Shaming, Blaming And Love

   

     It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have ways of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very "spiritual," that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.
                                        -- The demon Screwtape, counseling the apprentice demon Wormwood in                                                 C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape letters."


    My friend Harry wonders why God does not stop wars and disease and natural disasters.  He is slower to wonder why God doesn't stop him from being envious or unkind. Like most of us, Harry is selectively interested in God's to-do list.  Also, he's been habituated by our convenience culture. When he does consider a divine agenda, he may rest with thinking that it should just be more like his own.
    Harry is aware of these ironies. In a mellow mood, he cites himself as evidence that the Almighty has a tolerant sense of humor.  Harry is a bit of an armchair philosopher. He savors irony, and he enjoys rubbing ideas together.
    In fact, truth to tell, he enjoys a bit of an argument now and then. Certain kinds of opportunities make his antennae go right up. High among them are social conversations where someone introduces the subject of religion for purposes of debunking it. Harry loves to expound on these episodes. He does it roughly this way:

    You can see them getting ready to bring it (Harry says) almost like a dare. They say just enough to get the subject on the table, and then they declare something along the lines of  Well I just don't believe it. It's like they think God is over in the corner with his hand up, waiting to be recognized.
     I take the bait every time (Harry says). Just can't help it. I mean, religion is someone's private business, but claptrap is claptrap. They will say they are non-believers, and I will say well, since it's obviously impossible to believe nothing at all, what you really are is a disbeliever.  So, I say, tell me what it is that you  don't believe.
     And they will dribble out a bunch of stuff that sounds like they scavenged leftovers from some of those hair-styled televangelists. And we will back and forth a bit until we get that nonsense sort of pushed out of the way, and we get down to where they have to do more than snipe at other people's views, and they have to take ownership of something on their own. Then,  they will say something like I believe there is no God. 
    And I say, well, that is certainly your personal business, but I think it's very interesting that, even so, you are willing to make a declaration of faith, which is  what you just did.
    It chaps their cheeks every time, and I love it (Harry says).  Just can't help it.

    Harry has a mischievous streak. But in what he has to say there is a worthwhile nugget. A certain amount of what's nowadays peddled as divine message is, in fact,  human contrivance. It is wildly out of tune with the manifest spirit of Judeo-Christian scripture.
     In it we can search in vain for the emphasis on social justice that begins with the Old Testament prophets. In it we can search in vain for the kind of thoughtful love reflected in a statement of welcome published by a parish church in my state. It says in part:
      "--We understand and believe that faith is a matter of mind as well as heart, and that taking the Bible seriously means it need not always be taken literally.
     "-- We believe God's love embraces all persons equally, no matter their gender, race, or sexual orientation ... We believe diversity, acceptance, and inclusivity are strengths to be taught.
     "-- We believe it is important to find ways to treat all people with integrity and respect."
     "-- We believe ... that the social expression of love is justice."
     Harry can be quite colorful on the subject, especially if he's had a couple of drinks:

     I've been a churchgoer for 50 years (Harry says). I've seen people shucking and jiving past the hard parts, and talking a lot better game than they played. Hell, I've seen a fair handful of preachers talking a better game than they played. But you know what it is, mostly? It's ordinary folks doing the best they can and working hard to figure out what that's supposed to be.
     The right parts of it are nothing near the kind of loudmouthed shaming and blaming that you hear so much of nowadays.  That stuff is just plain wrong. And you know what's the telltale thing? Politicians have latched onto it. Politicians who are all about taking sides. Us against them. And free lunch, too. Easy answers:
     You just sign onto these rules that I stand for, and never mind where they came from; you stand with me against those people over there, and everything will work out just fine.
     You want to strain your brain? (Harry says.)  Try to imagine a politician running on a platform of loving your neighbor. That loving your neighbor business is tough work. At least it is for me. You have to be willing to give a little of yourself away.  It's a lot easier to call on God to fix the state of things than to think about how you might belly up to helping with it yourself.  So, imagine a politician running on that kind of message:
     Elect me, and I will call upon you to love your neighbor, even the one who's a nasty son of a gun. I will call upon you to give a little of yourself away. You. Yes, you.
     Fat chance. (Harry says.)

     Harry would cringe if accused of theology.  He would insist that a lifetime of churchgoing has come up far short of making him any kind of saint.  He would declare himself grateful for that divine sense of humor.  He would say he's an ordinary guy doing the best he can and working hard to figure out what that's supposed to be.
     I would say that some of Harry's figuring is pretty good.

Ho, Ho ... Ho?

                                                       ... and on earth peace, goodwill ...
                                                                                Luke 2:14
 
    We've had a little dust-up in our town. One of our big shopping malls decided to update the setting where Santa makes his appearances. They replaced the Christmas tree with a high-tech, interactive replica of a glacier. Howls went up, and mall management soon promised to return the tree.
    'Tis the season when peace and goodwill can be episodically scant.  Absent a major new wrinkle in the fabric of space-time, we'll soon see disputes over manger scenes, and more wrangles over the use and even the nomenclature of symbolic holiday trees.  Some folks will complain that the proper spirit of the holidays has been compromised by materialism. Others will push back against religious overtones.
    My friend Harry watches with wry amusement. He likes to consider himself an armchair philosopher. Harry says some of the stuff that goes on during the holidays is like a family squabble.
    Being human, Harry does have Christmas grumbles of his own. Being a philosopher, Harry favors grumbles that are thoughtful. One of them features The Panhandlers. These are the people with bells and buckets who post themselves at public entrances and, with relentlessly cheerful demeanor, challenge passers-by to proceed without giving. Harry is especially irked by those whose station outside liquor stores implies doctrinal disapproval of demon rum.
    He responds with an animated refusal to give. He embraces his supply of demon rum and answers the bell-ringer's hearty greeting with an aggressively hearty one of his own. Harry says that neither one of them really means it. Deep down, the bell-ringer thinks Harry is a heathen skinflint. Not so deep down, Harry hopes the bell-ringer's feet are cold.
    Harry is not, in fact, a heathen skinflint. He is a churchman. He has his own spiritual concept of the season, and doesn't want bell-ringers pushing theirs upon him. In this, he says, he can see the desire of irreligious friends to celebrate the season in their own way.  But being a philosopher, Harry adds a caveat:  The proselytizing impulse points in all directions; those friends who like to skip religious notions would be happier if he did, too.
    And so goes the season. Holiday stresses, they test us, every one. We expect that public venues will be flooded with treacly music; that one neighbor couple will festoon their house with garish lights. We know that Uncle Wilbur will have too much eggnog and drone the same old stories. Aunt Pearl's Jello salad will be dreadful.  Cousin Fawn's children will be impossible. The in-laws will keep score on our time with them. And what, oh what, to give cranky old Grandma?
    Still, as Harry might say, you can't have a family squabble unless you have a family. Perhaps our Christmas grumbles are like Uncle Wilbur's stories: Tiresome but also comfortably familiar. Yes, I wish one house in our neighborhood did not resemble an Interstate truck stop at night, but I drive by to see it anyway. Yes, I wish that Frosty and Rudolph would run far away together. But not until my grandchildren have grown up.
    The unifying thread in all the holiday kerfuffle is this: Most of us, in our own chosen way, care. I'll take the season in all its various parts.
    And I'll give Grandma a gift card. She'll like the control.
 

Bad Language

    I paused when my New York Times advised me of it.  A prominent businessman had fatally brained himself falling off a treadmill. The incident, my Times informed me from its very front page, had sent a shiver of concern through "the fitness community."
    Now, the regulars at my own gym might charitably be called a diverse bunch.  We have middle-aged wheezers who aren't as fit as they imagine they used to be. We have desk-bound office workers laboring to contain their waistlines. We have oldsters trying to preserve enough flexibility to reach into  the far depths of the liquor cabinet. And we have a sprinkling of impossibly buff youngsters who dart and glide among the rest of us as if we were statues.
    I daresay that we are reasonably typical gym folk.  And I would never have foreseen these motley groups being called a community.  Beneath my notice, the steady creep of English usage had established a new frontier.  This was the real nugget of news in the Times article. For those of us who hadn't been paying attention, with it were implied new defining questions.
    Question One: In this new vocabulary, what constitutes a community?  Can it be any area of shared interest? Several of my friends especially enjoy hummus. Are they a hummus community? Would voyeurs now be called the peeping community? Gossips the dishing community?
    Or perhaps the test is one of size. Must a group reach a certain critical mass to be eligible for community status?
    An excursion through the world of collective nouns was not helpful on the point.  Mathematicians, apparently with time on their hands, have coined a host of words for numbers of special size.  One whopper, for example, is called a googolplexplexplexminex. As the numbers themselves are impossible to comprehend, the utility of these terms escapes me.
    Traditional usage offers a variety of terms for groups of animals. Notable among them, through some sources, is "a congress of baboons."  Other sources dispute this as bogus lexicography. Still others reject it as a slander upon baboons.  Absent authoritative ruling, we seem to be free to arrive at our own opinions.
    Groups of human beings seemed a likelier focus. There we find troupes, teams, squads, slates, arrays and congregations.  One source quite seriously lists a melody of harpists, a pint of Irishmen and an explosion of Italians.
    My research failed, however, to find parameters for the latest concepts of community. Apparently any group  larger than two may be so-called. This does present possibilities of a sort. People who text while driving might be deemed the fathead community.  Telemarketers would be members of the pest community.
    But this kind of freewheeling usage robs language of essential meaning and moves it into the hands of -- well, the jargon community. And come to think of it, I guess people given to this particular form of jargon could be called the community community.
    Which is enough said. It's making me a member of the grumpy community.  Perhaps I'll find allies at the gym, if I can interest some folks who are not too winded to discuss it.
 
 
 
 


   
 

Does This Pope Really Matter?

    My  friend is gratified but not overwhelmed by Pope Francis' groundbreaking style. He says he'll believe real change is afoot when the Catholic Church gives all its treasure to the poor and sets up headquarters in a pole barn.
    My friend is not given to jaundiced views. But neither is he given to glossing over fundamentals.  Pope Francis has abandoned none of the harder doctrines that have troubled his denomination and divided public attitude. In its blood and bones, the Catholic Church remains itself.
     Yet this pope has caused a surge of reaction among Catholics, Protestants, and even people who might deem themselves irreligious. Pundits parse his words. Analysts try to peer inside his head and heart.
    What is going on here?
     One commentator says Pope Francis has changed the tune if not the words. And the new tune has resonated with people of all sorts. Or startled them. In an age that politicizes nearly every human transaction (and thus adulterates any useful understanding of politics) the Pope is commonly rated on a liberal/conservative scale. But I think a better measure of his impact may lie elsewhere. My hunch is that he has galvanized attention because his demeanor of loving, inclusive humility clashes with widely shared perceptions of the established church -- Protestant and Catholic alike.
    Consider the not-incidental context.  Church affiliation is in broad decline. People have been voting with their feet. Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote far more than crime fiction, ventured an explanation. In a collection of essays called Letters To A Diminished Church, she suggested that the church is complicit in the accretion of a damaging image of Christian faith.
    She offered a mock catechism.  An abbreviated sample:


    What does the church think of God the father?  He is omnipotent and holy. He created the world and imposed on man conditions impossible of fulfillment; he is very angry if these are not carried out. ...
    What was Jesus Christ like in real life? He was a good man -- so good as to be called the Son of God. ...  He had no sense of humor. ... If we try to live like him, God the Father will let us off being damned hereafter and only have us tortured in this life.
    What is meant by atonement?  God wanted to damn everybody, but his vindictive sadism was sated by the crucifixion of his own Son, who was quite innocent and therefore a particularly attractive victim.  ...
    What does the church think of sex?  God made it necessary to the machinery of the world and tolerates it provided the parties are (a) married and (b) get no pleasure out of it.
    What does  the church call sin?  Sex (otherwise than as excepted above); getting drunk; saying "damn"; murder; and cruelty to dumb animals; not going to church; most kinds of amusement. "Original sin" means that anything we enjoy doing is wrong.
    What is faith? Resolutely shutting your eyes to scientific fact.
     What are the seven Christian virtues? Respectability, childishness, mental timidity, dullness, sentimentality, censoriousness and depression of spirits.

    Sayers continued: "Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore. ...
    "Let us in heaven's name drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it ... ."
     We should be careful here. Organized religion is vulnerable to caricature.  Friends favor images that are easy to swallow. Foes favor images that are easy to condemn. The truth lies elsewhere, and is as complex as life.
    The record of the church through the ages is therefore mixed. And while the mix plentifully includes sacrificial service of good by exemplars of the highest kind, I think today's church does deserve charges of complicity in its own struggles.  Pope Francis' denomination remains itself. Its doctrines on birth control and abortion, to name only two, are a direct cause of much suffering.  Other denominations favor their various versions of narrow, judgmental and exclusionary piety.
    Today's church at large displays a taste for rule-mongering and doctrinal calisthenics.  In this it is an edifice made with hands, and reflects human foibles all too clearly. Add to this in some quarters an unseemly appetite for political power, and we come to a melancholy juncture: People of clear mind and good heart can feel that the posture of the established church is out of tune with the spirit of the Christian gospels.
    This formulation necessarily presupposes an appetite -- or at least a respect -- for the spirit of the Christian gospels. We cannot be offended by abuse of an ethic we hold in no regard.
    And so along comes Pope Francis, who reveals something in us by touching it.   Millions are energized by his example of loving, inclusive humility.
     I think the phenomenon is not trivial.

A Winter Lament

                                      Snowflakes are kisses from heaven. 
                                                                            Anonymous
                                     Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."
                                                                                      Robert Byrne
    Serious people, in my view, should pause now and then to consider the great divides in the human family. Not mere race or religion or nationality. We should consider the fundamentals that sort us out, to wit:
    -- Some people are cheerful in the morning, some are not.
    -- Some people are always on time, some always late.
    -- Some people are tidy.  Some others don't bother.
    -- Some people embrace winter, some hate it.
    The first three of these fundamentals do share one characteristic. People on opposite sides of them marry each other with regularity. This produces tensions and struggles of which much has been written and nothing more need be ventured here. Thus we are left to consider the matter of wintertime.
    Winter people are a cheerful and energetic bunch. They see jewels in snowflakes.  They love the textures of winter clothing and the hearty warmth of a good winter soup. They even go outdoors, to skate and ski and sled. Do they shiver, do they fall, do they suffer the least discomfort? Never.
     Anti-winter people, on the other hand, are morose and disagreeable for several months a year. I can say this with assurance, as I am one of them. For us, winter is chilblains, wet socks, and cold drafts that follow us through the house no matter where we sit. Presented with hearty soup and a hot toddy, we long for summer tomatoes and a gin and tonic. In winter's endless darkness, we brood about deeper questions, such as: Can there really be any excuse for the month of February?
    I have these matters in mind because the forecasters are beginning to remind us that winter is around the corner.  And they say it will be a bad one.  Here I do not rely on the folks employed by the government weather service, although they should be credited at least with enterprise. Apparently they've discovered how to generate computer models by rolling dice.
    No, I listen to forecasts that are tried and true -- such as the ones from The Old Farmers' Almanac.  This year's winter outlook is a stinker.  Lots of cold. Lots of snow, even in places that don't usually get it. Lots of rain in places that won't get snow.  In other words, chills and slipping and sliding and slop. Just about everywhere.
    Of course, even good forecasters are not perfect, and so I permit myself hope for a bit of reprieve from this vision of doom.  I wait on tiptoe for the next major prediction -- the October pronouncement of the woolly worms.  These caterpillars are colored with bands of brown and black.  If brown predominates when they emerge in the fall, the winter will be mild. If black predominates, hunker down for a bad one.
    And what if the almanac and the worms do indeed give opposite predictions?  I'll go with the optimistic one, of course, even knowing that its reprieve is only partial. I will be spared a measure of dread as the season approaches.  But I won't be spared some features of even the mildest winters. Drab skies giving way to long hours of darkness. Bare, skeletal trees. And the big one:  The clueless cheer of people who won't stop chattering that they enjoy the season.
    I insist that I am not unreasonable in this outlook. It's the way some of us are made. In fact we are recognized in literature. When Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, wanted an image for comprehensive gloom, he said he had November in his soul.
    Indeed.
    So there.
   

Ducking the Big Question

    First the story, then the point:
    The young man was full of himself, in the way young men can be. He was puffed up with his new scientific graduate degree. And his girlfriend was listening. He was showing off.
    He announced to fellow dinner guests (who had not raised the subject) that the Christian gospels are so much hooey. Full of discrepancies and contradictions. Not even close to the standards of real history. Written 100 years after the events they purport to record, by persons unknown who could not have been eyewitnesses.
    Our young lecturer did not know that the earliest Christian scriptures were written 18 to 20 years after the events of Jesus' life. They are Pauline letters. More to the point, these letters  were written by Paul to congregations already up and running across the region. In the bosom of an ancient theocracy, something fundamental had happened. It had caused people in numbers to abandon their very concept of reality, even at the risk of their lives.
    Our young dinner lecturer, being thus uninformed, had no occasion to consider some points of simple fact: The existence of the man Paul is settled. The authenticity of the main body of his letters is settled.  In these letters he says he did business with the apostle Peter and Jesus' brother James.  He says he met people who had encountered the resurrected Jesus. And he says he met the resurrected Jesus himself.
    Had our lecturer known as much, he would have faced a decision: Where would he place the information on a yardstick of credibility?  At one extreme, he would conclude that the man Paul gave his life to propagate a cockamamie yarn among folks indulging a mass delusion. At the opposite pole, he would conclude that Paul knew what he was talking about and meant what he said.
    That's the story. Here's the point:
    The young lecturer has brethren in attitude. Our rational and enlightened age hosts a mode of thinking that is neither. It embraces an ethic of skepticism that questions everything but itself. It swallows whole the doctrine that faith and reason are foes. It tolerates and even celebrates a  certain kind of cultural ignorance.
     Holding the Christian gospels to standards of modern history is simply silly. The discipline of modern history did not exist at the time of the gospel writings. Judged knowledgeably and objectively, the case for the historicity of the Christian gospels is sound. The evidence is available to anyone who knows how to read and bothers to look.
    But we moderns don't do a lot of bothering. Our reasons may seem good-hearted.
We are put off by the loons and scoundrels who caricature religion to their own benefit.  Or we are put off by rule-mongers who use the Bible to push what one writer calls "a narrow, hard and exclusive piety." Or we are confident of pursuing morality without religion.
    Or we're just too modern and too skeptical. In the upshot, a wise and beautiful book languishes at the outskirts of cultural literacy,  and supposedly discerning  people tap dance past the essential question about Judeo-Christian scripture.  The question is not whether the Bible describes an elevated system of morality. The question is whether it tells a story that is, in its essence, true.
    Ultimate questions can be mercilessly simple, also the decisions they imply.
    True? Or false?
    Yes? Or no?
    On this question, our rational age has not dealt rationally with the fact that automatic skepticism amounts to a  lazy form of evasion. Our young lecturer hadn't dealt rationally with it, either.  For intellectual  rigor, poor marks all around.



 

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall ...

                                             
                                                  You can't even do wrong right.
                                                                                Blues Lyric

    An old friend used to call them The Baddies. They are the kind of day when things go wrong from the start. You oversleep. Breakfast is rushed. Some of it gets stuck between your teeth. Then you get toothpaste on your sleeve.  That kind of day. Bad karma right out of the gate.
    I've thought of The Baddies as the presidential campaigns lurch to a start.  Of Republicans, we can at most say that their dueling publicity stunts have offered counterpoint to the yawn-fest on the Democratic side. Over there, while Hillary Clinton still seems the one to beat,  tepid poll numbers say that even supporters are not enthusiastic about her.
    At this rate, our next president will be sent to the White House by people voting with their fingers crossed. Such are the possibilities of politics in a safe and affluent country. We have evolved but not improved our definition of the phrase "consent of the governed." The first Continental Congress received its consent in an affirmative sense of the word. It had no established authority within the norms of the day. It was  sent to do the work of the people who did the sending. Nowadays, government has vested interests of its own. It is large beyond any valid need. It is extravagantly wasteful of the public's money. And it is peopled by careerists who are serenely confident of the rightness of their judgments for the rest of us.
    This should be fertile ground for Republican politicians, who do indeed like to prattle about limited government. However it is only prattle. In saying they'd like to scale back government enterprise, they mean they'd like to scale back government enterprise to someone else's constituents. When it comes to sending boodle to the home folks, Republicans are champs. The day of truly limited government is over in this country, and this is why politicians who preach it sound so often callous or silly.
    According to the news-celebrities who call their opinions analysis,  time favors Democrats, because their natural constituencies are growing.  But which Democrats does time favor?  Consider what the Bernie Sanders phenomenon reveals:  A candidate who has remarkably energized voters is a renegade by established political norms.
    These norms have given the Democrats Hillary Clinton. In her, a talent for policy is evident. A personal gift for politics is not. Direct conversations with the people are visibly a chore. Thus her campaign seeks to reduce political leadership to an exercise in packaging and posturing. (Note to Clinton staff: Lose the official photo that makes her look as if she's been startled out of a nap.)
    And so, on both sides of the partisan divide, we find today's chosen vehicle for obtaining the consent of the governed: Politics by marketable pose. This is what we get when we mix show business into public affairs. (See: Donald Trump.) Also, this is what we get from candidates who don't quite know what to say to the American people.   We are beset by would-be leaders who are quite willing to tell us what they think we want to hear, if only they can figure out what that is.
    Along with ineptitude -- or because of it --  not a few of the candidates have a second deficiency. They have embraced the notion of political doctrine as higher truth. Some of them appear actually to believe this. For others, claiming to have the one true vision is a shortcut past the labor of crafting a coherent program of governance from the competing values of a diverse society.
    A lack of political aptitude is a serious shortcoming in candidates for an office that is, foremost, a position of political leadership.  Some of this country's highest achievements in democracy have gone forward on the sweaty shoulders of political craft.  The nation can negotiate many circumstances with a mere manager in the White House, but moments inescapably come when it needs a leader.

Faith In The Closet

    Usually I dislike sermons.  The form is lost on me. This has occasioned some awkwardness in my life, as I've had good friends among clergy. They in turn have compounded my problem by being exceptions who vividly proved the rule. It is a mildly uncomfortable conundrum.
   In any case,  I usually dislike sermons. But I perked up at one a few Sundays ago. The preacher began with a story of visiting a backyard barbecue at a neighbor's house. One of the other guests, on learning that he was a clergyman, treated him to a lecture. It began with words on the order of, "Do you really believe all that stuff?"  It ended with words on the order of "You can't prove any of it."
    The story resonated with me.  From time to time I have a layman's version of the same experience. People who are not religious seem to be bothered by the fact that I am.
    I take care not to wear religion on my sleeve.  But I don't dissemble. If the subject comes up in social conversation, and the question lands in my lap, I acknowledge being observant in a Christian denomination.  Several kinds of reaction may occur. Some people shoot embarrassed glances toward far corners of the room, as if I had claimed to be a chicken pot pie. Others go blank and silent, as if to forbear through rudeness.  Still others go rigid with something that looks very like annoyance.
     Granted, religion can nowadays be a cringe-worthy subject. Choose your culprit, starting with the scalawags who will cure your bunions or save your soul -- your choice -- if only you'll pony up.  At the other extreme are the sweet folks whose faith is utterly sincere and comprehensively vocal. Nobody likes to be harangued. I'd rather not be blessed by the cashier at the grocery store.
    In between, we have hate-mongers, politicians who claim God as an ally, and mega-preachers whose definition of reverent humility permits them million-dollar homes. Praise the Lord, pass the loot, vote for me and scorn the neighbor of your choice.
    To all the above I plead not guilty. Even so, I may wind up being -- figuratively speaking -- the guy who stops conversation by telling the wrong joke or grinning with spinach between his teeth.
    Perhaps it is not irrelevant that atheism has become stylish. It has its own mega-preachers and proselytizers.  And like my friends on the religious side, its adherents can be artfully selective about which tenets they embrace and which they ignore.  I particularly enjoy the Christmas season's manger scene mania, in which religious tradition must not put so much as a toe on secular turf. I wait for the manger police to reject the tradition of taking the Christian Sabbath as a day off from work. So far, no go.
    With the rest of the human race, I am capable of petty resentment. I do become annoyed in those moments when I realize I'm being regarded as a walking, talking faux pas.  In years past I might venture to talk my way through them. The result was always social disaster. I babbled earnest endorsements of the theory of evolution, and abject admissions of scriptural contradiction, until I sounded as if I were selling door-to-door magazine subscriptions. I embarrassed whole rooms full of people, including myself.
    Social mores are bearable if not always sensible. But the ones here at hand reflect a larger context that I think terribly sad. The hucksters and pols and zealots have so thoroughly poisoned the vocabulary of religion that it is genuinely risky to mention the subject in polite company.
    As for my social life, perhaps I will try to hint -- without actually fibbing -- that I am a Druid.
    And come to think of it, I wonder if Druids have sermons.



 

Hangover Ahead?

    He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
                                                                                  Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ... 
                                                  From  The First Amendment to the United States Constitution

    People who behave foolishly are apt to be deemed fools. People who wield power foolishly are apt to be deemed dangerous fools.
                                                                                                  Anonymous


    Mixing politics and religion adulterates both and produces an unhealthy brew. More's the pity that foes of same-sex marriage are tippling on it.
     Republican politicians woo the religious right with talk of writing God into the Constitution. Mega-preachers rail against the Supreme Court, the president, even against citizens who voted for the president. State and local officials offer religious excuses for obstruction and foot-dragging.  That old-time religion has never had so many fans.
    I'm not among them. To my ear, the voice of the far Christian right has always been a little long on judging and a little short on loving. And in any case it is a factional voice. It does not typify Christian thought, much less American public attitude.  Yet some on that side would see their favorite doctrines written into civil law, to be enforced on all comers.
    History warns against thinking to evangelize by the sword. And common sense warns against thinking to dance with the devil and come away clean.  Except perhaps to unusually obtuse children, the principle of the thing is simple. If government were empowered to favor one version of faith over others, no one's faith would be safe.
    Yet between the preachers and the pols, a fond dalliance proceeds. On both sides, temptation has worked its powerful way.
    Without a coherent vision of public policy for the country, the Republican Party is doubly open to single-issue, hot-button politics. On the religious right, a worldly appetite for political power is at work.  When candidates go a-courtin' over there, they can find the welcome warm indeed. And over there can be found a politician's dream of cohesive voter blocs ripe for sloganeering. Thus we see religion used to decorate the hoary tactic of barren politicians: demonize a minority.
    The same-sex marriage issue will burn out eventually. It is at odds with settled law and public opinion. But the mutual exploitation of preachers and pols may linger for a while. The appetite for it on the religious right is plain to see. And the GOP's problem remains. The party has little to say to the American people, and leaders who say even that much badly. Thus Republican candidates will be tempted toward the expedient of whooping up emotional issues.
    They won't succeed in turning the country into a theocracy. They will succeed in debasing the language of our politics.
 

 

Comic Politics

    No Republican presidential candidate has yet been pictured in a propeller beanie, but Donald Trump probably has trouble with hats of any sort. In kindness we might call the Republican field colorful. In candor we would call most of it dreadful.
    Parts of it may fall out this way:
    Some hothouse flowers of state politics will not do well in the great outdoors. One of these will be former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who still doesn't seem to get it: Much of the country doesn't care how they do things down yonder in the Lone Star State. His indictment will matter less than his tin ear.
    Another will be Wisconsin's bully-boy governor, Scott Walker. Even when he's not bumbling, he will struggle to he heard over cries of outrage and dismay from his own state.
    Still another will be Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who may need more than one closet to hold all his skeletons. He struts his in-your-face act with such gusto that one writer calls him Gov. Powder Keg. He will discover that blunt talk is like virginity. People admire it more in the abstract.  Close and constant national scrutiny will show him to be a poseur -- or, as his home folks are beginning to say, a phony.
     Elsewhere in the pack are long shots getting makeovers for the national audience; scolds offering a dog's breakfast of pet peeves; and wannabes who may only wanna follow the Sarah Palin pattern of celebrity, in which flamboyantly failed candidates can make a good living as political hams.
     Experts see front runners in Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.  Rubio gained his Senate seat by surviving a multi-candidate election in which more people voted against him than for him. He has traveled well on youth and ethnicity, but on matters of substance has sometimes been a dim star. Does he have genuine political ability? So far we don't really know.
     Some early support migrated to Bush simply for want of attractive options. And he has not yet found a stride. Meanwhile, examinations of his past show him standing close to some shady business deals and making a living by trading on his family name. In other words, there are shadows on his character and his competence.
     Nowhere in sight is a rescuer who will say the truth about the national GOP:   The emperor is naked. The party's best talents are mediocre. Their pretense to stewardship of conservatism is a shame, and a reminder that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims it. In the history of Western democracy, the role of authentic conservative thought has been honorable and useful. In today's American politics, the role of the Republican Party has sometimes been neither.
     The GOP needs to free itself of people who treat politics as playacting and the party as a means of hustling a buck or grinding an axe.
 
   
     
   
   


j

After The Flag

                      The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.
                                                                                                Georges Bernanos
                      Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
                                                                         The White Queen, in Through The Looking Glass
    As a native southerner I say this about moves against the Confederate flag:  Good riddance. It is a symbol of bigotry and, for some, a license to kill. It has no proper place in contemporary public life.
    The general applause for these moves represents an ironic turn of events.  Traditionally, on matters of race, the rest of the nation has liked to look away with scorn to Dixie.  A sordid and shameful strain in this region's history has enabled selective recollection of history in other back yards. Of segregated schools in the Northeast and upper Midwest; segregated public accommodations and even entire towns in New England;  anti-miscegenation laws in most of the lower 48 states. And so on.
    History will likely right itself in the long term. Meanwhile, we are left to deal with the realities of here and now.  One of these is the ordinary human yen to think of racism as someone else's sin. Another is the temptation to believe that we may finally have the problem on the run -- to feel good about melting the tip of an iceberg, in the case of the flag.
    Still another can he heard among politicians and commentators on the right. They are signaling that they sense in their target constituency an issue-weariness on race. After the Charleston church massacre they strained to avoid calling it what it was: A classic racial hate crime.  In a bizarre aside, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal thought it timely to assert that institutional racism no longer exists in America.
    Without evidence that The White Queen works at The Journal, we may conclude that the editorialists don't get out much, and that their office windows do not afford them a clear view of, say, the criminal justice system.
    The politics and atmospherics of race have not been good these days. Politicians have worked openly to inhibit minority voting.  Our African-American president has been mocked and reviled in some quarters, even by some in Congress. See, for example,  the Norfolk, Nebraska parade float portraying an outhouse as the Obama Presidential Library. See the collected sayings of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz. (Senator Cruz's rhetoric is best sampled when there will be time afterward to take a shower.)
        Notwithstanding White Queen commentators and pandering politicians, institutional racism is still alive. Minorities are disadvantaged in health care, even in access to grocery shopping. They have been afflicted by the banking, insurance and mortgage industries. Racial disparity is sharply increasing  in schools, especially in the urban Northeast.
       To say that we are all responsible is not to say that we are all bigots. It is, rather, to say that we are not always attentive to what is produced or permitted by the accretion of our everyday behaviors.
       Symbols matter. Rejecting a hateful symbol matters.  But symbolism can't substitute for the glamourless work of diligent citizenship: For listening when we're told that minority schools are flagging a few miles from our homes;  for remembering that the politicians passing those ugly voting laws were elected from polling places like the one down the street.
   


 

Taking Back Our State?

    News reports say former governor Jim Hunt has convened a group to discuss "an alternative vision" for North Carolina. Let's hope they'll want to counteract the serial disgrace that began with the election of Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators widely beholden to a wealthy, right-wing ideologue.
    Charlotte Mayor McCrory was a thoughtful and even-handed public servant. Governor McCrory has baffled his friends, appalled his critics and saddened both. His political style has been long on parroting doctrinaire slogans. As the state's chief executive, he has displayed a startling capacity for connivance and double-talk.
    Treated early in his tenure to vocal dismay, McCrory lashed out. He decried "scare tactics" from "the extreme left."  Welcome to today's North Carolina. If you exercise a citizen's right to speak up, your own governor gives you the back of his hand.
    Meanwhile, under iron control by Republicans, the legislature indulged the notion that might makes right. Lawmakers whooped through abortion restrictions and a high-tech poll tax. They have tainted the state's distinguished university with partisan politics.
    The list of dismal particulars goes on.  And while we might disagree on this specific or that one, they are alike in the spirit of their affront to principled governance: They are fundamentally out of tune with the long manifest public temperament of this state.
    North Carolina has comfortably hosted conservative political ideas and progressive ones, too.  Our best leaders have honored a sleeves up, pragmatic ethic of tending to essential knitting in the broad public interest.
    The offense of our current leaders is regrettably simple. In imposing a stark, partisan lockstep on North Carolina, the governor and the legislature have functioned in  contempt of their obligation to serve all the people.
    Possibly, they have produced an especially significant result. They may have coalesced in the public mind the sort of resonating idea that supports a successful brand. In ironic justice, the brand would belong to their opponents.
    Attorney General Roy Cooper embraced it as he put his own hat in the gubernatorial ring:
    "North Carolina is better than this."
 
 

Who Does Our Killing?

    The Charleston massacre and the trial of the Colorado theater shooter have put me back in an old quandary While I am against the death penalty, I recognize that it is widely favored by people whose conscience is every bit as good as mine.
    To my ear, their arguments begin roughly this way:
     Claims that the death penalty lacks general deterrent impact are not persuasive. Yes, yes, studies say this and studies say that. But they depend on an inherently implausible notion. They purport to put a yardstick on nothingness -- to measure how often unknown persons have made unknown, inner decisions against committing a crime, with the result that nothing happened.
    And clearly, the death penalty deters the people upon whom it is visited. We can be sure that they will never repeat the crime of which they were convicted.  Recidivism will not be a problem.
    This view finds nourishment in a larger concern that our criminal justice system is a screen door against wind.  While the concern can be overblown by hotheads and political opportunists,  it is not without merit. The courts and the jails should reliably keep dangerous people off the street. They do not.
    A crusty old friend of mine would here advance one more argument:  Society should not shrink from saying that some people are just bad actors and deserve what they get.
    My friend had strong opinions and a vivid vocabulary. He liked to say we should be careful not to get so open-minded that our brains fall out. But on the matter of criminal penalties, he did have a point. Punishments have a societal value. We define our community in the rules we make. It is not merely appropriate for society to articulate ultimate prohibitions. It is important.
     Stacked against the ultimate penalty of death are familiar assertions, all true: It is capriciously applied. It falls more heavily on minorities and the poor. Innocents may be convicted.
    My own opposition is intractably simple. I try to imagine pushing the needle or flipping the switch with my own hand. I can't do it. If killing is wrong, we do not make it less wrong by hiring others to do it for us.
    The trial of the Charleston shooter is yet to come. The trial of the Colorado monster already tests our patience and our nerve. There is no doubt of his guilt. And yet the process wears on at a huge cost of time and money.
    Defense attorneys might counter that in defending the culprit they are defending the system. Whatever penalty may be levied at the end of the process, it is important to reach the end by respecting our own rules. It is important that we not be a mob.
 
 

 

 

About An Empty Man

    Once I knew a man who was a model of cheerful cynicism.
    The cheer was genuine. He liked his job and his home life. He enjoyed his fellow human beings.  He had a lively sense of humor.
    The cynicism also was genuine.  He knew all the angles and answers.  He was confident that he discerned every motive, every attitude in others. Life was a long contest for comfort and advantage. That was about it.
    At the time I felt a little sorry for him. I thought a part of him must be, despite his cheer, not really  happy. With the perspective of years, I've decided I was off the mark. I think a part of him was simply vacant.
    He had no capacity for reverence. By this I do not mean religious sensibility. I mean that he could view a great painting with interest but never with awe.  He could look at the stars without a twinge of wonder. He was numb to the difference between fun and joy.
     I thought I glimpsed his profile in an essay by the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley.  He worried that 20th Century western culture was trivializing the human spirit. He feared the result could be imagined as a new category of homo sapiens. He called it Asphalt Man.
    I leave the term to imply what it will to others. I am not competent to elaborate on Dr. Eiseley's elegant thinking. In  my own imagination, Asphalt Man takes several forms. Some of them annoy only me. Some amount to more -- and worse.
    I hear his voice in politicians who set out to meddle with great universities. This is happening in my state among others. Politically connected policymakers have trimmed liberal arts programs deemed to be under-used. During subsequent controversy, one policymaker was quoted as saying, "We are capitalists.  We have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."
    What to say of a statement that is at once so silly and so revealing? We should begin with first principles:  Education curricula are supposed to shape students, not vice versa.
    People now in control of our legislature want a turn toward job preparation in the university's mission. The talk of supply and demand is window dressing for a sharp change in policy. And it is a dodge past the truth that, had mere marketplace utility been their guide, great universities would not now be great.
    My state has a history of systemic rural poverty. In levying and spending the taxes to build the university, leaders of yesteryear wanted to offer their constituents a path of escape from life behind a mule. And they wanted graduates equipped to do more than earn a buck. They knew that fine minds are as likely to be born into plowboys as anywhere else. They hoped graduates would build an economy, but they knew graduates would -- for better or worse -- build a society.
    They would not have wanted their university to produce Asphalt Man. They would have recognized in him the heart of my former friend's cynicism: He valued only what he himself could understand. This was not merely an attitude. For him it was an ethic. Anything beyond his personal ken was not worth knowing.
    He would have sniffed that programs of arts and letters were about frilly and superfluous notions.  But in fact they are about the inner light that makes the human species unique.
    Dr. Eiseley feared that Asphalt Man was capable of pawning treasures to improve the roads.
    I fear that leaders in my state are offering to prove him right.

Say Howdy To Mendacity

   


    In the vintage western movie "Hondo"  -- based on a story by the late novelist and poet Louis L'Amour --  John Wayne protects a widow and her little boy from marauding Apaches. A key scene has the Apache war chief offering to release the three of them if Wayne will promise to conceal the Indians' whereabouts from approaching cavalry. In response, the Duke growls, "This I will not do."  The chief smiles in affirmation of Wayne's refusal to be a traitor and lets them go anyway.  The chief's proposition was a test, Wayne later explains to the widow: "Indians hate a liar."
    Though pooh-poohed by the smart set, Wayne's westerns were not bad work. And they were about more than cowboys and Indians. This one was about integrity.  The scene with the war chief was one of the theme-setters. The stereotype of the noble red man was used as counterpoint to white characters whose standards of behavior were not right and wrong but advantage and expediency. An Indian hated lies. Did  "civilized" white men? Maybe, maybe not.
    Even Louis L'Amour might deem his metaphors quaint in today's world. While most of us would say we dislike deceit, people who want our attention and allegiance plentifully bet that we are flexible on the point. If they weasel on matters of integrity, will we turn away from them? Maybe, maybe not.
    Hillary Clinton would be high on this list. She has entered the presidential  race  carrying -- as ever -- baggage.  She is said to be careless of appropriate boundaries between her public duty and her private interests. Details of the Clintons' alleged indiscretions may be perennially debatable. However, it seems fair to observe that the debate is, in fact, perennial. Also, we may usefully note the announced theme of her presidential campaign: She's an ordinary gal. Just one of the folks, like you and me.  This theme has the virtue of being warm and the telltale defect of being manifestly untrue.
    Meanwhile, over at NBC network news, anchor Brian Williams is half way through a six-month suspension for fibbing in some of his news reports.  For this offense a lesser light would have been fired before lunchtime. But Williams is a star. The audience likes him. He boosts ratings, and ratings boost revenue.   NBC management holds open the possibility that Williams will return to the air. Commercial imperatives are being weighed. Will integrity weigh as much? Maybe, maybe not.
    (Less of a stir has been caused by similar accusations against one of the stars in Fox News' cast of performers. My theory:  The Fox faithful refuse to believe it, and no one else is surprised.)
    If popular sports can reflect values in an affluent culture -- and they can -- the example of the New England Patriots' football team is worth considering.   The Patriots have been caught cheating, and not for the first time.  In this iteration, they deflated footballs for easier handling in a key game. Early explanations scapegoated a couple of underlings, but speculation would not ignore an obvious point: Golden boy quarterback Tom Brady cannot have failed to know.
    Brady smirked and baffle-gabbed his way past the question until an investigation concluded the obvious: He cannot have failed to know. The league suspended him for four games and fined the Patriots' organization $1 million.
    As commercial entertainment, professional football can let its standards be a matter for vendors,  customers, and the kept regulators who eventually get around to slapping wrists.  But will fans ever fully forget that Brady is a cheat? Will they always wonder if victory involves a little performance-enhancing funny business with the rules?  Integrity is a Humpty-Dumpty thing. In seeing the Patriots twice resolve to win by any means, and twice skate through being caught, football consumers have received notice: They are at risk of  buying an adulterated product.
    Corruption in journalism is, obviously, a more serious issue. But television news has one foot inextricably in show business.  The telling thing in the NBC episode is less Brian Williams' deceit than the network's long pause in deciding how much it matters. Eventually, television may decide to reconsider the whole institution of the prime time news anchor. Consumers with multiplying options for obtaining news and information could lose appetite for a standing appointment with a friendly face.
    Among adulterated products, the Clinton candidacy should concern us sharply. Given her lead over Democrats, and the Keystone Kops nature of the Republican field, she is likelier than anyone now in view to be the next president. Yet she has bought into the ethic that political leadership consists of finding a marketable pose. We must hope she knows better and would eventually choose to do better.

HIde! HIde! The Homos Are Coming!

    During  the Depression era a friend of mine lived in the deepest, poverty-ravaged parts of the South.  Options in public policy were grim, problems intractable. Better tomorrows were a melancholy dream. The tenure of public office holders was likely to be marked by a stringent shortage of results for the electorate. Politicians had to sell something other than accomplishment.
    One politician in my friend's home state cruised regularly to election and re-election. In political season, when he went out on the stump, he stationed henchmen in the audiences of his speeches. Early in his delivery, on cue, they would begin shouting, "Tell us about the niggers.  Tell us about the niggers."  With gusto he did, thus evading forthright treatment of his constituents' dismal lot and his own meager record. He was the people's champion against scapegoats of his own expedient choosing.
    I recalled this story of political hate-mongering when I read that presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul will appear in a new anti-gay film. It is being called -- without discernible irony -- a documentary. It portrays the advancement of gay marriage as a threat to the Christian faith. "If homosexual activists get everything they want, it will be nothing less than the criminalization of Christianity," one figure argues in the film.
    The looming presidential season has already offered other excursions into the twilight zone. Senator Paul is a regular tour leader. Just recently, within the space of a week, he took opposite positions on the issue of childhood vaccination. He continues to lie about his education credentials, despite having been caught in it years ago.  He is a human gaffe-fest. As the son of perennial gadfly Ron Paul, he poses a question for science: Could crackpot bumbling be hereditary?
    Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has taken a colorful show on the road. With choreographed outbursts of faux spontaneity, he touts poor self control as a leadership skill. And lurking in the wings of the political stage are more than  a dozen dreamers, has-beens, opportunists and oddballs who are likelier to be canonized than elected to the White House. Their declarations of presidential aspiration suggest that some have noted the Sarah Palin model. Political celebrity can pay well.  No electoral success required.
    Huckabee may be one of the mercenary group. The ordained minister has diligently shaped himself into a brand, in the idiom of today's marketeers. As a candidate, television and radio personality, speaker-for-hire and author, he has established himself in an aw-shucks vein of right-wing commentary on social and political issues.  The title of his latest book conveys well enough the sizzle of product-Huckabee: "God, Guns, Grits and Gravy."
    He cannot think that cornpone formulations will resonate with a varied national audience. Hence my suspicion that he aims to prosper in a niche market. He might be welcome to do this  were his methods not base.  He is, of course,  far from being the first politician to demonize minorities.  But as an observant Christian, I find his Bible-thumping version of it especially noxious. Permitting gay Americans to formalize loving relationships threatens nothing and harms no one.
    Elsewhere in the presidential pose-a-thon: Wisconsin's bully-boy Gov. Scott Walker is shucking and jiving past the simplest questions. Florida's Jeb Bush is severing financial ties that might appear unseemly for a presidential aspirant -- and are, in fact, unseemly for a presidential aspirant. Hillary Clinton is assembling a major campaign machine while purporting to be undecided about campaigning. Ditto Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who salivates over power. Vice President Joe Biden is making a show of plucking petals off his inner decision-daisy. Wannabes of every sort are searching for a schtick.
    Our national air reeks of politics whose aim is less to lead the people than to herd them.The election is not quite two years away. I fear it will seem a lot longer.




 
   

The Customer Is Always Ripe

       I have never seen an airline employee use a cattle prod on passengers.   However,  the image does occur to me, and not only  when I travel.  To my mind it symbolizes the fading  of a venerable term --  customer service --  toward that nether region  where outmoded concepts go to be quaint. There it will join smaller casualties of changing times, such as personal letter.  And it will join much greater ones, such as two from the world of politics, dignity and tolerance.
    Of course airlines are not alone in treating customers as a necessary evil. The style has been favored for years by insurance companies, which are keen to sell their product but loath to see it actually used.
     Yet who would have foreseen  a day when many businesses deal with customers by resourcefully hiding from them?  We've all had the experience. The automated phone tree offers me every option for service except the one I really need. The automated, on-line help page,with its list of Frequently Asked Questions, suggests that I am the only person on the planet who wants to know what I want to know. My question is not frequently asked. It is not even occasionally asked. I am an outlier on the bell curve of customer behavior. I am a nuisance.
   In the uncommon event that these robots clearly offer the option of access to a human being, the human being is  too busy to talk right away, even though my call is Very Important To Us. The human being is helping other customers  -- most of whom, like me, are twiddling their thumbs on hold. Our time, in the aggregate, is less important than the time of the human being whose wages we are paying and who supposedly is employed for our convenience.
    As the country learned the hard way, the ethic of customers-as-chattel has penetrated the banking industry as well.  And it has seeped all the way down, to affect the smallest of the small fry, people like me.
    My requirements of my bank are  simple. I want my money safely kept. I want portions of it promptly returned to me when I ask.  But nowadays, to gain access to my own money, I must run a gauntlet of sales pitches:

    Teller: "Have you considered our new warp-speed account bundle with color-coded deposit and withdrawal slips?"
    Me: "Yes. I've heard about it. But I don't  want it, thank you."
    Teller: "But you're missing so much."
    Me: "I'm aware of what I'm missing. I don't need it."
    Teller: "But you could have funds automatically moved among your accounts at night, and receive a complete update on your cellphone the next morning."
    Me: "I don't need to bank while I sleep, and I don't want to do arithmetic before breakfast."
    Teller, eyebrows arching: "Really!"

    I am old enough to remember when banks offered toasters as sales inducements. Now they offer scolding and guilt.
    In his satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, the late Al Capp presented the character of the shmoo. A shmoo was a chubby little bowling pin of a creature with a cheerful grin and a bottomless desire to enhance the happiness of human beings.
    Shmoos were plentiful. They reproduced exponentially and asexually. They needed only air. They  abundantly  gave eggs, milk and butter (no churning needed).  And shmoos gave themselves. If  a shmoo sensed that a nearby human being was hungry, it would cheerfully cook itself for dinner. Fried shmoo tasted like chicken.  Broiled shmoo tasted like steak.  Shmoos would undergo any circumstance to please.
    At the epicenter of commerce by shakedown -- industries with monopolistic advantage -- there is a certain inescapable shmoo-ness in the customer role. Other industries may be thinking wishfully when they adopt the model. I know of businesses that will not hand me over to an automaton when I need service. I favor them vigorously when I shop, and I am not alone in this.
    We probably should not imagine a focused consumer revolt. But traditional business may not be immune to the kind of creeping customer desertion that mortally wounded the American auto industry and American newspapers.
    Meanwhile, at certain points of my consumer need, I suppose I must grin shmoo-like and learn to live with realities.
    A bank is, whatever else, a better repository than a mattress.
    Usually.