshift street; they had been able to afford the tuition for a "third-rate Urdu-language private school" for the second-oldest son, Mirchi; they owned their own vehicle, giving them an edge in transporting the garbage they sorted through to recyclers; they'd even been able to save enough to make a deposit on a plot of land in a predominantly Muslim community outside of Mumbai, thus giving the the Husains the hope of becoming actual landowners and escaping the 3000+ person, half-acre collection of illegal, more or less desperately poor and uneducated squatters that made up Annawadi.

But it was not to be. As Boo expertly chronicles, the deprivation of Annawadi did not make for a united community, but rather a constantly shifting, usually bitter and suspicious, relentlessly competitive and often corrupt group of individuals. Anti-Muslim sentiments, common in Mumbai, were part of it, but most of it was just the plain and ugly truth that, when one lacks any kind of stable home to retreat to, or vocation to identify with, the smallest slights and most pathetic grievances can take on hysterical importance. The day came that the Husains were attempting some upgrades to their hut, installing some floor tiles and a stone shelf, working to make it level. The weak bricks which made up their walls crumbled somewhat in the midst of the construction, shaking their next-door neighbor's hut, occupied by another Muslim family, dominated by their sexually promiscuous, one-legged mother--who had been, predictably, subject to multiple levels of harassment, discrimination, and mockery by Annawadi's other residents--named Fatima. Some sand fell into the rice she was cooking. A fight broke out, with shouting and accusations aplenty; Fatima claimed that she would put the Husains "in a trap," complained to the local (and completely corrupt) constabulary at the Sahar Police Office, then dumped kerosene on herself and set herself on fire. As Boo puts it, Abdul's life "exploded" at that instance. What followed was arrest, police beatings, long confinement, bribery and doctored hospital reports and false claims on all sides, the collapse of the Husain's scavenging business and the loss of all their meager savings, and criminal trials which ultimately left Abdul's father exonerated of the accusation of inciting Fatima to commit suicide but Abdul in legal limbo, perhaps permanently. 

There is much more to the story than that, and that is only one of the many stories Boo has to share. But that specific reference--to Abdul's attempt to build a shelf level and straight, when his family's wall and foundations were rickety in the extreme, and the unforeseeable consequences which followed--not only encapsulates Abdul's story, but connects to the larger theme of the whole book. In an environment where the law is only sporadically enforced (and then usually only when a hefty fee is paid in advance), where criminality are the rule (at one point in the story Abdul resolves to no longer traffic in stolen metal, but in the face of complete deprivation abandons that pledge, to his regret: "I tell Allah I love Him immensely...but I cannot be better, because of how the world is"), where violence and despair go hand in hand (the book features several deaths, including the suicide of a young girl who saw death as the only way to escape beatings from her parents and an arranged marriage she detested), exactly what can be accomplished? That some things are accomplished is undeniable: among the Annawadi's inhabitants are at least a couple of young people who manage to get college educations and move out of the slum-squatting class (though in the case of one of them, that's at least partly the result of her mother's corrupt political maneuvering and marital infidelities). But for the great majority of the slum's residents, most of whom had fled to Mumbai seeking opportunity in the face of starvation in the countryside (the rural village home of one of the book's main characters was in the midst of drought, with much of the little available remaining land having been taken away by "large-scale corporate and government modernization projects") what they faced was the enduring continuation of the same: scrambling day to day, earning just enough to eat. No collective action was possible, because there were no collective resources to be harnessed to improve one's lot, and no trust that any such resources, even if they existed, could be used responsibly. While not quite a dog-eat-dog world (Boo notes that the rapacious yet resourceful folks she focused on lived in the comparatively more wealthy part of the Annawadi slum; they actually had huts, didn't sleep in the streets, and didn't have to eat rats or grass to survive, as the truly desperate of Annawadi residents did), it was close.

Boo, at one point near the end of the book, makes a rare, observational aside about what she had seen in her years of reporting:

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now; the quashing of voter applications at the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborers' pay. Abdul was one of many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together....Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, they improved their lot by beggaring the life chances of other people.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor looked down on one another, the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

I think about my own home--on a quiet, older suburban street in Wichita, KS, in walking distance from our children's public schools and our church, in biking distance from my work at a small liberal arts college--and I reflect upon just how much social effort and investment, how much taxation and regulation, how much civil religion and traditional instruction, how much labor unrest and market response, and how many years of all of the above had to go into making the ordinary things I take for granted possible. Here, we have citizens who will call for ambulances and even attempt to help when they see someone hit by a car and dying in the street; police who respond to complaints and won't immediately ask for a bribe; schools where instruction of whatever quality actually takes place day after day; fathers who know that beating their wives and raping their daughters is immoral and wrong and may even (if prosecutors are doing their job!) send them to jail; jobs where employees have protection from arbitrary dismissal and receive a decent wage; city governments that will acknowledge that a backed up sewer is public health hazard and ought to be fixed; hospitals where trained care-givers have, at the very least, enough beds and drugs and needles to minimally do their work. And that realization leads me to reflect on how even just a slight fraying of the social fabric--through family breakdown, through the retreat from civic obligations, through the privatizing of public responsibilities (Boo writes trenchantly about how the wealthy of India had, throughout the boom years, "typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government" through setting up their own schools and security agencies, rather than improving the public safety net), and perhaps most of all through the government and corporate actions (and inactions) which leave people without any sustainable or dependable ground to build upon, and thus have no choice to flee, migrate, follow the whatever random winds of opportunity they think they see, even if it results them crowding their families into mostly hopeless slums--can start to unwind the many threads that make up the whole.

We're lucky people, the great majority of any of us who are reading this website--the ground on which the communities we are part of were built is, mostly, pretty solid. Not as solid as it might be, but far more solid than the sewage-infected ground of Annawadi. Boo did not write this book, I think, just to get her readers to think "there but for the grace of God go I"--but such is clearly one result of her writing, and it's not an unreasonable one. Those of us who have families and homes and neighborhoods and communities (local or national) where justice and freedom and virtue are, if not automatic, than at least genuinely available opportunities--as opposed to at-best random, unaccountable happenstances--need to keep in mind the enormous political, cultural, economic, and social work which has gone into distinguishing our fortunate environments from those of the Husains, and guard against letting our frustrations with the complexities of modernity lead us into picking apart the very ground our world is built upon.

Why Haven't I Seen The Hobbit Yet?

It's January 3, 2013, and I still haven't made it to the theater to see The Hobbit. Why not?

Party because of all the partially negative (or at least less-than-enthusiastic) reviews, I'm sure. But I'm an old and committed Tolkien geek, who tool Jackson's previous adaptions very seriously, even when I fully recognized all the ways they failed to work, even on their own terms as movies. Surely hang-ups with 48 fps cinematography isn't enough to dissuade me, is it?

Comments by other, certified fantasy geeks, like Alan Jacobs and Jacob T. Levy, cut closer to what is probably my main reluctance. Alan and Jacob expressing their criticisms (which are both reluctant, I should note; they both enjoyed themselves at the film) differently, but they ultimately point in the same direction: the transformation of the Thorin & Company into awesome, apparently unstoppable super-warriors or video-game characters, with the consequent diminishing of both the Gandalf-centric Important Stuff which Jackson has elected to lard these movies up with, and more importantly of Bilbo and his journey itself. That probably is the heart of it, there. Because, you see, I love Bilbo's story--and I mean its story, the way it's laid out in Tolkien's Hobbit, which I consider to be a tremendous children’s novel, really one of the very best of the genre. It's funny, exciting, surprising, dramatic, and filled with homespun wisdom--all of which is conveyed alongside hints of a deeper historical myth infecting the language and rhythm of the tale, but never stopping it from being what it is: one of the greatest works of youth fiction ever written.

The LOTR books were, by contrast, never really all that great as books. I mean, they included fantastic adventures and great scenes and powerful characterizations, but they weren’t primarily works of literature; they were works of world-creation, of myth-making. So while I think Jackson fundamentally misunderstood or rejected some of thematic basics of that myth in his cinematic adaptations of LOTR (primarily, making the overarching story more about Aragorn and the triumph of men rather than about Frodo and the end of an age), he couldn’t really do any harm to it, any more than the movie The Avengers can do any harm to the grand myths of Thor and Loki. And moreover, they brought much of it to brilliant visual life, and along the way elaborated upon or extended the myth in important ways (replacing Glorfindel with Arwen in their film adaption of Fellowship; building up an important dynamic between Aragorn, Eowyn, and Wormtongue in their adaption of The Two Towers; etc.). So even when the movies dragged (and heavens, did the adaption of Return of the King ever drag, until Jackson plugged the holes and polished it up in the extended edition), I still loved them, and saw them as a contribution to Tolkien's overall legendarium. But with this film adaption of The Hobbit, all I can see is a wonderful work of literature–a real and genuine story, not a myth but a novel–being blown up and transformed and hooked up to a myth it has no narrative business being a part of.

I’m sure I’ll eventually see the film–all three of them, in all likelihood!–and maybe I’ll repent of this judgment entirely. Maybe Jackson and Company pulled off some wonderful alchemy in making this film adaption. But from the trailers I’ve seen, the reviews I’ve read, and really all the news going all the way back to the earliest development of the movie, I just can’t shake the feeling the Jackson's Hobbit is just doing it all wrong. Whereas this adaption, I'm sure, got it right:



(Update, via Facebook: Jacob Levy pithily comments that "The Hobbit pays homage to Tolkien the myth-maker at the expense of Tolkien the storyteller." Well said.)

All Creatures Great and Small

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

My father decided that we needed to learn how to work--and since he ran a feed mill, getting farm animals that we could feed relatively cheap seemed like the best idea. My father had been part of the world of alfalfa fields and cattle auctions since he was a child, but he wasn't a farmer, per se; just someone who knew and respected the social and economic place of farm life, and saw an opportunity to continue to make it a part of his children's lives. As so we got dairy cows, and starting around age nine, I and my older brother Daniel and older sister Samatha would milk them (usually two, sometimes three, sometimes only one) by hand, morning and night. Of course, that would include Christmas.

I'm a fan of holidays and traditions; I always have been, and probably always will. As a child, as a believer in Santa Claus (my father, I recall, informed Samatha and Daniel and I all together when I was seven or eight that there was no Santa Claus, and I insisted he was wrong, a position which I continue--with perhaps a little more philosophical sophistication--to maintain to this very day), I would attempt to talk to the cows on Christmas eve and Christmas day, in the hopes that they would speak to me, as the legend says they can on Christmas. But of course, they never did--not with words, anyway. And of course they wouldn't; they only speak at midnight, and I was always in bed by then. But I would still try.

God made the cows, and all creatures great and small. I'm certain that, as part of His creation, they are, in some way imperceptible to you and I, part of the joy of this season, as they are surely part of its stillness and darkness and its surprise as well. So it is right, I think, that we imaginatively bring them into our celebration, through song and story--and through this, my favorite Christmas poem. I've linked to it before, and I read it at our congregation's Christmas celebration yesterday. I wept like an idiot as I read it, because I wished, and probably always will wish, that I could be as steady and simple as Eddi, and his audience in this poem, and the animals that I tended on Christmas eves and days decades ago:

Eddi's Service, by Rudyard Kipling

(A.D. 687)

Eddi, priest of St. Wilfrid
In his chapel at Manhood End,
Ordered a midnight service
For such as cared to attend.

But the Saxons were keeping Christmas,
And the night was stormy as well.
Nobody came to service,
Though Eddi rang the bell.

"Wicked weather for walking,"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.
"But I must go on with the service
For such as care to attend."

The altar-lamps were lighted --
An old marsh-donkey came,
Bold as a guest invited,
And stared at the guttering flame.

The storm beat on at the windows,
The water splashed on the floor,
And a wet, yoke-weary bullock
Pushed in through the open door.

"How do I know what is greatest,
How do I know what is least?
That is My Father's business,"
Said Eddi, Wilfrid's priest.

"But -- three are gathered together --
Listen to me and attend.
I bring good news, my brethren!"
Said Eddi of Manhood End.

And he told the Ox of a Manger
And a Stall in Bethlehem,
And he spoke to the Ass of a Rider,
That rode to Jerusalem.

They steamed and dripped in the chancel,
They listened and never stirred,
While, just as though they were Bishops,
Eddi preached them The Word.

Till the gale blew off on the marshes
And the windows showed the day,
And the Ox and the Ass together
Wheeled and clattered away.

And when the Saxons mocked him,
Said Eddi of Manhood End,
"I dare not shut His chapel
On such as care to attend."

Conservative Wisdom from an Original Radical

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Last Friday, Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, principal author of 1962's Port Huron Statement (or, if you Big Lebowski fans insist, the compromised second draft), Freedom Rider, anti-war activist, social worker, California state representative for 18 years, author, and all-around inspiration to anyone on the left, visited Wichita and spoke at a local church, as part of our Peace and Social Justice Center's 20th anniversary. What I got out of that visit is that his words ought to be an at least partial inspiration to those on the right as well.

Hayden has, of course, spoken at probably thousands of similar occasions, to millions of people, over the past half-century. And deservedly so: the Port Huron Statement stands, in my opinion, with Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail and perhaps at most only a handful of other documents as one of the truly essential political expressions of the 20th century. I teach the Statement a couple of times every year, and when I do I strive to point my students towards the arguably ambiguous place which its passionate, communitarian, participatory, democratic radicalism occupies in the history of modern progressive liberalism. Today "liberal," when anyone can be bothered to think about the term honestly and seriously, is usually understood to mean the use of the state (its bureaucracies, its technologies, its manpower and money) to promote a kind of positive liberty and general equality. But Hayden and his co-radicals, thinking about the struggle for civil rights far away from their comfortably elite universities in the northern United States, had much more on their minds than vigorous enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments (though they were thinking about that too):

[W]e are...countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things--if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been "competently" manipulated into incompetence--we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making...The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic....

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism--the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man--we merely have faith in his potential. Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations....Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

These young, privileged, and courageous twenty-somethings were doing more than laying out grievances. They were doing something prophetic, responding to the distancing, the conformity, and the apathy which post-WWII suburban wealth and stability had spread across much of white America, capturing and articulating some early whiff of the 60s utopian zeitgeist, one suffused with a spirituality that, even when not fully reflected in the final document or the actions of those who trumpeted it over the decades of activism to come, is undeniable. As Hayden himself put it, both in this reflection here and while talking to me after his presentation Friday night, "the Port Huron Statement wrote us, not the other way around."

Hayden, in speaking and responding to numerous questions (and yes, even in Wichita, KS, there were more than enough of us liberals, progressives, former hippies, Occupiers, and other assorted radicals and wanna-bes and interested others to fill Fairmount United Church of Christ up to the balcony), returned repeatedly to that theme of apathy. The milieu he'd grown up in (like that of so many in this wealthy nation still today) was that suggested to him that it was only crazy, disturbed people, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye or Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who felt the need to take real action in opposition to the status quo--and yet there was the example of African-American citizens throughout the American South, engaging in sit-ins and protest marches and boycotts, risking their livelihoods and their very lives to be fully recognized members of the American community. They were taking incredible risks--and, from the perspective of decades later, he said he was more convinced than ever that they were capable of taking such risks because they knew how to "take the long view." Not that the didn't have immediate demands; they absolutely did! But they also were part of "communities of meaning" which much of the white consumer-capitalism-created college-educated class lacked, communities that provided them with strength and resources for when things get absurd and "sideways"--which, of course, they always will. He credited his own religious tradition (he was raised in a strong Irish Catholic family) with giving him a little of that, and, Californian that he has been most of his life, the example of the protesting Hispanic farm workers as well. This stronger sense of history--one might even call it "tragic," though he didn't--is something which he feels so much of the progressive left in the U.S. has lacked over the past half-century. Liberals, he said, have too often been oppositionally inclinced and easily frustrated consumers, people who don't how to do the organizing, or to respect and build upon the organizing done by those who have gone before, or to accept defeat and keep on working, confident that the lack of any coherent--much less "rational"!--story of progress in one's ability to govern one's community justly doesn't mean the end of the story. When he spoke about the need to recognize one's limits, to address oneself to those causes which one can most immediately respond to on the ground here in Kansas (or wherever), to be conscious of history, and to reject abstract "hope" in favor of realistic "planning," the man sounded almost Burkean.

Hayden remained humorous and thoughtful and reflective through his presentation, with perhaps his only genuine flash of energy and anger coming when a questioner from the audience confessed that Obama's inability or unwillingness to follow through on certain promises he made regarding civil liberties and the wars in the Middle East (an issue which has had much impact on my own thinking) had "broken his heart." "Don't let him do that!!" Hayden almost shouted in response. He continued: what activists and radicals are trying to do is make change, but when those changes happen they will because millions of individuals and neighborhoods and communities and groups have changed the conversation--"burst the canopy," as he put it--through their own slow, constant activism. To expect change to be quickly delivered through signing an online petition or casting a vote and then nothing else, like buying a jar of pickles at Walmart and getting angry because they taste bad, is just another kind of consumerist apathy--one that the corporate masters of our whole socio-economic and political order no doubt delight it. (On more than one occasion during his presentation, I thought he was about to break into a quotation from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.) He's happy to criticize the President, but as one who fully lines up with many progressive liberal views on environmental regulation and women's rights and more, he's frustrated at the idea that anyone whose vote might have made a difference in the 2012 election might have chosen the Green Party over the Democrats. Not because the Democrats are so great--he ripped into their war record and their dependence on Wall Street money often--but because are part of the conversation. The long view, he insisted, has to be about getting a place at the table, and then doing the deal-making you must when you get there. To make it all a grand, be-all-and-end-all moralistic struggle (he also said he hated talk about "lesser evils"--as if any actual Democrat or Republican in America today, no matter what they vote for or support, should be labeled "evil," in comparison to the violence so common elsewhere in the world!), one that has you shouting in triumph when your bill passes or speaking of being heartbroken when you candidate losses, only shows that your sense of history is in the wrong place: that your focus isn't a family or community that provide real meaning to your life. Political wins, he ultimately implied, shouldn't be nearly as important to us (no matter what the issue) as the communal context that allow us to participate in political contests in the first place.

A few days before Hayden arrived in Wichita a student of mine--a wounded veteran of the war in Iraq, and one who drinks deeply from the wells of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity--saw the flyer for Hayden's visit on my office door, and went on a predictable tear, about how men like him were responsible for the decline of America's greatness and had let loose in American public life a revolution in immorality which our country may never recover from. He was wrong of course--and I wish my student could have been there, as all sorts of folks, from academic eggheads like myself to Mennonite handymen like my friend Leroy Hershberger, were. If he'd come, he would have heard what he expected in terms of policy preferences: Hayden is today, as he was a half-century ago, a crusader on behalf of liberal progressive causes (climate change, the war in Afghanistan, public employee unions, immigration reform, the drug war, etc.), and it would be interesting to talk with him about how his own chosen causes, and the candidates who back them, arguably sometimes complicate his own almost "conservative" insistence upon planning and organizing and working to build communities democratically. But, if my student had been open-minded, he might also have been surprised to hear this man, so long and so thoroughly dismissed as a revolutionary hippie, talk quietly and seriously about the local, and radical, labor of politics, about striving to enable all citizens to be part of the never-ending conversation of government, and about the bureaucracies, the corporations, and commercialism that gets in the way of individuals making such authentic moments for themselves. That's his wisdom; that's his example. And frankly, if you take a look at what the man has represented and what he has accomplished....you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one.

Dave Brubeck, RIP

A year and a half ago, we lost Joe Morello. Now, David Brubeck has joined him. Of the greatest cool jazz quarter of all time--Brubeck on piano, Morello on drums, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, and Eugene Wright on bass--only Gene remains with us. Brubeck on the piano had the lightest, yet also the strongest, touch of any jazz player outside of Bill Evans; he wasn't bluesy, but mannered, calm, Californian. The results were...well, listen to him (he cuts loose around 3:12).



Put on a good show, Dave, wherever you are.

Home Teaching and the Miracle of Interruption

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Yesterday, I and another member of our church went to talk and counsel with a family in our congregation. (In Mormon parlance, this is called "home teaching" or "visit teaching.") They're a young couple, married less than a year. He was born and raised in the faith, but unfortunately also had made some bad choices and developed some addictive behaviors along the way--enough that he ultimately found himself in prison and excommunicated from the church. He's now on parole, and it was through his and his extended family's efforts that the woman he'd met and was dating chose to be baptized into the faith. Now they are expecting their first child, and the real difficulty of the path before them--the legal as well as spiritual one--as they make plans for their family has crashed down on them, hard. As it happens, I'm a little familiar with some of the behaviors that ultimately led him to place where he now finds himself, and I'd like to believe I was able to offer some solace and support. But it's hard to tell. Our congregation's boundaries were recently redrawn, and I was asked to take on some new responsibilities at church, and so I am suddenly meeting new people, confronting new problems. Thrust into this situation by choices I made--as, in a very different but still similar sense, this couple also find themselves confronted by the unexpected, despite all the ways in which their own choices put them in the place they are--I do the best I can....but you never know what will come of these interruptions.

Late last night, after returning home, I finish a movie I'd been watching over the previous two evenings: The Interrupters. It's a harsh and difficult documentary to watch, but I finished it, thinking about the home teaching visit I'd completed hours before, and wished that I could find some way to show this movie (whose language is off-the-charts vulgar) to my fellow church members--all of whom are, in one way or another, asked to do what the characters in this film do: interrupt the lives of others. Walk into violence, or despair, or poverty, or confusion, or irresponsibility, or ignorance, and pose a challenge, send a message, offer a helping hand. The movie's many parts build slowly, but by the end of the film's two hours the different pieces of its tale of CeaseFire, the brave outreach organization which sends former gang members into the streets of Chicago to confront and heal violence, come together in a manner both haunting and inspiring.



Ammena Matthews is just one of those whose belief in her cause, her willingness to speak truth to the bad paths others are on, presents an example which ought to thrill and shame every Christian who has ever been in the position, and perhaps felt the expectation, or even had the responsibility, of standing up and calling out, of interrupting.



Here in the United States our Thanksgiving holiday is past, and for many the Christmas season has begun. Christmas means many things to me, but one of those many things is that wintertime, this season of endings and beginnings and gifts being given, is so often a time of quiet surprise. Of interruption, one might even say. The sudden freeze, the unexpected blizzard, the rush to get things done and then the unanticipated moment when it all halts and holds still. In the Mormon faith, those of us with home or visit teaching responsibilities are supposed to check in with one another at least once a month, and so of course--this being America--it's become a rueful commonplace that every rushes to get things done at the end of each month. That's what I was doing yesterday--but meeting and speaking with that young family slowed me down, put me on the spot, obliged me to speak more than just the usual rote pleasantries. If I interrupted them, they--their needs, their struggles--also interrupted me.

Nobody could ever mistake Hannah Arendt for a believing Christian, and yet in her political philosophy, she saw the root of all real, meaningful human action in the miracle of interruption: the unexpected moment when our own responsibilities and routines suddenly present us with moments of freedom, of being an authoritative actor in our own lives as well as others. Riffing on St. Augustine, she wrote:

Man does not possess freedom so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe....God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning....[T]he human capacity which corresponds to this power, which, in the words of the Gospel, is capable of removing mountains, is not will but faith. The work of faith, actually its product, is what the gospels called "miracles," a word with many meanings in the New Testament and difficult to understand. We can neglect the difficulties here and refer only to those passages where miracles are clearly not supernatural events but only what all miracles, those performed by men no less than those performed by a divine agent, always must be: namely, interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected....Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a "miracle"--that is, something that could not be expected. (Arendt, "What is Freedom," Between Past and Future, 1993, pp. 167-169)

Arendt, a secular Jew, made this Christian observation even more strongly--and, considering the present time of year, more seasonally appropriate--in The Human Condition, when she wrote about "unpredictability": "The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural,' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted....Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope....that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with the Gospels announced their 'glad tidings': 'A child has been born unto us.'" (p.247)

As anyone who knows anything about contemporary Mormonism can tell you, all of us grumble about home and visiting teaching--that it's a chore and a hassle, that it's ineffective and inauthentic, that it pulls us away from what we already know how to do and confronts us with the Sartrean hell that is other people. (Okay, maybe only I bring up Sartre, but you get the idea.) And for certain, there is a basis for all of those complaints. But going about my own "automatic process" yesterday put me before someone else, whose similar wish for some dependable routine has left him entangled him in painful legal and moral quandary, and--last night, at least--in need of someone to stick his arm out, cry halt, open a hand, and try to help pull him into a new place, to--in some small and hopeful way--perhaps even play midwife to the birth of something new, preceding the new actual birth in their family which will, one again, interrupt all that they imagine their daily automatic lives will be. That was a good thing, a real thing. Something I need more of. Jesus was, truly, the ultimate interruption; if I, or any of us, claim to be His people, then we need to take action, and watch for and be part of His continuing unpredictable and interruptive miracles, day by day.