The Christian Wrong

    Among the aftershocks of the presidential election are fulminations from the Christian right. Leaders there say they won't abandon efforts to have the government of the United States enforce their religious doctrine.
    The Roman Catholic Church weighed in through the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano,  and Vatican radio.  The church re-asserted its opposition to initiatives legalizing same-sex marriage.  A front-page newspaper article said, "The church is called upon to present itself as the lone critic of modernity, the only check ... to the breakup of anthropological structures  on which human society was founded."    In a radio editorial, a Vatican spokesman asked sarcastically why gay marriage proponents don't go ahead and push for legal recognition of polygamy as well. 
   The Protestant right also is sobered by losses on gay marriage and abortion issues.  Leaders there -- sounding more like political consultants than churchmen -- say they must find ways to broaden their base.
    Teachers in my day would have cited the Vatican's radio gibe as an example of the straw man technique.  With it, a speaker attacks a caricature of an adversary's stated view rather than dealing forthrightly with what the adversary really said.  This tactic can be found in texts on debating -- also in studies of propaganda.
    The marriage  question being posed in America today has nothing to do with polygamy or, for that matter, with permitting human beings to marry saltshakers or shoehorns.  The question being posed is quite simple, and eminently fair: Should all American citizens living in long-term, monogamous commitments have equal rights under civil law?
    The eagerness of religious leaders for political clout is a threat to the integrity of democratic government, of course.  It also is a threat to the integrity of free religious practice in this country.  Once the door between religion and government is opened, it can be used by all comers,  and we cannot foresee what tomorrow's energized faction will be.
    This yen for secular power -- emphasis on both words -- also would appear to be fundamentally inconsistent with the original Christian message.  It warned religious leaders of that day against savoring earthly status, and against putting words in the mouth of the deity.  It warned that faith is not manifest in rule-mongering,  that the faithful life cannot be defined by a human hirearchy's authorized list of do's and don'ts.
   The Roman Catholic Church has amply demonstrated blindness to the difference between nourishing values and protecting its institutional grip.  Conservative American Protestants have entered similar territory with leaders who invite the courtship of politicians, and with interest groups that are only lobbies in fancy dress.
    Although the true believers of the right have not been able to take over federal policy, they have tainted our politics. Their influence has placed the Republican Party in disarray. And they've given us a renewal of candidates as moral preceptors: A vote for me is a vote for morality. A vote against me is ... . 
    The implication is clear, and it is especially corrosive when it is peddled by candidates who actually believe it.  The very concept of disagreement becomes disreputable.  Adversaries are not merely opposed, they are reviled. Settled discussion of the public interest becomes impossible.
      Exhibit A: Our recent election.  As the Republican Party tries to make something useful rise from the ashes of that defeat, it has an opportunity to help the country by insisting that the Christian right learn proper restraint. In this, the GOP would be a liberalizing influence, in the broadest, non-partisan sense of that term. What nice irony that would be for a party that has caused and received so much harm through its obeisance to right-wing zealotry.
     
   
   

Now That It's Over

    My Democratic friends are glowing with relief this week.  They feared Mitt Romney would be elected and impose a dark, conservative vision on the country.  I thought their fear was slightly off the mark.  Mine was that Romney would prove incompetent to lead the country in any direction.
    He tried, in effect,  to lie his way into the White House. Had he succeeded, he would have arrived with very little credibility and a conspicuous lack  of essential skill.  His repeated gaffes in the campaign were not mere slips of the lip.  They were the blunders of a man without a grasp of public leadership.
    Our system gives us means to curb a president who offers to go to extremes.  It does not equip us to endow a president with abilities he simply doesn't have.

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    Lewis Carroll's White Queen would have been untroubled by Romney's shape-shifting  candidacy. She boasted that she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast."   Those of us who can't may yearn to see through the smoke screen at last and discern what the country has escaped or gained by re-electing Barack Obama.
    One of my guesses is that we have gained a higher quality of appointments to the federal judiciary.
    The process of judicial appointment has fallen toward a low state  as the country has become progressively more comfortable, alas, in viewing the courts as surrogate legislatures.  Candidates for the bench are assessed in the kind of terms once reserved for elective office -- terms that jurists of an earlier era would rightly have found insulting.
    If one were to choose a sports analogy  (and I ask  forgiveness for doing so) it would be something like this: We no longer mind the notion that the referees may throw the game.  We have settled for wanting referees who will throw it our way.
    As a result, the federal bench is peppered with men and women who are noted for ideology over ability.  Romney did not manifest the kind of mind that would have respected the difference. I think President Obama displays a higher regard for what used to be known as "judicial temperament."

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    The people who went to the polls were voting for or against something and presumably believed they understood what they were doing.
    What was it?
    Let us note, regret and pass beyond the truth that some opposition to President Obama is racial. The better point is also the larger one. The country as a whole elected an African American president and then re-elected him in difficult circumstances.  This should be a matter of pride and hope.
    Some others no doubt voted against the president because they felt his administration had begun to display the body language of a stalled enteprise. Opinions will vary on how much of this should be laid to him, how much to fickle circumstance, and how much to the relentless effort of Congressional foes to sabotage his work.  Fairly or unfairly, voters could have felt that blame should be fixed where credit would be taken if matters were in a better state.
    Anti-Romney voters could have rejected him for a dozen reasons. His campaign reeked of dishonesty.  His expressed view of the American public was a caricature.  His philosophy of government was a mystery because he intentionally made it one.  If he really was a conservative, he was a ham-handed and myopic one.
    But what about the affirmative view of choice?  What about the voters who were selecting something they wanted?
    A vote for Republicans or Democrats has traditionally been viewed as a vote for smaller or bigger government. This formulation is no longer apt. Our central government will remain huge no matter who has the White House. Several Republican presidents rank high among architects of larger government enterprise.
    The useful differences between the two parties would have more to do with priorities for effort, with breadth of initiative, and with appropriate restraint.  Republicans would be the party more wary of the destructive power of taxation and less ready to view government as a problem-solver of first resort.
    There is a useful place for this point of view in our national deliberation of ends and means.But it has been lost or, to speak more precisely, abandoned by those in control of the Republican Party today. They have overdosed on a toxic mixture of political extremism, intolerant religion and cultural bigotry. 
    Sad to say, some voters wanted to choose exactly that.  But let's hope that most Republican voters merely wanted to express the not unreasonable view that our government's reach has exceeded its grasp and its ability to pay the bills in a responsible way.
    And those of us who chose the Obama ticket?  I'm guessing most of us feel that the greater inclusivity of the Democratic Party is right as a matter of principle, and far more realistic as an approach to governing a country where diversity is on a steady march.

                        ****                                  ****                                ****

    Confession time:  During my working years I was a journalist. 
    My mother never knew.  I told her I was a piano player in a bawdy house. I thought this would suit her better than knowing that her son was a member of the media.
    But even given the public's low regard for my old trade (Mom was not alone by far) I remember it fondly.  Thus I am vexed by some of what passes for journalism today.
    Of the hucksters at Fox News we can only say that they are -- well, hucksters.
    And surely I am not the only one who would like shelter from the widespread blizzard of post-election analysis.  How many ways are there to say that people who favored the Democratic point of view prevailed through the cunning tactic of voting in greater numbers? And how many times must it be said?
    I am reminded of the job description for journalists:  They sit on the sidelines of the battlefield until the fighting is over. Then the journalists ride down onto the battlefield and shoot the wounded.
   
   
   
   

The Divine Pest

   For no particular reason, these ideas are on my mind lately. Few are original with me, but I like them anyway:
    I have several friends who are atheists. They are thoughtful people and good human beings. They care about fundamentals of right and wrong.  They are serious about principled behavior.
    But as I like to tease them  -- and I do like to tease them -- their creed is not above the contortions, contradictions and logical embarrassments that afflict other forms of belief.
     For starters, if we define atheism as an affirmative rejection of the existence of God, then atheism is ironically focused on the concept of deity. God is, so to speak, fiendishly hard to avoid.
    And moving on: Without God, atheism would be an entirely man-made thing. In that respect, if we reason strictly, it would not be wildly different from organizing one's value system around a totem pole or a stone figurine.  On the other hand, if there is a God, then our capacity to conceive of atheism is God-given. The Old Pest has his own taste for irony.
      When my atheist friends tease me -- and they do like to tease me -- they quite accurately point out that similar comments could be aimed in my direction. I am a Christian.  (But not today's right-wing kind. I am not under the impression that my political opinions are divinely inspired.)
    As an entirely man-made thing, the Christian story would not be a very clever job. The several versions of it don't always jibe. If I'm going to put faith in a tale, my atheist friends  tell me, I should search for one whose authors have not left so many seams showing.
      If, on the other hand, the Christian God is really up there and watching, God tolerates in events and behavior a good deal that God is said to abhor.  As value systems, theism and Christianity are not reliably systematic. 
    My atheist friends do not persuade me.  Neither do I persuade them, if only because I don't try.  I never proselytize. 
    For me, it would be a messy undertaking.  The necessary disclaimers alone would leave time for little else. One does not want to be confused with the quacks and slickers who will save your soul for only a modest donation. Nor am I in tune with the churches whose God wants them to build a larger gymnasium.
    And I respect the view that religious faith is a private and personal thing usually better left to private and personal resolution.  For all these reasons I long ago concluded that God could soldier on without my help in recruiting.
    Thus I do not advertise my faith. Neither do I go to lengths to hide it.  The G-word occasionally slips out of me.  In our aggressively secular culture, reactions are an interesting study.  From friends and family I usually get loving forbearance.  Double-takes from others hint that I might  as well have claimed aliens put transmitters in my molars.
     But some people take the G-word as a cue for engagement, even though I never mean to use it in that way. Often I find these people are looking for a reality check on honest doubts.  We've all had them, if we are awake and alert.
     There are so many faiths, they say, and so many varieties of outlook even within a given faith. How can you reconcile a belief in one God with this crazy quilt?
    (In what follows I have no aim to persuade, only to avoid the vanity of embroidering my views with phony reservations.)
    The proposition does not trouble me. I see no reason why God should not choose to speak to different people in different ways. I am less interested in the differences than in the single thread that runs through them all:  Belief in a higher order.  Societies world-wide include faith-based value systems.
    And so the religious impulse is -- whatever else -- not an artifact of secular culture. It is everywhere, in cultures as different from each other as Earth from Mars. It appears to be inborn. Hence we can usefully wonder: How could it happen, in a Godless universe, that people of all kinds would be born with religious sensibilities?
    OK, my doubting questioners say, but what about your Christianity?  What about history's litany of ghastly cruelties perpetrated for -- and by -- the church?  What about the outright charlatans through the ages, from dissolute popes to television bunco artists?  How do you reconcile the Christian message with all that?
    Well, I don't.  The first question to ask about the Christian story is not whether it can be claimed by fools and scoundrels.  The first question to ask -- to belly up and face -- is this one: Is it true? The central assertion of  Jesus' death and resurrection. Is it true?
    For purposes of argument I will rule out equivocation. A duly informed answer is possible.  For many years my answer has been,  Yes, the story is true.  Those things actually did happen. 
    Here, we moderns reflexively think, Show me.  Prove it, or at least give me good evidence.
    If we simply must indulge the notion of measuring infinity with finite concepts, we may consider history:  We know as much about the historicity of Jesus as about other ancient figures whose stories we accept.
    Also science:  (I like this one.  My schooling is in mathematics.)  The pure scientific odds against a chance emergence of earthly life are astronomical.
    But in the end there is no Open Sesame, no Rosetta Stone. We will be handed no lens through which, with only a look,  we could at last clearly see divine footprints.  If we confront it forthrightly, the mystery of faith requires of us what it has required of everyone in human history: We must strive for our own discernment. 
    From my work at that, the simplest formulation I can offer is the punch line from an old and often-quoted story:  I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that our capacities for love and beauty are produced by the molecular chemistry of meat.
    In my experience, people who can't bring themselves to embrace religion are balked by hierarchical silliness, power-mongering and greed in religious institutions; or by other forms of  rampant hypocrisy among the so-called faithful; or simply by the random cruelty of nature.
   Heaven knows -- to choose a phrase  -- they see clearly.  But, just as organized religion does not create God, attitudes of unbelief cannot erase God or neutralize grace.  In fact,  I wonder if the Almighty gets a wry smile out of seeing that antipathy toward religion is so often a product of scrupulous conscience.
   
   

Which Side Are You On?

    As we watch singers and actors taking sides in the presidential election, we may wonder what connects art and politics.
      I am not here thinking of the art that has always paid attention to certain kinds of public affairs -- songs of protest, for example, or novels that treat social injustice.  Rather I have in mind entertainers who trade on their celebrity to magnify mere partisan allegiance.
    This is not a major matter.  Just a straw in the wind. But straws do show which way the wind is blowing. Celebrity feeds and is fed by popular culture. Celebrity politics suggest an assumption that side-taking is safely consistent with cultural norms. And indeed it is.  In America nowadays, the question in the air is not, How can we best live together? but Which side are you on?
    The skirmish lines of our culture war often run through religious territory. At one extreme a faction of Christian conservatives pushes the rest of us to accept a dog's breakfast of religious doctrine and bully-boy politics. Their ardor for religious values includes an ironic disrespect for religious values -- other people's, that is. Failing by moral persuasion to induce other people to abandon their values, these self-appointed Christian soldiers resort to force. They want the government to mandate their chosen interpretation of Christian scripture through civil law. This is of course dangerous both to religion and to a principled rule of law.
    An attitude at the other extreme is not so sharply focused or militant. But it is consequential. It rises from a muddled extrapolation on principles of church/state separation.  The concept of freedom of religion has morphed into a cultural expectation of freedom from religion.  A lot of us feel we have a right to live beyond sight or sound of any manifestation of faith.
     The attitude reaches far beyond issues of nativity scenes on courthouse lawns. It reaches into private spheres. Ask a person of faith what kind of looks may be directed at a murmur of prayer over a restaurant meal.  Or consider common social etiquette:  Tell an off-color story at a dinner party and you may be judged merely daring or naughty. But venture a serious consideration of God and you may be charged with a truly significant breach of manners.
   And consider again the weathervane of celebrity.  Our popular culture is so ripe for anti-religious attitudes that to the pantheon of celebrity liberals and celebrity conservatives we have now added celebrity atheists.
    On either side of the religious skirmish line, groups of us scorn other people's beliefs.  On either side of political skirmish lines, groups of us disdain questions of balancing ends and means.
    The United States Congress will suffice as exhibit A.  Once known as the world's greatest deliberative body, it has lost capacity for true deliberation because it has lost respect for the very idea.  Moderates are seen as weaklings and treated accordingly.  Compromise is equated with failure. Congress wars over trifles and trifles with fundamentals.  The nation's business is conducted with the dignity of a soccer riot. The default on sworn duty is especially sharp in the House of Representatives, where a Republican faction is so besotted with ideology that it values nothing else.
    All of which brings us back to the weathervane of the presidential election.  Here there is no real contest of ideas, not much at all beyond gestures of contempt.  Both sides have favored epithet over substance. The Republican ticket has adulterated even this sorry mix with a campaign of audacious falsehood.
    And if disdain for the truth is shoddy,  Republican strategy contains another element that is downright alarming. The Romney/Ryan ticket plainly intends to reveal as little as possible about specifics of the policies they would take to Washington.
    Only two readings are possible here:
    -- The Republican candidates believe the American people have no right to know what they can expect from their government.
    -- The candidates know the people have that right but mean to scorn it in hopes of gliding to election on glossy platitudes.  They mean to gain the White House by tricking the electorate.
    The tenor of this campaign is a spectacular disgrace. We must hope that we are not soon again asked to endure the like of it.
    But the campaign is in part the work of party strategists and their hired-gun consultants.  Something else is at work in the tenor of our larger national discourse. There, the much-lamented failure of civility is only a symptom.  The root failure is one of tolerance.  We are surrendering to a notion that different values are illegitimate by virtue of being different.
    This is civic laziness. Or perhaps it is only civic weariness. Hard times take a toll.

Whoppers, Bedfellows and the Fate of the Nation

    I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day. At least I think he's my uncle in some distant way. I've never been completely clear on that.  Every time I ask the people in my family who are old enough to know, they just chuckle or change the subject. He's a pretty good old gentleman, though, and he's fond of me, so he writes now and then to discuss what he calls the passing parade of life.  He has a particular kind of view of it from his home way out there in Barlow County.
    Here's what he had to say:
    "Dear Nephew,
    "Well, things are pretty slow hereabouts, if you don't count the fact that Scooter over at the cafe is in trouble again with his wife Ida. She's been after him to take her up to the city to hear the symphony.  Well, Scooter told Floyd over at the grain elevator and hardware store that he would just about as soon listen to a bull farting through a bugle.  Trouble was, Scooter didn't know that Ida was in the next aisle shopping for canning jars. She heard every word.
    "That was when Scooter made his second mistake.  He told Ida he was just making a little joke. Now, Ida is mighty fond of her point of view.  If she's real serious about something, she wants you to be, too, and she's ready to explain why. She jumped all over Scooter in the worst way. Been giving him down the country for more than a week. He's going around town looking droopy as a wet dog.
    "I got to thinking that Ida is a little like some of these politicians we've got going around nowadays.  I mean the ones that want all of us  to have personal opinions just like theirs, and who want laws to make it look like we did even if we don't. There was a bunch of that sort flocked together at that Republican National Convention down in Florida. You'd have thought some of them were handing down heavenly pronouncements, except for the fact that a fair amount of what they had to say wasn't really true.
    "I guess the hands-down leader in that department was this fellow Ryan who wants to be vice president.  Millie over at the library says he's the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and stand on the stump to make a speech about conservation. You'd think he'd be pretty good with the whoppers  by now, seeing as how he's been telling them in a pretty regular way for several years. But darned if he didn't tell one interviewer that he had run one of those marathon races a whole lot faster than he actually did. It's a little thing, I guess, but it's mighty odd. I mean,  if you were setting out to lie in public, why would you choose a thing where other people were timing with  stopwatches and writing down results? Millie says Ryan acts like he's got livermush for brains.
    "Well, then, along came the Democrats with their own show, and I felt like I ought to watch it, too. They sure did put on a humdinger. I guess maybe a little more of what they said was actually true, although to make proper sense of some of the numbers they were throwing around, you kind of had to close one eye and squint at them sideways.  I have never understood why politicians need to get into tall tales when they want to criticize each other. The truth is usually bad enough.
    "I noticed some movie actors hanging around both the conventions.  And I guess that makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as how politicians and actors are in similar lines of work. But it can sure make for some strange sets of bedfellows. When the Republicans chose an actor they wanted to put up at the podium, they went with that Eastwood gent who got his big break making cut-rate westerns in Spain. I thought Republicans were touchy about that whole outsourcing business, but maybe not so much.
    "I favor the Democrat bunch this year. I have pretty much decided that.  They don't remind me of the Peabodys like the Republicans do.
    "When I was a boy, the Peabodys lived in a big house on the swell side of town. If the Peabody boys didn't want to be completely alone, they had to hang around with the rest of us from time to time. (Although they would never let girls into their tree house.)  But they always acted like they were doing us a favor with their company.  Every now and then you would catch one of them looking at you like you had cow flop on your shoes.
    "And none of the parents liked to go out to eat with old man Peabody. He always found a way to wiggle out of helping with the tip. He kind of acted like it was everybody else's obligation to help him hang onto as much money as he could.
    "The Peabodys were big churchgoers, which I guess is a fine thing for people to do if they want to. But the Peabodys acted like their church was the only proper one, and they could be mighty pushy about it. One time they tried to get the county board to pass a law closing the Bijou movie theater on Sunday, because their church didn't favor what they called worldly entertainment on the Sabbath.  Well, then old Ben Levine said if they were going to start passing Sabbath laws he might have some different notions to offer, and the whole thing got bogged down and finally just went away.
    "My daddy didn't like the Peabodys one bit, but mostly I just felt sorry for them.  They always seemed to be real troubled that everybody in Barlow County didn't think just the same way they did.
    "I have to go now. I'm going to drop over to the cafe and see if I can't cheer Scooter up a little bit.  His cooking goes straight to the dogs when he's on the outs with Ida, and some folks are starting to talk about taking their lunch trade to the Burger Boy out on the bypass.
    "I promise to write again real soon.
                                                                                                   " Sincerely,
                                                                                                    "Your Uncle Barlow"
 
 

The Romney Sandwich

    I got a letter from Uncle Barlow the other day.  Life is getting lively way out there in Barlow County.  And he's been watching the national news again, which often stirs him up.  Here's what he had to say.

"Dear Nephew,
    " I guess it's been a while since I wrote you. I've been mighty busy. You might remember that the Ladies' Genealogical Society  is working on a biographical history of Barlow County.  Well, they discovered that my Daddy bootlegged a little whiskey from time to time, and that I drove deliveries for him when I was a young buck.  And the trouble is, the Genealogical Society is pretty much the same bunch as the Ladies Auxiliary of the First Barlow Church.  When they found out about the whiskey, they took a fit.
      "Out of the blue I had a flock of them on my porch singing 'Come Ye Sinners,' and 'There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood.'  The Widow Cumbee was standing over to one side shouting at me to repent, and I want to tell you, when the Widow Cumbee gets wound up she can howl the chrome off a truck bumper.  All the commotion scared the tar out of my coon dog Buster, and he got stuck trying to hide under the sofa, and I guess  I said some things to the old biddies that I shouldn't have said.  So, then I had to go around to each of them and apologize, but every visit had to include another sermon about the evils of whiskey, and that wound up taking quite a while, and that's why I have been mighty busy.
    "Now, all that hellfire and brimstone put me in mind of catching up on the presidential election, since both the fellows running say the country will go straight to hell if the other one wins. And darned if that thing hasn't started to look like one of those mud-wrestling contests you can see on TV. Matter of fact, someone might want to caution those two fellows about winding up like those wrestlers.  I mean, after a while, if they've heaped enough mud on each other, it gets kind of hard to tell which one is which.
    "Anyhow, I am particularly interested in this fellow Romney, since he is the new one into this presidential business. And I've tried, nephew, honest I've tried.  But I just can't figure out what kind of man is walking around inside that fellow's clothes.
    "I see that while I was busy getting rescued from the jaws of hell, he went overseas to visit a bit. And I guess it took him a little while to get his bearings, seeing as how he started out by saying that the British couldn't organize a fire drill and those Palestinian folks were dumber than a box of hammers.  I mean, he probably really does understand that guests shouldn't talk that way.
    "But the thing that puzzled me was that when he finally did get to what he said was the point of things, which was foreign policy, he just said he had some ideas but he would get around to exaplaining  most of them some other time.  I said to Millie over at the library, if that was all he had to say he could have saved air fare and sent them a post card. Millie said he was never really interested in saying much of anything at all, that he just wanted to have some pictures taken with foreign leaders so he could look presidential.
    "I should warn you that Millie would just as soon kiss a snake as speak well of a Republican. She says they are just too darned nosy about what women do in their personal lives. She says they would favor chastity belts if they could get away with it. Millie has a mighty sharp tongue about some things, but I do have to say that on matters of sex and birth control and such, this Ryan fellow who is Romney's new sidekick does sound like one of those people who want the government make all of us join their church.
    "Anyhow, it seems like every other time Romney speaks up, all he wants to say is that President Obama is lower than a suck-egg dog.   Now, I guess most of us have already figured out that Romney doesn't think Obama is the man for the job, or else he wouln't be going to so much trouble to try to get him thrown out. And I guess it's understandable that Romney might get a little hot under the collar about it now and then.
    "But Millie says (I had to write this down, as Millie has a lot more words than I do) 'Personal derision of Barack Obama does not amount to a philosophy of government.'  For my own self, I would just say that if Romney is elected, he's going to have to do a lot more than cuss Obama to get us through the next four years.
    "I'd like to know some more about how me might go about that.  And here's where I start scratching my head.  Darned if he doesn't act like he wants to avoid the whole subject.  He says he's got a plan to cut taxes and balance the budget, but he doesn't explain how it would work. He says he's got a plan to lower unemployment, but he doesn't explain how that would work, either. He says he wants to eliminate some federal government office and agencies, but he won't say which ones.
    "And at the top of the list of things he's mum about, I guess you would have to put his income tax returns.  Now, I don't suppose they would show he's done anything illegal.  Those tax boys over at the IRS would have been after him long ago for something like that. I just think the returns would show he put a high life priority on getting rich, since you don't get to be as rich as he is by falling off a log. No, sir.  (Millie grumbles about him being a rich guy, but I told her that if we didn't allow rich guys to be president we would have eliminated quite a few good ones.)
   "No, the thing that interests me about this tax return business is that he gets so sniffy when the subject comes up.  He acts kind of like you're burping at the dinner table if you even ask.  It's almost like he's looking down his nose at the public, which is a strange kind of behavior for someone who wants a lot of folks to vote for him. Matter of fact, this whole business of asking us to choose his plans without really knowing what they are is strange behavior.
    "Millie says Scooter over at the cafe is missing a good bet with that mystery meat he serves. She says he should put it on bread and call it a Romney Sandwich.
    "That Millie. She has a mighty sharp tongue about some things.
    "I hope you are well.  I will try not to let it be so long before I write you again.
                                                                                     "Sincerely,
                                                                                     "Your Uncle Barlow"

Us Against Them

    Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
    Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
    You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane, 
    All they will call you will be, "deportee"
                                           From "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)"
                                           By Woody Guthrie and Martin Hoffman

    During World War II, Congress authorized a program to bring Mexican farm workers into the United States to fill labor shortages caused by the war. Private contractors were to provide transportation to and from the Mexican border. If contractors defaulted, the U.S. Immigration Service filled in.
    In 1948, a plane carrying Mexican laborers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California. All aboard were killed. Newspaper and radio accounts of the crash named the flight crew but not the 28 Mexican passengers. They were called only  "deportees."   They were buried in a mass grave.  Only 12 were ever identified.
    Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a poem containing the words above.  Later a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman set it to music. The song became a staple of the American folk music  movement in the 1960s.
    Guthrie was assailing the cultural bias manifest in the episode: The dead passengers were only hired help.  And they were not even from our country.  They were not like "us." In death as in life, they mattered less.
    Biases are part of being human. Everyone harbors them.  We carry around in our heads a kind of personal caste system.  We label people:  This one is diligent; that one is lazy; the other is greedy. Some lifestyles are wholesome; of others we disapprove.   Some vocations are lofty, some menial. On the ladder in our minds, not everyone stands on the same rung.
    Our varying views have a common denominator:  Some people and their attitudes are essentially like me and mine.  But others are essentially different. Those differences mark the border of unfamiliar territory. There, my norms may not be observed;  my interests may not be wholly valued. People who are different put me on alert.
    Add the catalyst of ethnicity, and our attitudes can reach punitive extremes. The American story is full of examples. When they reached our shores, Italians, Irish, Poles, Dutch, Chinese and more had to endure disdain, ridicule, abuse and worse. To this day, African Americans pay a heavy price simply for being who they are.    
    Newcomers. Outsiders. People who don't look or speak or dress or worship or celebrate or grieve the way we do.  They all put us on alert.
    The death of  those wartime workers marks an example that has exploded anew in the debate of illegal immigration.  The debate can be especially heated, even venomous, because it takes place in a powerful new context. Demographic trends are literally changing the nation's face.  In about 40 years, people  who've traditionally thought of themselves the typical American -- that is, whites -- will be a minority.  The surge from south of the border is not just a legal, political or economic problem. It's a reminder that the way we live together in our own country is headed for fundamental and inescapable change. 
    Ethnicity also is playing a new role in presidential politics. An election that pits a moderately conservative Republican against a moderately liberal Democrat is complicated by the fact that the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney,  is a moneyed patrician, and the Democratic president is African American.   Us-versus-them imagery is especially tempting, and some have succumbed. A vivid example comes from former New Hampshire Governor and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. He declared not long ago that President Barack Obama needs to "learn how to be an American."  This would be an exceedingly odd thing to say of a fifth generation WASP.  It resonates -- in some ears -- because the president is a black man with an unusual name.
    (For the sake of a smile, let us note that Sununu was born in Cuba, and that his immediate heritage is Palestinian and Greek.)
    Unless we find a way to transcend human nature, ethnic tensions are inevitable in a country as diverse as ours. But nowadays they've been heightened by the sheer size of the illegal migration from the south.   And other pressures -- economic, and cultural -- have joined to put ugly edges on our national conversation. 
    Failures of leadership complete the mix.  A bankruptcy of ideas has opened politics on the right to proprietorship by second-stringers, ideologues, snake oil salesmen and quacks.  Republicans themselves acknowledge that their presidential nominee is merely the strongest of a weak bunch.  
    On all sides we find a contagious portrayal of political notions as moral precepts. In the sadly ironic result, we lose the moral discipline to respect others' point of view. Policy debate becomes a kind of holy war.  Candidates are not merely opposed; they are reviled.  Public discourse becomes genuinely hostile to differences of opinion.  
    American democracy should aspire to more than an ethic of intolerance.
    
    
    
    
  

I Remember A Mountain Man

    Don't it always seem to go
    That you don't know what you've got
    'Til it's gone
    They paved paradise
    And put up a parking lot
                         "Big Yellow Taxi"
                         Joni Mitchell, 1970


    He is long dead now, but he still deserves his privacy, so I'll call him Mr. Smith. He was a weathered old mountain man from deep in the coves and hollows of western North Carolina.
    He and his wife lived a few miles down a dirt track carved into steep hillsides. At one edge of it,  rock faces jumped up so close you could touch them without stretching in your seat. At the other edge, the land dropped sharply to a river bottom far below.  The little road was not wide enough for two cars to pass. Shallow turnouts had been scooped out of the hills here and there. If  two drivers met, one backed up to the nearest turnout to let the other by.
    You walked the last 50 yards or so to the Smiths' place.  The slope up to their dooryard was too steep to drive. Their little cinder-block house was tucked against a second slope.  Around it, the walls of a small valley swept up and out. I once asked him how much of it they owned. He said everything I could see had been in his family for generations. He called it "my mountain."
    Mr. Smith was in his '80s when I knew him, born and reared almost all the way to manhood in the late 19th Century. He knew all the old mountain ways, and still kept many. He knew how to make a toothbrush from a sugarbush branch, and a broom from  nothing more than a hardwood tree limb. I suspected that Mr. Smith knew how to make a little liquor, too, but he never said and I never asked.
    He had piped a cold mountain spring through the rear wall of his house. It pooled in  a broad concrete basin, then flowed out to a creek that bubbled through his front yard. Jars of food stood in the basin, which served as their refrigerator.
     The best spot for a barn was split by that creek.  Mr. Smith had felled tree trunks across it,  and built the barn upon them, straddling the stream.
    During his working years, he had farmed the flatter parts of his land. In old age he turned to building houses now and then. That was how I met him.  He was putting up a vacation house for a friend of mine.  He'd designed it in pencil, on a shirt cardboard that he carried in the bib of his overalls.   He built it with only the help of an 18-year-old lad who  ferried him to the site and did the heavy lifting.
    It was a complete, three-bedroom job with a barn-style, gambrel roof (Mr. Smith called it a "roundin' rafters" roof.)  On one end were two floors of living quarters. On the other was a great room open all the way to the roof line. Much of the end wall was covered by a stone fireplace with a massive wooden beam for a mantel.  Mr. Smith had fashioned the beam from wood on his land. He had built the fireplace himself from field stone that also came from his land.
    I was never sure how well Mr. Smith could read or write. But his gifts with stone and wood were remarkable.  He added to my friend's house touches we could never have imagined. The door-latching mechanisms were hand-made of wood in the old-fashioned way.  They worked as well as any you could buy. The gutters and downspouts were of wood in the old way, too.  And to carry water away from the foundation, he made spillways from slabs of wild stone. Nature could have placed them herself.
    In time, I asked Mr. Smith to build a  little cottage for me.  My friend had recommended me. You had to be recommended to Mr. Smith.
    And my friend advised me: The mountain people have their own way about some things. They take pride in doing a proper job of what they're paid to do.  But their attitude is that they are working with you, not for you. At some point Mr. Smith will make it clear,  with words or some kind of gesture, that this is his view. It will be important for you to respond.
    I asked: How will I know when that is happening?
    My friend said: You'll know. If you pay attention, you'll know.
    Sure enough, one very early morning, Mr. Smith roused me with an insistent knock. He said: I need your help with this ladder.  
    Still in my pajamas, I helped him carry a ladder down the lane from my unfinished place to my friend's.  When we put the ladder down, Mr. Smith looked me in the eye for a conspicuous extra beat and said: Thank you. I'm grateful for your help.
    I paid him by the hour. (He kept track on the back side of that shirt cardboard in his bib overalls.) And  I began to sense that he spent more time at my site than I was paying him for. When I asked about it, I discovered that he didn't charge me when rain stopped him from working. But neither did he go home. If he thought the rain wouldn't last, he and  the helper sat in the cab of their truck, sometimes for hours, waiting to get a little more done before they left for the day.
    I asked him to let me pay at least a little something for his hours on my site, even if he wasn't able to work the whole time.  He wouldn't hear of it.
    When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of Mr. Smith. I think of that morning of the ladder, when he and I silently agreed that I had bought his time but not him. I think of his refusal to accept pay for idle time,    and of learning to understand that the refusal was  for his own sake and not for mine. I remember his knowing how to get a living from  hard land, and how to make from a length of wood or a mute rock something that did a job and pleased the eye, too. I remember the smile in his eyes when he looked up the slopes of "his mountain," and the warmth in his voice when he described remote spots where the rhododendron blooms were just right and the mountain laurel covered whole hillsides.
    When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of all the craft of life that was in Mr. Smith and is now gone.  I'm reminded of what we're covering over with our golf courses and theme parks and bars and boutiques. We are covering not just a landscape but a culture.
    We who were priveleged to glimpse it should erect markers.  We should declare: Something else was here before. Something worthwhile. Something that mattered.
    I hope this counts a little in that direction.
 
 

Lifted Pinkies

    The good news is, we discuss public art in my town.
    That's also the bad news.
    My town is a pretty place, by and large. The streets are clean, the shoulders mowed and trimmed. Plentiful parks are well kept.  A widespread tree canopy is valued in civic tradition and protected by local ordinance.
    In towns as in people, an essential regard for appearance is a virtue. You and I may differ on particulars. Our standards of fashion, decor and maintenance may not match. But below a certain threshold, a slob is a slob, an eyesore is an eyesore, and a dump is a dump.
    With an eye toward maintaining a pleasant community aspect, the government of my town uses  a fraction of its tax income to purchase works of art for display in public places. These objects are placed on major street corners, in parks and the medians of boulevards. One interesting set is spread along the right-of-way of a commuter rail line.
    Opinions of these selections are, of course, not unanimous. In my own view, some of them are fine indeed, and some look like the runner-up entries in a grammar school craft contest. Eye of the beholder, and all that. Overall, they are a valid investment of public money. They are a nice dash of seasoning in the quality of life hereabouts.
    From time to time, new purchases are announced. On these occasions, some taxpayers object to the selections with extra vigor.  Then, trouble begins. Then, the culture mavens emerge from their salons to scold the common folk. (In the squall of condescending cliches, one perennial and mystifying favorite is an assertion that "good" art should "provoke."  This standard does not distinguish, for me,  an experience of good art from an experience of interstate gridlock.)
    Let us leave to its perpetrators the odd notion that taxpayers should hot have -- or at least should not express -- opinions about the uses made of their money.  Consider instead the proposition that taste is the province of the refined few, who will let the rest of us know what should be admired.
     Taste prescribed by others is not taste at all but only conformity. We are allowed to have independent tastes, and in fact we do.  They may be refined by experience or education, but they are instilled by neither.  Our tastes are part of us.
    We all can cite examples that refute elitist stereotypes. Mine include a waterfront laborer whose knowledge and grasp of opera were stunning. One of my favorite paintings was done by an inmate of San Quentin's death row. A Midwestern undertaker wrote a book of essays in some of the most graceful prose I have ever read. ("The Undertaking: Life Studies from The Dismal Trade," by Thomas Lynch).
    Such examples hint at something essential in us.  We are makers and partakers of patterns and images, of poems and songs, of narratives that seek to explain the way things happen and the way things are. We want to apply from within ourselves some suggestion of order and sense to our existence.  We feel that we should, we feel that we can, and from the first time an image of a stag was painted on the wall  of a cave, we have always tried.
    Others bring to this idea far more than anecdotal evidence. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright is one. In the first pages of his multi-volume look at the concept of God as perceived through the Christian New Testament, he makes an interesting choice of foundation stones to lay down before his readers.  He does not begin with theological concepts. He beings with a detailed explication of the nature of storytelling: "Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. ... Stories ... provide a vital framework for experiencing the world."
    On this point Bishop Wright's outlook was shared by American drama critic Walter Kerr. His 1962 book "The Decline of Pleasure" argued that the fine arts had been consigned to second-class citizenship in modern American culture. This he lamented as a fundamental loss. He said that music and art and literature emerge from -- and therefore speak to -- our human nature. If we diminish our regard for them, he said, we permit a part of ourselves to wither.
    In this view, Kerr wrote, the highest tastes can never be the province of the few.  They are inborn and personal:  "For taste is either personal (yours, mine, Henry's) or it does not exist. There is no chemical element in the universe that invariably produces it in a certain solution ... . Taste is never a law. It is always an entirely private love."
   So, for my own part, I will go on being glad that the leaders of my town buy us a little adornment from time to time. I will go on hoping they buy more of what I like and less of what I don't.  I will cling to the view that  beauty belongs to everyone, and that wonderful gems may be cut and polished for us by the ordinary people next door, to wit:  a passage from Kerr's book that he attributes to an unnamed columnist in an unnamed, small-town American newspaper:
    "Saw three birds abreast, wheeling leisurely in great circles, the movements of six wings synchronized and perfect ... as they momentarily held the morning sun and then winged away into the distance. .. Had I been an ornithologist, I would have identified these creatures on the wing by name, delved into their family tree, and explained something of their habits.  Seeing them in the eyes of a weather prophet, I might have announced them as omens of fair weather or of rain and related stories of the past that would prove my predictions.  As a philosopher perhaps I would see them as symbols of peace and harmony and would expound at length the examples that nature has set for mankind. Being none of these, I saw them only as three white birds in a morning sun and thought them beautiful."
 
 
 
 

Settling For Bafflegab

    Years ago, before the Soviet Union collapsed, a friend of mine worked in Washington for his hometown  newspaper. At a diplomatic reception he found himself standing in a corner with a reporter for the official Soviet press. My friend had taken a few extra drinks. Part of their conversation went roughly this way:

     My friend: C'mon, Yuri, you've been in our country for a couple of years. Surely you have to admit that our system is better than yours.
    Yuri: Noncommittal grunt.
    My friend:  You've seen our system up close. We have representative government. People can choose their leaders. 
    Yuri: Mildly irritable grunt.
    My friend: C'mon Yuri, how can you possibly say you don't like our system?
   Yuri, with a cold glare:  If you were honest with yourself about "your system," you would admit that your elected leaders have far more in common with each other than with the people they supposedly represent.


    Politicians of every kind have this ethic in common: They are willing to have power over the rest of us,  and they are disposed to keep it to themselves and their fellow party members. Thus Yuri would not be surprised by the polarization of today's public affairs. While it rises from cultural and economic tensions that test the public's sense of well being, it is stoked by an ugly struggle for partisan tenure in the driver's seat.
    The partisan ethic elevates the interests of political organizations above the interests of the public. And it creates a vocabulary -- an idiom -- that adulterates democratic process.
   Idiom is useful in private and public conversation. It helps us make certain kinds of points economically.     But with overdoses of the partisan ethic, idiom strays into caricature. Politicians on the right are painted as flint-hearted plutocrats who would gladly grind the faces of the poor.  Politicians on the left are called addle-pated do-gooders who like to fund their good works with other people's tax money.
    These images cross an important line. They invite disregard and distrust.   In this way, electoral and public policy decisions come to be styled as  good- guy/bad -guy contests: It is not necessary for us to do the work of making informed decisions. We need only give power to the folks in the white hats.
    The notion that our nation's options can be so simple is silly on its face. Likewise the notion that this political party or that one has transcended the limits of human nature and can be relied upon, ipso facto, to Do The Right Thing.
     The selfish temptations of power touch every ideology.  In political parties they excite the institutional instinct for self-perpetuation. They can carry partisan careerists and true believers to destructive extremes, as in today's behavior by one hot-eyed faction of Congressional Republicans. (Adherents of honorable Republican traditions can only cringe, and shelter in the maxim that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims to believe it.)    Playing to one angry segment of the electorate, these toughs commandeer the people's legislature to make their own private war against a duly elected Democratic president.  Abetted by a blinkered and inept Republican leadership, they have dragged the Congress of the United States into historic disrepute.
    Extremists do not last in American public life.  In due time, those now plaguing Congress will be curbed or replaced. Of greater concern for the long term is a chronic, cliche-driven inattention to the realities of our national affairs.
    Partisans on the right inveigh against big, expensive, intrusive government. And wariness on this score is warranted.
    But the favorite cliches of the right to not acknowledge that truly limited government is long gone. It would no longer be sufficient. The task of running this country is too complex.  The dangers afoot in the world are too great. American government is big, and it's going to stay big no matter who's in charge -- witness the record of several Republican presidents who rank high among modern architects of  huge government enterprise. The enduring question for our country is not whether government should be big or small.  The question is, to what uses should big government be put?
    In this connection, partisans on the left call upon us to do a better job with social equity. And well they should. The inequities that persist even yet in this prosperous country are not morally or politically tenable.
     But the favorite cliches of the left do not forthrightly own one of their necessary methods: empowering government to take something that belongs to you and give it to me. Nor do they remind us that this power, once given, remains in place to be used in the discretion of the unknowns who will one day succeed the incumbents of the moment. Nor do they squarely face the truth of charges that government programs are inherently vulnerable to waste and corruption.
    With rhetoric that advertises false choices and disguises real ones, politicians invite charges of cynicism. Clearly, some of them are guilty.  They treat politics entirely as a game of appearances. They aim to succeed by glad-handing the electorate and tricking up new costumes for a single message:  Trust me. You can't trust the others, but you can trust me.
   If we rest with charges of cynicism, however, we merely join those who traffic in simplistic formulations. A conspiracy theory won't do. Not all politicians are cynical.. Other factors combine to fill our national affairs with partisan sloganeering -- language that is not meant to illuminate choices but only to persuade voters to take sides. 
    One factor is public indifference. Most people don't regularly vote. Among those who do, not a few vote out of ignorance or prejudice. Earnest politicians who might want to get beyond slogans face a huge obstacle: At any given moment, most of the electorate isn't listening.
    I can't render public service if I can't get elected. I can't get elected if I can't get you to vote for the ideas I represent. I can't get you to vote for me if I can't get your attention. And to get your attention in today's America, I need the vivid phrase, the colorful image, the sound bite and the photo op.  Nothing else reliably works.  A sorry expedient becomes the norm.
    The special tensions of the moment are circumstantial: an historic economic swoon; sea changes in the demographics of the population;  the newly inescapable closeness of the world community.
    These circumstances, and our experience of them,  will settle. The chronic failure of better conversation about our national priorities is a deeper thing, and worrisome.
    
    






 

Hard-Hearted Religion

    This time it's Presbyterians. Congregations are breaking away from the Presbyterian Church USA because of its "liberal" drift. They call their preferred alternative a "biblically based" approach to church life. They'll travel their own chosen path.
    This time it happens to be Presbyterians, but the story is familiar across Christian denominations.  Faith is equated with a particular line of dogma. The dogma becomes a reason to drop the hands of selected fellows. An ethic of rejection prevails.
    Schism is not new in the Christian church.  Nor are disagreements over biblical authority. Nor is resistance to change -- habit being comfortable in human institutions as well as human beings. History is full of such disputes.
    Still, events of our own time and place merit attention.
     In today's  America, discussions of biblical authority are likely to be muddled. Our popular culture is textured by an ersatz scientific skepticism that questions everything but itself, and by epic biblical ignorance.  (Exhibit A might be some of the debate about supposed conflict between the Bible and the theories of Charles Darwin. There is no real conflict, but a vernacular quarrel endures nonetheless. Hearsay versions of 150-year-old science are proclaimed as if they were holy writ, and the Bible is freighted with claims it does not make by people who haven't read it.)
     The Bible is not a book in our contemporary sense. It is certainly not a history book, as no such thing was known in the years when it was created.  It is a conflation of sermons, songs, poems, letters and narratives written at different times and different places, by different people for different audiences, all for different reasons.
    The Bible is a collection of human attempts across thousands of years to express an understanding of God.  Understandings varied with circumstance.  Considered only as an array of separate parts, the Bible is a jumble of inconsistencies and contradictions. Considered as a whole, it tells an evolving story about human experience of the divine.
    All of which is to say that the Bible cannot be typified by a single passage or group of passages. Thus citations of Biblical authority may be highly selective. And sure enough, in today's church upheavals, they often are. Common triggers of upset among conservative churchgoers are matters of sex, reproduction and gender role. They are seized upon  as if they were central in Christian scripture.  But they are not.
    We should be careful about begrudging others their point of view, lest they welcome license to begrudge us ours. The very sweep of the Bible makes it approachable from different directions.
    But it is fair to ask what's really happening when people insist they'll stand only on one small corner of its grand tapestry.  It is fair to say that selective citations of biblical authority are, in fact, expressions of a point of view.  It is reasonable to suspect that cultural bias is being broadcast through the voice of the church and called religion.
    Of course every organized church functions at risk of putting words in the mouth of God. A principal admonition of the original Christian message went to that very point. It cautioned against claiming divine mandate for rules of human choosing. In particular, it charged the theocracy of its day with being hard-hearted and legalistic.
    In today's denominational wrangles, the conservative church favors words that are exclusionary.  The church adopts the posture of a club.  Divine welcome is subject to the approval of human insiders.  At its most extreme, the Christian right favors words of self-righteous condemnation. The language is -- well, hard-hearted and legalistic.
     This crabbed and narrow view is nothing like what really is central in Christian scripture: A call to human community and social justice. In the injunction to love one's neighbor there is no room for any kind of moral caste system.
 
 
 

 

Sinful Lifestyles

    I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day.  He's feeling nervous right now.
    It seems the ladies' genealogical society  has decided to do a biographical history of Barlow County.  They want to interview him.  Trouble is, the chronology of his marriage to Aunt Rose and the birth of their son Willie doesn't bear close examination.
    He isn't ashamed of it or anything.  He loved Aunt Rose dearly until the day she died, and Willie grew up to be a fine man.  The problem is, the genealogical society is pretty much the same group as the ladies auxiliary of the First Barlow Church.  If they get any idea that a man hasn't been walking the straight and narrow, they send a committee to try to save him.The last time they tried to save Uncle Barlow, he had to hide his jug for three weeks.  It made him awfully cranky.
    Here's what Uncle Barlow had to say.
    "Dear Nephew,
    "I declare, I just don't know what I'm going to do with my television set. On the entertainment shows, the commercials take up as much time as the program. I've tried and tried, but it just aggravates me something awful. So  I thought maybe I'd stick to the newscasts, but no matter which one I watch, it feels like they're trying to talk me into something. I mean, can't they just tell me what's happening and leave it at that?  ( I do figure I understand why those anchor people make a lot of money. I'd hate to think what they must spend on hair spray.)
    "Anyhow, I decided I'd stick to watching comedians for a while. At least I know they're clowning on purpose. That's how I stumbled across this fellow the other night who was talking about this gay marriage thing that's getting so much attention nowadays. He said he doesn't have any trouble at all understanding why gay marriage should be prevented. He said if we let gay people go around being gay right out in the open, and getting married just like everybody else, pretty soon everybody will want to be gay. Then there won't be any more babies, and the red Chinese will overrun us.  He said gay marriage isn't a personal issue, it's a geopolitical threat.
    "Of course he was funning, but it did get me to thinking about all those man-on-the-street interviews where somebody gets their serious face on and says it's important for the government to declare that marriage has to be between a man and a woman. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm always faulting the TV people, but I just don't understand why these interviewers never ask the obvious question: Why? Why is it important for the government to say that marriage has to be between a man and a woman?  Who gets hurt if gay people get married?
    "Now, it appears to me that a lot of the folks who are anxious about gay marriage are church folks, so I went over to the First Barlow Church to put the question directly to Pastor Throckmorton.  I said, Preacher, why should gay people not get married? He said, Because gayness is a sinful lifestyle, and gay people should be cured of wanting to choose it.
   "Now, that brought me up short. I had always thought of choosing a lifestyle as being sort of like deciding whether you wanted to live in the city or the country. But sex?  I remember back in my teens, when Wanda Hightower got to jumping around in that little cheerleader skirt, the thoughts that rushed all over me didn't wait to be chosen. No, sir. They just swarmed up strong all on their own.  Many a time I had to keep my coat in my lap for the whole game.
   "So I asked the preacher if he meant that anybody could be gay.  I said, Preacher, could you be gay?
   "Well, I thought his eyeballs were going to pop right out of his head. He turned all red in the face and got so winded he had to sit down.  He commenced to shouting all kinds of no, no, nevers, and I decided it was probably a good time for me just to hush and let him go on.
    "And I got to thinking that maybe I shouldn't have come there anyway, because I never have had much luck understanding those folks over at the First Barlow Church.  They swarm in there on Sundays and talk about loving their neighbors, and then they go around all week acting like they never heard a word of it. I remember once when a couple of the old ladies got the notion that I spent a little too much time with my jug, and darned if they didn't track me down and get all over me about changing my ways. It didn't feel to me like I was being loved. It felt to me like I was being weighed and found wanting.
   "I guess Preacher Throckmorton and them feel like folks should follow some proper rules in life, and I guess that's OK.  But they do seem mighty eager to appoint themselves to choose the rules and do the enforcing.  And I have to say, there's just something unkind in that part of it.
    "That got me to thinking about kindness. And you know who I came up with? Cousin Frank. Actually, I guess, you probably never knew him. He was a lot older. The family used to call him our 'confirmed bachelor.'
    "What should I say next about Cousin Frank? Isn't it funny how we decide to go about explaining somebody to somebody else? Well, I guess I've already said the most important thing. He was a kind man. He was a druggist by trade.  Owned a little drug store and pharmacy here in town. And he was a helper by nature. Always going a step or two out of his way to give some help to folks he didn't necessarily owe it to.
    "Some of it was little things. Like, he'd notice if customers weren't refilling their prescriptions on time. And if they didn't, he'd find just the right way to mention it without being nosy. He might lean over to Doc Martin at the Rotary Club meeting and say something like, I wonder how the Widow Cumbee is doing? She hasn't been in my store in quite a while.  Right away the doc would know she wasn't taking her medicine like she ought, and he'd have the nurse call her up.
   "And some of Cousin Frank's helping was with bigger things. He was always one of the first to volunteer for the Rotary Club service projects. And he'd go over to the home on Sundays just to read to people or chat with them and keep them company.  One of them was the Widow Cumbee's mother in law, old Mother Cumbee. She had Alzheimer's. She liked to sit on Sunday afternoons and stare at one particular tree. Well, Frank would go over there and sit and just hold her hand and stare at that tree himself for hours like it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
   "Anyhow, the particular thing about Cousin Frank was, everybody knew he wasn't partial to women, and nobody cared, because nobody thought it made him less the fine person they knew him to be. He was the best man you would ever want to meet.
   "That was what was going through my mind while I sat there and waited for the preacher to calm down to a walk. I could see the conversation wasn't going anywhere, and I just thanked him for his time and shook hands to leave. So we never did get around to talking any more about it, and I never got around to asking him why the government should make laws to suit the rules of his church, or how that might work if somebody else's church could round up more votes than his could, and I never did get a common sense answer to that first question: Why?
    "About the time I got to the door, the preacher shook his finger and warned me that I shouldn't be so cavalier about homosexuality. I had to look up 'cavalier' when I got home, but I had already caught the meaning of the way he said it. It was like he wanted me to be afraid in some way.
    "I thought that was a mighty curious way for a preacher to behave, and so I'm more confused now than I ever was about this whole thing.  Maybe the next time you visit here in Barlow County I could introduce you to Pastor Throckmorton, and you could help me understand how he and his folks could be so hostile about something that doesn't hurt them one speck.
   "But if you ever do meet him, I recommend you don't ask him if it would be possible for him to be gay.  He seems to be mighty touchy about any notion of that sort.

                                                                                                     "Sincerely,
                                                                                                     "Your Uncle Barlow"
                                   


 

Music In Our Souls

      His name was new to me, and these many years later I have lost it from memory.  He was a tall man, bowed but not bent. He wore bib overalls.. His long face was weathered. Thinning, salt-and-pepper hair was slicked straight back. His fingers were knobbed and gnarled, his few teeth badly stained.
    In his rough hands the fiddle looked like something he'd picked up by mistake.    When he appeared, the little pickup band went silent with something like awe.  One of them bent to whisper to another. I caught only " .. thought he was dead."    The tall man tucked the fiddle under his chin, and put the bow to it, and soon turned every head within earshot. The high, sweet music was pure as moonlight.
    Wordlessly, one by one, the others joined in.  The bass player first, softly, then the guitar, then the banjo, each finding his place and staying faithfully in it, so that what they made together was seamless and perfect -- and would be heard, we all knew, only once, in this moment they had conjured out of nothing.
    We were in a vast Carolina pasture. It was my first fiddler's convention.  My friend and I had gone on a last-minute impulse. Though we would have been horrified to hear it said of us, I think that in some corner of our minds we were city boys presuming to go and peer at the rubes.
     However I found there a portal to a realm of art and culture that has fascinated me lifelong.  From that muddy field I went on to learn about John and Alan Lomax, folklorists and musicologists who field-recorded thousands of American folk songs for the library of Congress and hugely affected contemporary music. (The FBI didn't like Alan Lomax's leftist attitudes and subjected him for years to one of their zany snooping enterprises.)  I learned about such unlikely pioneers as Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who sang his way out of a Texas prison (pardoned by a governor who enjoyed his stuff) and may have single-handedly saved the 12-string guitar from fading into disuse and obscurity.
     I learned about the songs people used to preserve the heritage they brought to America from all over the world. In some you could hear the skirling of bagpipes, in others the groans of slaves. Some were beautiful, some not. Some of the stories they told were uplifting, some not.  But the songs and their stories were true, in the way that a thing is true if it says something right about the work and reward of being human.
    I am in mind of all this because of the death of Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson, the North Carolina mountain man who exerted his own transforming influence on American music. He is remembered as a guitar stylist, and that he surely was, changing our very concept of the instrument and its uses. He is remembered as an exemplar of Appalachian roots music, and that he surely was,  singing out the dignity and grace of a people subjected elsewhere to rude caricature.
    But his music crossed many boundaries of style. In this he was an exemplar of more than lore and technique. In Doc Watson -- as in Leadbelly and many others -- the inborn genius of the man lay in his being a lens upon the alchemy of music in the human spirit.
    We are creatures who gaze at stars and see faces in the clouds. And the music that comes down to us from always and everywhere tells us this one more thing about ourselves: No ghastly grief or trial has ever been able to make us into creatures who imagined to live without husbanding our memories, or without singing.
    The novelist William Faulkner knew that art is a manifestation of the better parts of us. When he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, he spoke of it this way:
    " ... I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
    Music is also the poet's voice, of course. Doc Watson knew that high art in poetry and music may be found in cow pastures as well as concert halls. Thus, when he chose the inscription for a statue erected in his honor, it said: "Just One Of The People."
    Yes, precisely.
 

Romney And The Rich

    I got another letter from Uncle Barlow the other day. He writes me sometimes when he's troubled or confused.
    I should explain that I'm not sure he's really my uncle.  Some in the family say he's Aunt Hettie's love child and not really her baby brother.  I guess nobody ever came right out and asked her. She was not the kind of person you question.
    And I should mention that I'm not sure Barlow is really his name. It could be.  Out in the country where he lives, just about every other person  is named Barlow. Even the county is named Barlow. So, it could be his name, or it could be a geographic nickname, like Tex or Scotty.
    Any how, here's what he had to say.


"Dear Nephew,
    "We've got a situation here in Barlow County.  Oh, my, do we have a situation. It's not as bad as the time the loading door on the grain elevator gave way and main street got covered with corn. (An avalanche of corn is a sight to see, let me tell you.) But it's a mess.
    "You see, Millie over at the library has got herself into a big wrangle with her bosses on the library board of directors.  She wrote a letter to the Barlow Clarion saying that this fellow Mitt Romney was a spoiled rich guy who didn't really understand ordinary people.  But half the library board is rich people, and they took offense, and told Millie she should keep her opinions to herself.
    "Well, Millie is one of the sort who get all stiff-necked if you say boo to them.  She said she was entitled to her opinions, and she would speak them if she pleased.  And then she commenced to speaking them, oh boy, did she ever.
    "I must say, it appears to me that Millie may have a point or two on her side when it comes to this fellow Romney.  For example, he had one of those secret Swiss bank accounts for a while.  Now, I can understand a person wanting to switch banks, now that so many of them are treating their customers like milk cows. The Barlow Bank and Trust wants to charge me a fee for everything except combing my own hair. When I was there the other day I asked them why don't they go ahead and put a turnstile on the door. They acted like their feelings were hurt.
    "And I can understand that if a fellow manages to put together a little extra money he might want to keep it out of sight, so the in-laws don't get notions. But Switzerland?  Millie says there must have been something funny about the money if he wanted to hide it that way. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it sure doesn't look very good, man running for president putting money in a foreign bank. Are they giving away cellphones or something over there when you open a new account?
    "Also, I read in The Clarion that one of Romney's old business partners has written a book saying the super-rich are doing the rest of us a favor by being so well off.  They only spend part of their money on themselves, he says, and they invest the rest of it in ways that make new opportunities for everybody else.
    "I'm not any kind of economist, so I'm sure I can't follow the ins and outs of all that he says in his book. But I do notice that rich folks are apt to live pretty high on the hog, so maybe they're enjoying their money at least a little bit.  It seems to me that if some of them were willing to do without quite so many houses, cars and boats, they might be able to spread around even more opportunity.
    "Anyhow, I'll bet Romney will wish his friend hadn't chosen right now to publish his book, because for little folks like me it sounds mighty selfish and fat-headed. Sort of like the guy doesn't really understand ordinary people.
    "But I was talking about Millie and the library bunch. Oh, my goodness, what a mess.  Millie has a pretty sharp tongue when she gets wound up, and she finally aggravated Orlo Babcock. He owns the tractor dealership out on the bypass.  He said she didn't respect the free enterprise system, and maybe he ought to take an extra look at the library's financials to make sure she was running the place like a proper business.
    "I guess he must have jumped on Millie pretty bad, and that aggravated Floyd from the elevator and Scooter from the cafe.  They told Orlo they worked hard for their money, and thought they had a pretty close acquaintance with the real-life side of the free enterprise system, and anyway what the hell did running a business have to do with operating a tax-paid public service ?
     "Orlo called them free-spending do-gooders. Then the whole board started taking sides. The fight took off from there, and  now it's got a life all its own.  I think they may even have forgotten what started the whole thing.  They fight over the rug lint.
    "Trouble is, while they're fighting, nothing else gets done. They're getting close to the time when they have to agree on next year's library budget, and if they don't meet the deadline they'll have to shut the place down. Bang! Just close the doors.
    "That's when I made my mistake. I decided to sit down with Orlo and try to talk some sense. Even though he's pretty much of a big shot now, I've known him since we were in 4-H together and I taught him how to worm a horse.
    "So I got together with Orlo and just laid it right out plain. I guess maybe I was pretty blunt. I said, Orlo, look here. Y'all are not keeping your obligations. You need to quit fighting and take care of proper business.
    "He said I didn't understand the principle of the thing. I said, Orlo, the principle of the thing is that you folks are supposed to be doing a job for the public, not strutting your pet notions.
    "Well, even on his best days, Orlo is the kind of fellow who can strut sitting down. He didn't listen to me, much less try to talk good sense to the others. They have gone right on fighting, and letting their proper business go to the dogs.
    "Millie says they are acting  just like the U.S. Congress, and in Millie's book that's just about the worst thing you can say about a group of people.  She says we ought to throw all of them out and vote in a new bunch.
    "I'm not sure if she was  talking about the library bunch or the Congress.  Could pretty easy be both, come to think of it.
    "I hope this letter finds you well, and that things are going smoother up there in the city than they are out here where I live.

                                                                                                          "Sincerely,
                                                                                                          "Your Uncle Barlow"

The Death Penalty

    I am opposed to the death penalty.  Always have been.  Yet I've also been nagged lifelong by the fact that perfectly decent people support it.
    Their conscience is good as mine, their moral sense as robust.  They feel the death penalty for certain crimes is appropriate -- even desirable and necessary.
     Some see it as a defensive resource. They note that, as a bulwark against crime, our criminal justice system can seem to be a screen door against the wind. But dangerous felons who've been executed can't be released to do further harm. At least one measure of public safety is thus guaranteed.
    Other proponents have in mind a concept of proportionate consequences.  The notion is familiar: Let the punishment fit the crime. It would not be right for murder to carry a $5 fine, or jaywalking a prison sentence. With laws that define crime and fix penalties, a society details its values. Proponents of the death penalty feel that some offenses are so vile they deserve ultimate punishment. And they feel it's important for society to say so in its statutes.
    On the other side of the ledger -- my side -- the ultimate punishment can be the ultimate mistake.  Innocent people can be executed.  To avoid this horror, a civilized country should go to every possible length..  Our country tries but does not always succeed.
    Even where innocents are not involved, capital punishment falls more often on minorities and the poor. Here, the penalty has nothing at all to do with proportionate consequences.  It has to do with the socioeconomic status of defendants, and vagaries of attitude among prosecutors, judges and jurors. Within one state or even one city, the same crime can send a white defendant to prison and a black defendant to death row.
    But of course these reservations beg the central question: Is it ever right  to impose capital punishment? Given a heinous crime and fully established guilt, can the state legitimately put someone to death?
    I say no, for reasons that are essentially personal:  I do not absolve myself of responsibility by licensing the state to do what I would not do with my own hands.
    Thus my disagreement with proponents is over the best location for a moral boundary.  The disagreement is fundamental and very likely intractable.
     Our system of government is designed to respect and mediate among fundamental disagreements. I have a right to my conscience, you have a right to yours. I may use the vote to assert my views, but my feeling that I'm in the right does not make my vote worth more. Those who cast more votes prevail, and experience suggests that my view on the death penalty will not prevail in my lifetime.
    Still, there is room and need for a larger discussion of the criminal justice system, which doesn't reliably work as it should.  Whether it is thought too harsh, too lenient or simply careless, the system is widely perceived to be capricious.  In the aggregate, the perception is valid. Too many facilities are overcrowded and underfunded.  Too much court process is driven by a need to settle cases expediently and keep the docket moving.
   The system denies the speedy trial promised in the U.S. Constitution.  It denies consistent and proportionate punishment.  It causes a chronic low fever of public fear that proven offenders are leaked out to do more harm.
    Issues of crime and justice in a complex society are themselves complex, of course. Along with symptoms, causes must be considered -- notably the causes rooted in socioeconomic desperation. But we should not push causal notions so far as to make them a libel on poor people or let them obscure another important point:  Timely, certain and consistent punishment does have a proper societal value.
    And on the issue of capital punishment, fewer might favor it if fewer considered it the only the only sure way to keep dangerous people away from the rest of us.