On Being Told By God

I have been receiving of late weekly Bible commentaries from the Aleph Institute (the link to the institute itself is broken), a Jewish chaplaincy outfit based in Florida that specializes in military and prison chaplaincy as well as "family ministry." (I put that in quotes because I'm not sure what it means. I'm not suspicious -- I like just about everything I get from these folks -- I just don't know what "family ministry" is.) And I get these because I have befriended Dr. Joel Dreyer, a former employer of mine who is currently in Federal Prison.

He'd been sentenced to 10 years after pleading guilty to drug offenses, but his sentence was tossed out more then a year ago, and now he's doing indeterminate time until a federal court judge rules on whether he is competent enough to assist in his own defense.

Aleph is associated with the Chabad Lubavitcher, and Doc Dreyer recently sent me a couple of a Lubavitcher pamphlets -- Geulah (literally, "Redemption," though it refers specifically to the coming of Messiah) published by the Chabad World Center to Greet Moshiach, and a little thing called "Reflections of Redemption: Essays on the Weekly Torah Reading and Moshiach, Based on the talks of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menacham M. Schneerson" and published by Moshiach Awareness Center, an operation of Enlightenment for the Blind.

Before I quote what I want to quote, a couple of things. It's interesting just how much these Jewish pamphlets reminds me of a certain kind of Islamic publication I saw a lot of long ago when I was Muslim. (I'm thinking specifically of some of the material that came out of South Africa.) It's very heavy in Hebrew cognates, so much so, that parts of don't really feel written in English. This is very true of the "Reflections on Redemption," which has the following sentence:

[T]he Shabbos of Re'eh is also Shabbos Mevarchim -- the Shabbos on which is recited the blessing for the new month.

Not so bad, except that the use of the transliterated Hebrew words is something of a stumbling block. There's a lot of that in this short essay, mostly because the essay deals with a word-by-word examination of a particular Hebrew phrase from the Torah, "See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse," though the pamphlet leaves off the curse bit of the verse. (As an aside, I wrote a song on this passage.) Still, there are a lot of Hebrew transliterations in the essay, and I find myself wondering what value something like really is to someone who doesn't already have some understanding of Hebrew. There were Muslim publications that used so many Arabic transliterations that there was almost no point in their being written in English.

But this is all so beside the point. This comes from the "Point of Light" essay in Geulah. There is no date, but the number on the upper corner says "469" it lists candle lighting times for Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Montreal for the week of October 11, 2013 (7 Cheshvan 5774). No author is noted, but there is a picture of what appears to be the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. And this is what sticks out for me in the essay:

Our forefather Abraham was not asked. He was told. 

"Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father's home, toward the land that I will show." G-d command Abraham to forsake anything that is comfortable and familiar to him, and set out on a harsh journey, with no clear idea of his final destination. 

Abraham had already established himself in Ur Kasidim. In one moment, G-d appeared to him and commanded him to leave everything that he had built up, and move to a strange land. Before sending him on this journey, G-d blesses Abraham: "I will make you a great nation." 

At that moment, who was in control? Was Abraham taking control of his life, or relinquishing it? Abraham realized that while he might have been living a successful, conventional life, there was something missing. He was grounded in the habits of his land, his birthplace, his father's home. By choosing to follow that Divine voice, Abraham willingly and consciously let go of his past. He opened himself to live a life without boundaries, without limitations, without expectations. And is doing so, he made himself a vessel to receive G-d's blessings, to become a great nation. 

I'm inclined to quibbled with some of the wording here. I'm not sure Abraham really chose to follow. Could he have said no? Or did God go trolling Ur, commanding many until one -- Abram -- said yes? We don't know. The biblical story we have says God spoke, and Abraham followed. I don't believe he could have said no. Not really. No more than Mary could have.

Again, besides the point. The Rebbe's essential point here is important -- Abraham was not asked. He was told. 

In our democratic modernity, we have made an idol of choosing. We choose what we will do. Wo we will be. Who we will love. Where we will live. We choose what we consume. We can even, at the edges, choose how to consume. But we choose. Choosing is what we do. Choosing, and the ability to choose, has become the essence of human freedom in Enlightenment Modernity. Someone who can choose is free. Someone who cannot choose is a slave.

The church is no stranger to this ideology of choice. Of giving people choices. Of believing God gives us choices. After all, in that Deuteronomy passage discussed above, God gives Israel a choice -- life or death, good or evil. So, God gives us choices. Choices to follow. Choices to believe. Choices to be grateful.

Except I'm not so sure. Abraham was not asked. He was told. Our best stories of Jesus in the New Testament shows a God incarnate who chooses, who calls disciples. And not by saying, "whoever wants to follow me can follow." But by telling -- "Follow me." "You shall be fishers of men." "Feed my sheep." "Baptize and teach and make disciples of all nations." Not a "please?" or "would you like to?" in the whole bunch. Commands. All of them.

The one time that comes to mind when someone actually asked Jesus "What do I have to do to earn eternal life?" Jesus answers his questioner in such a way that he walks away, despondent. Jesus gives ambiguous answers to all those who ask. And maybe a lot of people saw what he was doing, what his disciples did, and actively choose to follow.

But not the disciples. They experienced what Abraham in the Rebbe's account experienced -- the overwhelming call of God. They were not asked, they were told. And there is no saying no to God. To be a disciple, as opposed to one who merely follows, is to know there is no choice, no choosing, no options, no alternative. Just the overwhelming presence of God to which "no" is not an answer. Here's where I love the two short verses which are the call of Levi-Matthew (this is the Luke account):

After this he went out and saw ca tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.

There's so much story that just isn't there. Like the Good Rebbe, we can fill some things in with our imaginations. I suspect Levi had watched Jesus and his disciples doing their thing for weeks. Perhaps he was curious, interested, perhaps he even admired them. But I suspect he also watched them as they worked and concluded, "they will not end well." And yet he knows when Jesus walks into his life, and command him to follow, he cannot say no. There is no "no." Not anymore. Just the yes of God, which tore his life to shreds and left him with absolutely nothing save for the promise of God.

Whatever happened, both Luke and Matthew say the tax collector got up and followed, leaving everything he had. Everything. He. Had.

This is hard experience to speak of in our day and age. It is unreasonable, and Enlightenment Modernity disdains unreason. It sees the call of God as compulsion, and compulsion may be necessary, but we've done everything we can to remove raw power from compulsion, hiding it or burying it in social structures that seem to (or sometimes even really do) offer choice. It sees the call of God as overwhelming, and aside from sexual passion, we have banished the overwhelming from our lives.

Abraham was not asked. He was told. "Follow me." He left everything. And followed.

Humanity vs. The Machines

Well, I just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, after reading this, which compared the world in which we are currently living to Vonnegut's early 1950s vision.

I love dystopian novels. I regularly re-read Brave New World, and occasionally will re-read 1984 just to reacquaint myself with Orwell's world. Brave New World is the better predictor of the human future, a world of meaningless hedonism and consumerism, than Orwell ever wrote. I also think Zamyatin got the role of science in organizing society better in We, which is such a bracingly strange novel that I had to read it three times just to finally grasp how the narrative works.

None of these novels by itself adequately predicts the future -- assuming that was their job. Orwell was worst, since he looked into a world of Stalin and Hitler and saw only the darkness of party-states seeking to annihilate humanity. That has not happened, nor is it likely to. Not so brutally. Better is Huxley's humanist scientism (also at work in We), which rather than investing the future of humanity in a sole, ruling political party that monopolizing anything resembling meaning, is a life given over to pointless, never ending pleasure. I'd rather live in Huxley's world, not because I'd love to drink soma all the time and have "everybody belongs to everybody" sex (making the sign of the T right now), but rather the World Controllers of Huxley's novel appreciate there is at least some room for malcontents and the maladjusted -- "Thank God for islands!" I believe is what Mustafa Mond says.

Mostly, what I really appreciate about these novels is their pessimism. There is no not loving Big Brother, no not acting like a child, no not appreciating the gifts of the One State in the great glass city. If Ayn Rand makes any kind of mistake, it's believing heroic human beings can triumph in the face of such things. We can't. We can only perish. Or find some corner to be human in.

Which is why I'm going to put Player Piano on my list of books to reread on a regular basis. There is so very much prescient about this 1952 novel. Vonnegut conducts a thought experiment -- what if machines made most human labor redundant? What would happen? And there's an amazing amount he gets right.

The managers and engineers are the privileged class (which is true of all the mid-century dystopian novels save for 1984, which privileges the party hacks), and make inordinate salaries (the lead character, Dr. Paul Proteus, makes around $50,000 a year as the chief of the Ilium Works, I think, an exorbitant sum when considered in the early 1950s) when compared to the take-home pay of most "employed" either in the Army or the Bureau of Reconstruction and Reclamation in fairly pointless, make-work jobs. There is the class division, the sense of privilege on the part of the managers (who, at the same time, realize their jobs will eventually face being made obsolete as machines get better at planning and managing), and the use of a compulsory summer camp ("The Meadows") to foster group cohesion and class identity among the managerial class. (Which also allows constant opportunities for networking, though Vonnegut doesn't call it that.)

There's even an amazingly funny bit at Cornell University dealing with the professionalization and gross ostentation of college sports. An athlete being recruited to play football there, for the princely sum of $36,000 a year, asks if he can also take classes (wanting something other than a future filling potholes with the Wrecks and Reeks when he his football career is over), and is told, "We used to allow that sort of thing, but it didn't work out so well."

At stake is the dignity of human labor, and what happens when whole swaths of people no longer have meaningful work to do. At first, it seems like the labor being denigrated is solely that of people who work with their hands, who run machines, who work on assembly lines. They have become meaningless, pointless people, who know they have become meaningless. They exist solely to consume, being provided all they need through their make-work jobs (all paid for out of deductions, so most only take home $30 a weeks).

But the labor also denigrated is that of the managers. It doesn't seem that way at first -- after all, they have all the power. But most don't really know anything. And they know so little of the world, of art, of history, of anything of real value. (Everything of that nature is eventually demolished to make way for factories and power plants.) At the same time, however, their positions and lives are given inflated pseudo-value through a credentialing process that even requires secretaries have doctorates. (One character, a property managers, is a "Doctor of Realty," for example.)

Because the whole point of Vonnegut's novel is that when the machines are allowed to structure society, human beings will always be bent so they can be made of greatest use to the machines, or broken, and thrown away. To compete with machines in this way is to become their slaves.

There's a lot Vonnegut couldn't see. He didn't imagine the transistor, or the integrated circuit, so vacuum tubes make his player piano work. A giant computer, EPICAC, fills up some substantial portion of New Mexico and plans America's industries. And government. The gender roles are still very much grounded in early 1950s bourgeois norms -- men work, women are wives (or secretaries). And no one, and I mean no one, seems to have ever envisioned the mobile phone.

Vonnegut is also writing a mid-century novel. So he sees the New Deal welfare state logically extending itself to "caring" for those displaced by providing them a very generous social welfare in exchange for their pointless jobs filling holes or guarding the far flung bits of America's global empire. He couldn't imagine, as a hypothetical (cough cough), a world in which human labor is made redundant  by machines but then the same people made pointless are blamed for their circumstances, and not given anything except payday loans. (I think Ayn Rand would have needed to write THAT novel...) It is still a novel of management triumphant (and yes, Rand wrote those TOO), and would need some rapacious financiers making a lot more than $50,000 a year in order to work for today. At least Player Piano's managerial class perceived themselves as having an obligation to those they'd made redundant (though Proteus comes to understand that as the condescending liberalism which it is). Which is more than we can say for ourselves today.

Finally, the novel ends badly. An uprising rapidly spreads, breaks the machines, but is quickly crushed. Ilium is besieged. Eventually, Proteus and several of his co-conspirators prepare to hand themselves over to the authorities, having done what they could, having stood their ground and failed. It ends the way it should have. The only other possible, and realistic ending, was one in which some amount of dissent and non-conformity to the economic order would have been accepted or tolerated -- a kind-of "Galt's Gulch" or St. Helena of artisan crafts people who lived on their own, made the things they used and consumed, and where an alternative meaning to human existence could have been constructed. A small thing, but a real thing.

That, however, would have been predicting hipsters. And I'm not sure Vonnegut was up to that.

Quite Possibly the Worst Sermon I've Ever Heard

As some of you know, Jennifer and I have been rambling a bit, staying with friends and seeing the country. We've been in Eastern Texas for a while, and last Sunday took in a worship service at a church in the small East Texas town where we live.

I won't say where, or what church, save that it was a small, local, non-denomination, politically and culturally conservative church in the small town where we are staying outside Austin.

The pastor was a confident speaker, and began by showing his largely mainly white audience slides of various and Sundry buildings in Rome. He pointed out the crosses everywhere, even in the Coliseum, where Christians during the time of the Roman Empire huddled in fear that they might be arrested, tortured and thrown to the animals. Christians had no power, no influence, no standing, were a tiny, persecuted minority in the Roman Empire. Yet, within 300 years (and thanks to the declaration of "Emperor Constantinople"), Christianity became the official ruling faith of that very same empire.

"How?" the pastor asked?

Because Christians had an ethics grounded in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-16 seemed to be the text he was preaching on; there was no reading, just praise music and whatever moved the pastor to preach), an ethic which stressed being "poor in spirit, mourning, meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, mercy, being pure in heart, peacemaking, and being persecuted." Because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them.

More importantly, such people are "salt of the earth" and "light of the world." When the culture becomes pagan, corrupt, based on "might makes right," it is the call of the church to save the culture be being salt. There was a fascinating subtext here, and I suspect this sermon would never have been delivered in this way, using imperial decadence and power in such an up front way, had George W. Bush been president. But the pastor said nothing overtly political, at least nothing partisan.

Because Christians are the meek, persecuted "salt of the earth," the pastor said "You have no standing politically, but you are the last stand." To save the culture of death and make it a culture of life. (My phrasing, not his.)

At this point, he got his most overtly political. Condemning the recent deal to raise the debt limit, he said that all this empowered Christians to say "Enough is enough!" and to take a stand. The "ethics" of the Sermon on the Mount led to this, he said. This is Christian love in action. (Again, not his phrasing.)

Along the way, he did give some advice for daily living. That the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount begin in our daily lives, in how we live our lives at work, in school, wherever. But we did this not so much to show God's love, but to do our part in the larger work on reclaiming the Empire and saving the society.

"Because it's not about us. It's about who gets the glory," the pastor said.

Because the final goal of all this ethical action is take control of the Empire. Christians did it once, they can do it again, the pastor said. And to make being Christian respectable again.

The world wants to listen to what Christians have to say, he concluded. But the question for us is: are we going to act in a way that fills the world's hunger and answers the desire to "make us believe," or are we simply going to act in such a way that says we just "make believe."

It was a culturally conservative sermon from top to bottom, one that spoke to the anxieties and fears of some reasonably well-off white Texas Christians, one that didn't challenge them or invite them to participate in God's actions in the world. Because aside from "creating an ethical system," God doesn't act at all. There was no saving Grace, no love, no sin (except in the culture), just a call to work to redeem the world. (The closest the pastor got to acknowledging anything like grace was noting that, "Some of us are messed up. But God is bigger than your mess!") Because the saving work of God remains undone, and the call to discipleship is simply a call to organize the world the way God demands and finish God's work of salvation.

While this approach is a problem I have with conservative Christianity, particularly cultural conservatism, this kind of sermon and this kind of thinking -- God sets out an ethics that empowers us to act to (effectively) finish God's salvation for the world -- is not merely a conservative problem. It's why I don't like much of Liberal or Progressive Christianity as well. (Walter Wink wrote about redeeming "the powers" in a book I found annoyingly self-righteous and just plain deluded.) It privileges human action over anything God has done. It takes the ethics of the Book of Esther and places them front and center, and not what God speaks through Moses to the Israelites at sea as they witnessed Pharaoh's army advancing upon them:

And Moses said to the people, "Fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent." (Exodus 14:13-14)

 וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל־הָעָם אַל־תִּירָאוּ הִֽתְיַצְבוּ וּרְאוּ אֶת־יְשׁוּעַת יְהוָה אֲשֶׁר־יַעֲשֶׂה לָכֶם הַיּוֹם כִּי אֲשֶׁר רְאִיתֶם אֶת־מִצְרַיִם הַיּוֹם לֹא תֹסִיפוּ לִרְאֹתָם עוֹד עַד־עוֹלָֽם׃  יְהוָה יִלָּחֵם לָכֶם וְאַתֶּם תַּחֲרִישֽׁוּן׃ פ

This theme, "watch what God will do for you today, God will fight for you" is echoed throughout scripture -- water from the rock, manna from heaven, Joshua defeating Jericho merely by tooting of a trumpet, Gideon's 300 to conquer the Midianites, David's defeating Goliath with a rock (read what David says right before he tosses the stone), Elisha's increasing the widow's oil or battling the prophets of Baal, gathering the exiles from Babylon, other examples I'm certain I have forgotten. It is central to Israel's experience of its relationship with God. It's even, I believe, the unstated words of Calvary, to those of us who gaze upon our awful work on Good Friday -- Fear not, Stand firm, behold the saving grace God is working for you today.

This is not an ethical system. It is... well, I'm not sure what it is. Shared mystical experience, maybe. But it isn't an ethical system. We who God calls aren't given an ethical system, not really. The Torah is not an ethics, but an attempt by God to show us -- God's people, not humanity -- what it means to live in relationship with God and with each other given that God has called us together as a people. If pressed, I would admit this IS an ethical system (given that ethics is inescapable), but my problem here is that ethics as we do them don't need or require the relationship with God. They make man the focus, and human action the focus. And as in the Book of Esther, God is not necessary. You don't need God when you have ethics. You don't need God when you have culture. You don't need to stop, to wait, to watch, to be silent. You need to act. Now. Or all is lost.

(If I am sensitive to this, it is because this approach to the human calling is the Islamist approach. God has called humanity, particularly Muslims, to finish saving the world, organizing the world, in the way God wants it organized, so that virtue may be maximized and the opportunities to sin reduced or eliminated.)

To be salt is to trust that we are preserving the world even if we aren't sure how. That we are light, shining brightly, even if we have no idea what that means. To trust, as Abram trusted, that God will make us a blessing to the world, even if we have no idea what that means or how it will happen.

Human action is not the point of the Bible story. God's love for Israel, for God's people, for the world, is the point of the Bible story. We can live into that love, or not, and some form of it may conquer the empire (Thomasite Christians did not conquer India, and Nestorians did not conquer China), but whatever ends up ruling -- whatever ends up "redeeming" the powers or the culture -- is only a shadow of that saving grace. As long as we live in that moment between Eden and Eschaton, we will only experience that grace sideways, in scattered brilliant moments where God's grace meets us and overwhelms us and includes us in God's already completed salvation for the world.

Is There a "Common Good" in America?

Nichaolas Lemann, in a review of Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, which is a legislative, administrative and social history of the New Deal, notes something very interesting about America politics:

Political scientists use the term “pluralist” to describe a system in which interest groups compete incessantly for advantage, and there is no overarching, determinative notion of the public interest. The side that wins gets to define the public interest, and the system’s moral commitment is to the procedure, not the outcomes. The final product of the New Deal, Katznelson argues, was a pluralist, “procedural” state in domestic affairs, and a far more expansive and less democratic state—corporatist, committed to planning in the “national interest”—in military affairs. This amounts to a liberal nightmare (and also demonstrates that one should not be confident that reducing interest-group influence in politics would necessarily produce pleasing results): the aspect of government liberals focus on was constrained, the aspect conservatives focus on was unbridled. And it was the South’s doing.

Katznelson deals mostly with how the New Deal was implemented, and why it took the shape it did. I've not read the book, but Lemann's review is fascinating, and it's why I pulled the above graf out.

One of the political and social arguments I've long been most suspicious of is "the common good." I've said before I don't believe there is any such thing as the common good, and I generally stand by that statement.

But I would like to nuance it a bit. There is no common good in the American context. Not really. The common good is not an abstract statement of fact, but rather an arrived-at social consensus that, in order to be effectively realized politically, must pre-exist politics. A particularly defined community may say to itself "we care for each person in this community" and then express that care in any number of ways.  The American Left much admires very liberal Scandinavia, all the while ignoring most Scandinavian states are small and very homogenous, and have arrived at their welfare states less through deliberate policy than through shared social understanding of obligations to others -- others who are an awful lot like themselves. (We also see a fraying of this in Northern Europe as migrants who do not share the social understanding don't completely assimilate to it.) So a common good requires a common understanding, and that understanding is a communal feeling or sensibility that precedes political action.

Absent that, all you have are assertions. "Every American child should be educated in a state school," for example, was an assertion of a common good from the late 19th century that was strongly opposed just about everywhere it was asserted (if John Taylor Gatto can be believed). It has become a "common good," though one widely questioned (and frequently challenged, and a "good" I would suggest we are forever uncomfortable with). And as Lemann notes, "the side that wins gets to define the public interest." The "common good" is a product of who can bring the most brute force (in political terms) to bear in a struggle.

This is the risk of a pluralistic society. It is my understanding that in history, most pluralistic societies were empires, ruled by a tight but sometimes very open ruling class that very definitely rules. Non-majority communities were subject, but also had some degree of autonomy, to rule themselves according to whatever traditions they had, so long as those traditions did not threaten (or were not seen to threaten) the empire. In trying to build a pluralistic, multicultural democratic society, we are doing something that has never been done before. That may be possible, but I'm something of a conservative when it comes to human organization: there are only so many ways people can organize themselves. If the kind of society we are trying to build doesn't show up in history, well, there's probably a reason for that -- it cannot be done. It is likely, I think, that such a state will become democratic in procedure only, as any outcome that challenges multicultural pluralism will simply not be allowed. If what you are making is an empire, than empire will eventually out itself.

I'm not sure how asserting a "common good" and then imposing it via political fiat isn't authoritarianism. (This is why I am deeply mistrustful of progressivism, because of its authoritarian bent.) On the other hand, it has become clear that contentious political impositions in this country have become part some notion of "common good," although they remain disputed and challenged.

But in the end, I do not believe you can create with politics and ideology the things that need to hold a society and nation together, if those things -- language, culture, shared outlook and understanding, shared stories -- don't already exist. Politics can shape all that, and over time, even create it (much of Europe exists because of someone's say so, whether it be the nation of France or surnames), and those changes can become very stable and durable. But not when they are frequently challenged, even by a tiny but vociferous group. That usually ends in bloodshed.

My personal preference is for bottom-up organizing, not top-down. Which is why I am generally suspicious of most grand attempts to remake the world using political power. Or assertions of the "common good," especially on a national level. I'm not sure what a "common good" for 300 million people looks like. I'm not sure there can be such a thing.

On Being a Suspicious Character

Had an interesting encounter this evening in the West Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago. I was waiting outside Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church -- an African American Lutheran church -- to rehearse some music with Minister of Music Sam Widemon. (We're playing at Resurrection Lutheran's Worship in the Street next Sunday, and I have asked him to join me at Lion & Lamb Festival.) Sam is an amazing musician, and it turns out, is deeply in love with my music.

But Sam was late. (He called me, told me I was tied up in traffic.) So, I sat in my van, waiting, at the corner of West End and Keeler. Now, West Garfield Park is a rough neighborhood. It was once a very German immigrant neighborhood, from sometime in the late 19th century until probably the early 1950s, when the children and grandchildren of White European migrants -- Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Danes -- left for the suburbs. And were replaced, initially, on the south and west sides of Chicago by African Americans.

There's still the bits and pieces of the old German infrastructure around. Churches with foundation stones and stained glass in German. A few old synagogues now doing duty as Missionary Baptist Churches. While never well loved by the powers that be, West Garfield Park has fallen into decay and disrepair. Abandoned homes. Boarded up apartment buildings that were probably once quite lovely for a working-class neighborhood. The neighborhood lost 25 percent of its residents in the 1990s as folks who could leave did. Leaving behind those who, for whatever reason, cannot leave.

Anyway, there I was, alone in my van. Sitting with my backpack and my guitar (in a gig bag) next to me. I've been waiting a half hour when a couple of young men approach the van, and ask me to roll down the window.

"How can I help you, sir?" I ask.

"You go here?" asks one young man, pointing to the church.

"Yes sir, I do. I'm waiting for Sam Widemon, the minister of music."

He seems to relax a bit. "We know Sam. Okay. But we just needed to check. Trying to keep suspicious characters out of the neighborhood, you know."

And as they turn away, I notice the second young man has two screwdrivers, which he had been holding behind him. One in each hand.

They hung around the car, at a distance, for about 15 minutes. A younger boy asks me for money, which I say I don't have. And the other two appear to dress him down for it.

And then they leave.

Over the course of the next 10 minutes, three police SUVs drove by. No one in them even slowed down to give me a second look.

It was an interesting encounter. I was a little bit nervous, uncertain what exactly was going to happen when I was asked to roll the window down. Exactly where things would go from there.

But I also had to appreciate this -- I was a lone white man, sitting alone in a non-descript silver van, with something that might have looked like a weapon (my guitar in the gig bag). I was a suspicious character. (I have seen a few white people in the neighborhood, usually folks very down on their luck. The only white people in cars I've seen there were either police or there to buy drugs. I have been asked twice if I was there to buy drugs.) I think the young man who spoke to me was sincere, on some level, about what his intentions were. Had robbery been the point, I doubt that my being at Bethel Church would have saved me.

I have to appreciate that I've lived a very different experience of race in American than many white people. Largely because I was Muslim for many years, which made me the minority. (I still remember the afternoon, after prayer, when a young boy whose parents were Libyans looked up at me, grasped the side of my head with his small hands, and exclaimed: "Your eyes! They're blue!") Among African American Muslims, that made me one of them. I've been asked for my slave name (my Muslim name was Omar), lived and worked and prayed in places people who look like me would be too afraid to even think about going into.

Once, I even worked for a member of the Nation of Islam. Which is a fun story that I will tell someday. But not today.

But, I also know that none of this experience is apparent. That no one can look at me and know those things about me. I know that I am no longer Muslim, I no longer dress as a Muslim, and so I cannot be identified as a Muslim in a neighborhood like West Garfield Park. Instead, I am something much less interesting and much more problematic: a white man. And I carry the baggage of all that means in a place like Chicago.

(This ability to easily slip between worlds, to know that the rules of American race don't really apply to me anymore because I have joined a community of people who have generally seceded from them, is one of the things I miss terribly about not being Muslim.)

I don't focus so much on my safety (though I never try to do anything too careless of stupid), but rather what my presence -- and who I appear to be -- means for those around me. I do not want to be an attractive nuisance in a neighborhood like West Garfield Park, do not want to be the reason someone else gets themselves into trouble. That way of thinking about one's own personal safety then makes it a way of thinking about others. I find it helpful. But then I have a very unique set of experiences on this. A very unique perspective.

I'm still not sure what today was about, what my meeting with the ad hoc neighborhood watch committee on Keeler meant. I find myself wondering what would have had to happen for the whole encounter to have gone badly. I do not know who the young men were, what their interest was. For a moment I was a suspicious character. I do not wish to speculate.

But for a moment, I was a suspicious character.

The Difference Between Power and Authority

A little background. A little more than 20 years ago or so, in 1991, I had to drop out of my studies at San Francisco State University because the money ran out. Things got very difficult for Jennifer and me for a while, but eventually there was work -- in Southern California. After a bit, I got hired by Dr. Joel Dreyer, a psychiatrist, to help process medical reports for his worker's comp clinic.

I don't know how to describe Joel Dreyer. Perhaps beguiling and very charming rogue would be the best way to do do. (He's a "bad boy," and I think even he would admit to that.) I could tell many stories, and to some of you I have. But not today. Those need to wait for another time. He's also a larger-than-life personality, and he fills a room. He truly does.

I worked for Dreyer for a year. In that time, because I was responsible for transcribing and editing psychiatric reports filed with the state of California, I became somewhat familiar with the terminology in the then DSM-IIIR. Jennifer and I became fascinated. (Yes, we bought our own copy, even.) But things were changing at Jade Psychiatric, typing reports was no career, and within a year, my finances had gotten secure enough to resume school. At Ohio State. Which I did.

But I'd often wondered what had happened to Joel Dreyer. Well, it turns out, he'd been arrested by the DEA in 2007 or 2008, I think, and eventually pled guilty to dealing prescription drugs illegally. And at the ripe old age of 73, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Which is where Dreyer is today.

I started corresponding with my former employer, and that's been going on for a while now. Almost two years, actually. He's often times remarked that he is the only Jew in whatever institution he is doing time in, and he started passing on the weekly shabbos e-mails he gets from The Aleph Institute, a Jewish charity which specializes in military and prison chaplaincy and proving services to Jewish families. They also appear to have a Chavod Lubavicher orientation, or that just may be the leanings of the rabbi who sends out the emails.

They are fascinating e-mails to read. This is from last week, and it comes as part of discussion of the difference between how Moses handles the prophetic utterances of Eldad and Medad (recorded in Numbers 11) and Korah's rebellion (Numbers 16):

There are two forms or dimensions of leadership. One is power; the other, influence. Often we confuse the two. After all, those who have power often have influence, and those who have influence have a certain kind of power. In fact, however, the two are quite different, even opposites. 

We can see this by a simple thought experiment. Imagine you have total power, and then you decide to share it with nine others. You now have one-tenth of the power with which you began. Imagine, by contrast, that you have a certain measure of influence, and now you share it with nine others. How much do you have left? Not less. In fact, more. Initially there was only one of you; now there are ten. Your influence has spread. Power operates by division, influence by multiplication. With power, the more we share, the less we have. With influence, the more we share, the more we have. 

So deep is the difference that the Torah allocates them to two distinct leadership roles: king and prophet. Kings had power. They could levy taxes, conscript people to serve in the army, and decide when and against whom to wage war. They could impose non-judicial punishments to preserve social order. Hobbes famously called kingship a "Leviathan" and defined it in terms of power. The very nature of the social contract, he argued, was the transfer of power from individuals to a central authority. Without this, there could be no government, no defense of a country, and no safeguard against lawlessness and anarchy. 

Prophets, by contrast, had no power at all. They commanded no armies. They levied no taxes. They spoke G-d's word, but had no means of enforcing it. All they had was influence but what influence! To this day, Elijah's fight against corruption, Amos' call to social justice, Isaiah's vision of the end of days, are still capable of moving us by the sheer force of their inspiration. Who, today, is swayed by the lives of Ahab or Jehoshaphat or Jehu? When a king dies, his power ends. When a prophet dies, his influence begins.

This is an important thing. It's something I especially need to remember, in my concern about power, in my fear of temporal -- particularly state -- power. I don't give influence enough credit for accomplishing very much, mostly because I don't see "power" if there isn't coercion or brute force. But the rabbi is right, that prophets are a far stronger force, they have more "power," because their words mean and do far more than any king's commands or deeds ever will.

Your Country Has Ceased to Exist, And That's For Your Own Good

Well, I have finished Frederick Shoberl's little guide to early 19th century Imperial Austria, Austria; Containing a Description of the Manners, Customs, Character and Costumes of the People of That Empire, and it appears that he saved the worst for last.

Generally, Shoberl thinks most highly of those in the Western part of the Austrian Empire, and his opinion of people decline as he travels east. German Austrians in all their permutations are perfectly wonderful, if somewhat quaint, followed by the western Slavs (Czechs and Slovaks), and then the southern Slavs (Croats), and then the Magyars, and finally, he has little good to say about those Romanians living within the confines of the Austrian Empire.

But his worst opinions are saved for those Poles who came under Austrian rule following the multiple partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria in the second half of the 18th century. Apparently, the disappearance of Poland -- something lamented by Polish nationalists well into the 20th century -- was a benefit for the Poles themselves, since they were incapable of enlightened self-rule:

Much as it has been the fashion to deplore the “fatal partition” of Poland, and to execrate the powers concerned in it, we have now the satisfaction to know that to the Poles themselves this measure has proved one of the greatest blessings. Every individual has gained by it, excepting a few selfish, pampered magnates, who abused their overgrown power, and inflicted perpetual misery on the serfs whom Providence had subjected to their rule.  

If ever there was a country where “might constituted right,” that country was Poland. The most dreadful oppression, the most execrable tyranny, and the most wanton cruelties, were daily exercised by the nobles on their unfortunate peasants. Dr. Neale in his Travels adduces a few facts which prove but too clearly their miserable condition.  

The life of a peasant was held of no greater value than that of one of his horned cattle; and if his lord killed him he was merely fined a hundred Polish florins, or two pounds sixteen shillings of our money. If, on the contrary, a man of low birth presumed to raise his hand against a nobleman, death was the inevitable punishment. If any one dared to question the nobility of a magnat, he was required to prove his assertion, or doomed to die: nay, if a powerful man took a fancy to the field of his humbler neighbour and erected a land-mark upon it, and if that land-mark remained three days, the poor man lost his possession.  

The atrocious cruelties habitually exercised almost exceed credibility. A Masalki caused his hounds to devour a peasant who chanced to fright his horse; a Radzivil had the belly of one of his serfs ripped open, that he might thrust his feet into it, in the hope of being cured of a malady with which he was afflicted. Still there were laws in Poland, but how were they executed? A peasant, going to the market at Warsaw, met a man who had just assassinated another: he seized the murderer, bound him, and having placed him in his wagon together with the body of his victim, he went to deliver him up to the nearest Starost. On his arrival, he was asked if he had ten ducats to pay for his interference, and on his answering in the negative, he was sent back with his dead and living lumber. After this fact, the reader will not be surprised to learn, that it cost a merchant of Warsaw fourteen hundred dollars to prosecute to conviction and execution two robbers who had plundered him.

Of course, we all know that the lives of the poor -- peasant, urban dweller, Irish -- were sacred in the United Kingdom. We all know in 1828 Britain, a rich man could never take the life of a poor one with impunity, could never steal the small holding of a peasant legally, and the lives of the poor were respected as if they mattered as much as those of the wealthy or were of the gentry.

But enough. Let's go on. Because it gets worse:

The morals of the people, were then, as they still continue to be, nearly at the lowest point of debasement. Female chastity is a virtue unknown in Poland. Among persons of all ranks, from the highest to the lowest, with very few exceptions, the most dreadful licentiousness prevails. The men are equally profligate; and debauchery of every kind prevails among them to a degree unknown in other countries of Europe. Education is in general much neglected, the lower classes being unable to obtain the means of instruction: and among the higher, where no man is assured of the legitimacy of his offspring, a total indifference prevails as to the training of the doubtful brood. They are therefore neglected from their cradles, and left to the indulgence of every passion, undisciplined, untutored and uncontrolled. Endowed by nature with great personal beauty, the young Polish noble makes the tour of France and Germany, engrafts the vices of every capital that he visits on his own native stock; and after dilapidating his revenues returns to his paternal estate with a train of French cooks, valets, parasites and all the paraphernalia of modern luxury, to wallow in sensuality, and to die prematurely of acquired disease.

I read this and was reminded of the really bad joke, "So, why wasn't Jesus born in Poland?" It reads like some moralist's lecture on the evils of, well, being Polish. As if that were a choice, or something. I'd like to say this is as bad as it gets, but ... it does get worse.

Because apparently Poland has far too many Jews in it. And one of Emperor Joseph II's great attempts to better Polish life was to place restrictions on what Jews could do in Galicia, that part of Poland the Austrian Empire acquired in the dicing up of Poland:

In no country in Europe have the Jews obtained such firm footing as in Poland, where Casimir the Great, at the instigation of his Jewish mistress, Esther, took them, four centuries ago, into his especial favour and protection. Enjoying privileges and immunities which they possess in no other region, with opportunities of engaging deeply in traffic and accumulating immense fortunes; masters of all the specie and most of the commerce of Poland; mortgagees of the land, and sometimes masters of the glebe—the Jewish interlopers appear to be more the lords of the country then even the Poles themselves.  

All the distilleries throughout Poland are farmed out to Jews, who pay large sums to the nobles for the privilege of poisoning and intoxicating their serfs. Mr. Burnett states, that when he was in Poland, a company of Jews paid to Count Zaymoski the sum of three thousand pounds sterling annually for the mere privilege of distilling spirituous liquors on the largest of his estates, which, to be sure, comprehends at least four thousand square miles. Hence some estimate may be formed of the enormous quantity that is consumed. 

When Joseph II. obtained possession of Galicia, that judicious prince perceived the necessity of limiting the privileges of the Jews. He took from them the power of cultivating the lands belonging to the serfs subject to contributions, and prohibited them from keeping inns and distilling spirits: but at his death these regulations ceased to be enforced, and the Jews have since been silently regaining their former influence.  

The inns, as has been already observed, are now altogether in their hands, as well as the fabrication of ardent spirits and liqueurs. They have all the traffic in peltry, the precious metals, diamonds and other jewels, and they are also the principal agents in the corn-trade. Of late years many of these Jewish families who had amassed great wealth by commerce, having affected to abjure their religion and to embrace the Catholic faith, have been ennobled and permitted to purchase extensive estates: still true, however, to their own nation, they have built large towns and villages on these estates, and peopled them exclusively with Jewish families; for from a singular instinct the Poles seem to detest their fellowship, and generally herd together in their own miastas.  

The enjoyment of liberty and civil rights seems to have produced a strong effect on the physical constitution and physiognomy of the Hebrew race, and to have bestowed on them a dignity and energy of character, which we may look for in vain in the Jews of other countries. The men, clothed in long black robes reaching to their ankles, and sometimes adorned in front with silver agraffes, their heads covered with fur caps, their chesnut or auburn locks parted in front, and falling gracefully on their shoulders in spiral curls, display much manly beauty. In feminine beauty, the women are likewise distinguished; but beauty is not uncommon among the Jewesses of other countries. When looking at them, says Dr. Neale, seated, according to their usual custom, on a wooden sofa, by the doors of their houses, on the evenings of their sabbath, dressed in their richest stuffs and pearl head-dresses, I have imagined that I could trace a strong resemblance between their present head-ornaments and those sculptured on the heads of the Egyptian sphynxes. Nor do I think it at all improbable, that the dresses of the Hebrews of both sexes in Poland, are at this day nearly the same as those of their ancestors when they quitted the “house of bondage.”

Ahh, those wretched, thieving, king-seducing and utterly unchanging Jews bereft of any civic spirit and poisoning the people with your vile liquors and your miserable hostels!

In this chapter, Shoberl quotes a lot from a Dr. Neale's Travels (a book I cannot find with a cursory Google search), and at first it seems like he's not even bothered to visit Galicia himself. But he adds that he found Dr. Neale's account hard to believe, and wouldn't have believed if it he hadn't seen with his own eyes the mean state of those in Austrian Poland. I'm trying to consider the nature of Shoberl's animus toward the Poles -- could it be that they were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon (and the country was temporarily revived during the Napoleonic Wars) and thus on the wrong side of what, by 1828, were The Late Unpleasantries? It's hard to tell.

I have a difficult time believing the state of your typical Pole was all that different than the Magyar peasants describes, and yet he doesn't call their subjugation by their Magyar overlords something done for their own good. And he doesn't single out Jews for such abysmal treatment until he gets to Poland. (Indeed, aside from noting that Austria is full of Jews, he doesn't even describe how they live until he gets to Poland.)

Well, I've had another armchair tour of the continent from the early 19th century. These are fun to read. Even when they aren't.

Then Why Aren't There Slovaks Everywhere?

Thanks be to Project Gutenberg, I'm reading this charming little guide to Austria (really, the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire from Aš to Braşov, which isn't just the cute little Austria we now know all snuggly in mitteleuropa) -- Austria; Containing a Description of the Manners, Customs, Character and Costumes of the People of That Empire by one Frederick Schoberl, published in 1828. It's a charming little book, filled with the certainties of the educated Englishman (or Anglicized German, as Schoberl likely is), for whom the Magyar and the Wend are as much foreign and exotic people -- and separate "races" of human beings -- as were the Zulu, the Bengali and the Mongol.

Case in point, this little bit from his brief overview chapter early in the book. On Slovaks, which he spells (following, I think, the Polish, but I'm probably mistaken there) "Slowack," which sounds like the kind of thing that might happen at a baseball game on a particularly hot afternoon. He is praising either their fecundity, or their pushiness, or quite possibly both. And it makes me wonder -- why aren't there more Slovaks?

The Slowacks, the relics of the Moravian monarchy, which comprehended Moravia and the north-western part of Hungary, are nearly confined to those two countries. There are nevertheless some of them in Bohemia. To those people particularly applies the observation of Schwartner, who remarks, that of all the inhabitants of Hungary the Slowacks multiply fastest. Wherever they settle, the Germans and Magyares gradually disappear. Thus in the 14th century the mountainous part of the county of Gömör was entirely inhabited by Germans, whereas at present the population consists exclusively of Slowacks.

I suspect many Slovaks wonder this as well (and probably dispute Schoberl's and Schwartner's assertion, given how persistent German settlement was and what a problem that would be in the 20th century). But Schoberl didn't live in that world. He lived in that era between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848, of which I know little about save that lots of educated Englishmen and women traveled the continent, staying and studying in Germany and Italy and elsewhere, and then wrote a ghastly number of books about it all. Schoberl might not have even lived to see 1848. I don't know.

The Schwartner in question might be this man, Marton Schwartner, a Magyar academic from the 18th century. No, I do not read Magyar, and the Google translation of the Magyar is a mess. He was a teacher, a protestant, wrote some books (including one excellent statistical volume on the Kingdom of Hungary) and left his personal library of some 12,000 volumes to a high school somewhere. Probably in Magyarország. Or quite possibly Slovakia.

Sorry, "Slowackia." You're out!

The End of Class Solidarity

There's something interesting hinted at in this piece by John Lingan on the difficulties the city of Winchester, Virginia, has had with embracing the legacy of country singer Patsy Cline:

The entire Winchester-area middle class has traveled a similar path since about World War II. Economic, cultural, and political changes have elevated these proprietary sons and daughters beyond the abidingly second-tier status that their parents held. Starting in the 1950s, the new “business progressive” mindset replaced the previous Southern focus on industry and agriculture, and Winchester went all-in. The current Winchester-Frederick County Manufacturing Directory includes about 100 companies, most of which have come to the region in the last 60 years. The Winchester section of I-81, which forms the city’s eastern border, was completed in 1965. Thanks to that road and the other major local thoroughfares—I-66 and state Routes 7 (the Harry F. Byrd Highway) and 37-50 percent of the U.S. population lives within a day’s drive. Virginia’s sole inland port was built just 12 miles south of Winchester in 1989, so shipping traffic now accounts for part of the region’s economic pull, as well. The first industrial parks were built in the ’80s, and now they cover a shudderingly vast sprawl of land above the city limits along the interstate. 

 Not surprisingly, the region’s population growth over the past four decades has rivaled that of any other U.S. county in the 20th century, as the Winchester-Frederick County Economic Development Commission will happily tell you. U.S. manufacturing jobs decreased throughout the ’80s and ’90s, but Winchester-Frederick County’s spiked. And inside the Winchester limits alone, the population increased 7.4% from 1990 to 2000, and 11% from 2000 to 2010. 

There have of course been what Anita mournfully called “growing pains.” Many residents pay an inadvisable third or more of their income in rent. Nearly a fifth live below the poverty level, a figure slightly higher than the national rate. Like America at large, Winchester’s economy has become increasingly corporatized and unfriendly to the truly working-class. The big employers in town aren’t the old local tycoons but monolithic corporations like Rubbermaid, Pactiv Foodservice Products, and Valley Health, which owns the infinitely expanding Winchester Medical Center on the city’s west side. Nearly a quarter of the workforce is employed in the human services field, especially health care, and an additional quarter works in manufacturing and retail. 

... 

... With the old social structure no longer economically relevant, the descendants of Patsy’s people are now in positions of power and influence. Patsy is their north star, their spirit animal. She embodies everything they claim to value in a person: hard work, generosity, humor, irreverence, and God-given talent. Winchester is a town that clings to family stories and historical claims with grim obstinacy, and Celebrating Patsy Cline is attempting to reclaim that identity as other long-held stories crumble under the weight of prefabricated shopping centers and an influx of outsiders.

We forget, I think, that as the racial order was destroyed in the South (and across the country) beginning in the 1950s, so was the class order. And with that, the social solidarity that made it possible for the white working class to be "progressive" in large numbers.

Lingan writes about how Winchester's elites -- mainly professionals, landowners, bankers, and clergy (he hints at this description more than outright stating it) -- have been reluctant to embrace Cline because she was "white trash." The city's tourism focuses mainly on the Civil War and its apple festival, things the town's gentility can and have organized (and been passionate about). In the passage I cite above, he notes that the "business progressive" view took hold about the time segregation was challenged. That "business progressive" view needed not just an end to segregation, but an end to the class structure as well.

Why? The working class, prior to the 1950s, were fairly well cordoned off from the elites. They were ruled, and had little say in how they were rules or who ruled them. The children of the working class could, if they were very smart or very talented, becomes something other than industrial or agricultural laborers (or small-time merchants). But mostly, to be born working meant that you would most likely do what your father and grandfather had done before you. Your options would be fairly constrained.

And it is in this constraint, this limit on mobility and freedom -- a limit held firmly in place by the structure of power -- that created a working "class" that could identify itself as such. Few could hope to get rich, or even rise to management or government, so you then fought for the best deal not just for yourself but also for your neighbors. Because they and you were in the same situation, the same condition, and shared the same fate. And this was involuntary. Few could choose to move higher (though that always existed, it was limited only to the very best and very brightest). A class was forged because it had no choice.

Destroy the social structure, however, and you remove the compulsion. Anyone can become anything. Even a professional. Even, as Lingan's story notes, those who end up running Winchester. Once "working class" is no longer an involuntary identity, one held together by rigid social norms, and lack of opportunity and mobility, and a fair amount of violence, then solidarity disintegrates. And you no longer have a "class," you have a mass of individuals, each believing -- and rightly so -- that they can succeed at whatever they wish without external limitations. There is no longer a class interest because the "working class" are no longer in it together.

Instead, what comes to matter is "hard work, generosity, humor, irreverence, and God-given talent" in each individual. That had always been true, but this was no longer tempered by the real hopes placed in the very exceptional versus the very real fact that some people don't have talent or won't work hard. And thus will never become much more than what their parents were.

This, I think, is the answer to Thomas Franks as to why the "working class" don't vote their class interests. Because they no longer have a class interest, only a shared set of individual interests (which is not the same thing). Because of that, they have affected a cultural identity (in much the same way African American nationalists did in the 1960s) that is grounded in a real culture but that comes without the real solidarity. It may be that in a world of atomized individuals, all collective identities are affectations -- choices made -- rather than real markers of class or social status.

But that is as far as I want to take the theorizing now, I think.

Insane Pride

No morally upright critique of vice, sin, iniquity an corruption would be complete without a condemnation of homosexuality. And boy, does L. O. Curon let the condemnation flow freely in Chicago, Satan's Sanctum. He does everything except actually use the word "homosexual." Which I'm guessing no one did in polite company in 1899.

(One interesting side light. When Curon wants to get graphic about sexual practices he considers immoral, he retreats into ancient history and ancient Greek literature for his examples. It's an interesting use for a classical education. Some of that is at work here in this passage.)

Anyway, back to Curon. And some of his purplest prose yet (starts on p. 145)!

The dens of the sexual pervert of the male sex, found in the basements of buildings in the most crowded, but least respectable parts of certain streets, with immoral theaters, cheap museums, opium joints and vile concert saloons surrounding them, are the blackest holes of iniquity that ever existed in any country since the dawn of history. A phrase was recently coined in New York which conveys—in the absence of the possibility of describing them in decent language—the meaning of the brute practices indulged in these damnable resorts, and the terrible consequences to humanity as a result of unnatural habits—“Paresis Halls.” 

No form of this indulgence described by writers on the history of morals, no species of sodomy the debased minds of these devils can devise, is missing from the programme of their diabolical orgies. In divine history we read of the abominations of the strange women of Israel, with their male companions, in their worship of Moloch, Belphegor and Baal, and of the death penalties pronounced by Moses against the participants in them. To suppress the brutish immorality, and prevent the spread of disease arising from it, the Jewish law giver put to death all his Midianite female captives except the virgins. Profane history tells of the infamies of the Babylonian banquets, of the incestuous and “promiscuous combats of sensuality” of the Lydians and the Persians; of the Athenian Auletrides, or female flute players, who danced and furnished music at the banquets of the nobility and wallowed in the filth of every sensual indecency, and of the polluted condition of Roman life, prior to, and as the Christian era dawned, but in all the untranslatable literature of eroticism no description of the debaucheries of the ancients, if freely interpreted into English from the dead languages in which they are preserved, could depict the nastiness these yahoos are reported as having introduced into our midst, and rendered more hateful and disgusting by the squalor of their underground abodes. The young are lured by them, ruined in health and seared in conscience. The very slang of the streets is surcharged with expressions, derived from, and directly traceable to, the names of these unmentionable acts of lechery. 

Not content with the private and crafty pursuit of their calling, they must flaunt it in the faces of the public and under the very eyes of the police, in a series of annual balls held by the “fruits” and the “cabmen,” advertised by placards extensively all over the city. At these disreputable gatherings the pervert of the male persuasion displays his habits by aping everything feminine. In speech, walk, dress and adornment they are to all appearances women. The modern mysteries of the toilet, used to build up and round out the female figure, are applied in the make-up of the male pervert. Viewed from the galleries, it is impossible to distinguish them from the sex they are imitating. Theirs is no maid-marian costume; it is strictly in the line of the prevailing styles among fashionable women, from female hair to pinched feet. The convenient bar supplies the liquid excitement, and when the women arrivals from the bagnios swarm into the hall, led in many instances by the landlady, white or black, and the streets and saloons have contributed their quotas, the dance begins and holds on until the morning hours approach. The acts are those mainly suggestive of indecency. Nothing, except the gross language and easy familiarity in deportment, coupled with the assumed falsetto voice and effeminate manners of the pervert, would reveal to the uninformed observer what a seething mass of human corruption he is witnessing. As the “encyclopedia of the art of making up” puts it, “the exposed parts of the human anatomy” usually displayed in fashionable society are counterfeited so perfectly, the wigs are selected and arranged with such nicety, the eyebrows and lashes so dexterously treated, and the features so artistically touched with cosmetics, as to make it very difficult, at first glance, to distinguish between the impostor and the real woman. The big hands and tawdry dresses, the large though pinched feet and the burly ankle, betray the sex of the imitating pervert. 

No reason, except that the police are paid for non-interference with these vice pitted revels, can be given for their toleration. The city’s officials are either in collusion with their projectors, they are incompetent, or are the willing tools of these stinking body scavengers. These beasts look with disdain upon the votaries of natural pleasures, and have an insane pride in their hopeless degradation.

His citing of biblical commands -- "the Jewish law giver put to death all his Midianite female captives except the virgins" -- suggests Curon would happily take the first stone (and second, and third) and throw them. Hard. But he doesn't say that. He doesn't say anything except condemn these saloons full of drag queens and people with ruined bodies and seared consciences. I'm guessing he doesn't really care what the police, when they aren't being paid to let these places do business, would do to their inmates.

More than anything, he wants to prevent people from living like this. From falling to this. The fact of such people in a society are a sign not just of its decadence, but it's weakness. Which is why society needed to be regimented, tightly controlled, scripted and organized, young people given strict guidance and things to belong to -- sports clubs, Boy Scouts, classrooms, armies. (The hymn that most reflects this awful worldview is "Earth and All Stars.") A weak society cannot engage in uplift, cannot defend itself from barbarians (Filipino cockfighters and Chinese opium dealers!), cannot redeem the world.

And this is the face of the Liberal Christianity of the late 19th and early 20th century that we inherit -- a faith that saw itself as acting to redeem the world, a world that human beings would have to redeem if it were to be redeemed at all. If Curon is a churchman (I and believe he is; he devotes a whole introductory chapter to quotes from other churchmen on the evils of Chicago and the need for better or more moral government), the faith he subscribes to puts the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ far to the side. Jesus doesn't really save us, and he is almost peripheral to our actual salvation. Rather, Jesus empowers us to save ourselves using all the scientific tools that mass industrial democratic civilization give us.

This is the legacy of Liberal Christianity that I oppose. Because we still struggle with that, in the ethics of Niebuhr, the social activism of Martin Luther King, in all the revolutionary nonsense (pseudo and real) of liberation theology, which in the end, makes human beings the agents of their own salvation. Indeed, necessary agents of their own salvation, as it won't otherwise happen if human beings don't act.

In this, the cross and empty tomb become quaint stories, things to sing sanctimonious and sentimental hymns about, but which don't really matter. Because the saving of the world is man's work.

When You Go to Court in Los Angeles, Please Don't Bring Your Guns.

I have been off and on reading this little gem, Sixty Years in Southern California by Harris Newmark. Written in 1913, Newmark was a German Jew who emigrated to Los Angeles from northern Germany via Sweden, England, Nicaragua and San Francisco. It's a fascinating tale, especially all of his details about Los Angeles in the early 1850s. Newmark was skilled as an ink maker in Germany, but joined an older brother in Los Angeles as a dealer in dry goods. I'm not through the 1850s at this point, but I'm guessing Newmark does pretty well for himself.

But this book, given all of his adventures (Nearly arrested in Liverpool for consorting with a Swedish bank robber! Nearly drowned in the North Atlantic when a storm wrecks sailing ship!), isn't as well written as it could be. It does, however, have that matter-of-fact narration that lends itself to the understating of some very interesting and funny events. He writes at length about the state of the law and the legal profession in early 1850s Los Angeles, and tells this wonderful little story:

Speaking of the informality of courts in the earlier days, I should record that jurymen and others would come in coatless and, especially in warm weather, without vests and collars; and that it was the fashion for each juryman to provide himself with a jack-knife and a piece of wood, in order that he might whittle the time away. This was a recognized privilege, and I am not exaggerating when I say that if he forgot his piece of wood, it was considered his further prerogative to whittle the chair on which he sat! In other respects, also, court solemnity was lacking. Judge and attorneys would frequently lock horns; and sometimes their disputes ended violently. On one occasion, for example, while I was in court, Columbus Sims, an attorney who came here in 1852, threw an inkstand at his opponent, during an altercation; but this contempt of court did not call forth his disbarment, for he was later found acting as attorney for Pancho Daniel, one of Sheriff Barton's murderers, until sickness compelled his retirement from the case. As to panel-service, I recollect that while serving as juror in those early days, we were once locked up for the night; and in order that time might not hang too heavily on our hands, we engaged in a sociable little game of poker. Sims is dead. 

More than inkstands were sometimes hurled in the early courts. On one occasion, for instance, after the angry disputants had arrived at a state of agitation which made the further use of canes, chairs, and similar objects tame and uninteresting, revolvers were drawn, notwithstanding the marshal's repeated attempts to restore order. Judge Dryden, in the midst of the mêlée, hid behind the platform upon which his Judgeship's bench rested; and being well out of the range of the threatening irons, yelled at the rioters: 

"Shoot away, damn you! and to hell with all of you!"

Have Scissors, Will Commit Felony

Another wonderful tidbit from L.O. Curon's 1899 volume of moral agitprop, Chicago, Satan's Sanctum. The pool room in question is not for billiards. Rather, it is an illegal gambling establishment where people bet on "pools" of things -- racing results, baseball games, the Yale-Harvard crewing regatta, Filipino cockfights, whatever. Curon has not so far explained how it works.

The want of an energetic police is the cause of the prevalence of such abominable offenses as hair clipping, or the severing from the heads of young girls upon the public streets their braids of hair. One of these perverts was arrested and excused himself upon the ground that it was a mania with him, and that the temptation to cut off the braids of hair from every young girl he met, was almost irresistible. If detectives, instead of lounging around their daily haunts for drinking purposes, loafing in cigar stores, and playing the pool rooms, were mingling with the crowds upon the streets, offenses of this character would be nearly impossible, although this particular weakness seems to lead its impulsive perpetrators to less crowded thoroughfares, and selects the hours of going to and returning from school, as the most favorable parts of the day for its gratification. It may be prompted by a morbid desire, but it is none the less a serious offense, which, as yet, the criminal law has not defined, and has therefore not provided a proper penalty for its punishment. No evidence, so far as it is known, has yet been adduced to show that the braids of hair are ever sold to dealers in that article, such as wig manufacturers, etc. If such evidence should be forthcoming, the ingenuity of the average criminal for the discovery of new methods of despoliation will receive additional confirmation.

The quality of our perverts has sadly declined in the last century. Maybe it's because so many girls don't wear their hair in braids anymore.

When You Visit Chicago, Always Bring Your Guns With You

Another post from Chicago, Satan's Sanctum, by L. O. Curon. From chapter four (I think it starts at the bottom of p. 117) which outlines the various different kinds of gambling, robbery and theft that went on in Chicago 100 years ago. For obvious reasons, I'm not gonna comment on this. Because, to be honest, there's just not a lot to add to this account. I make no apologies for Curon's language. He is, after all, writing in 1899:

Boys in their teens, men and women, both black and white, the latter of the strong armed class, comprise this coterie of criminals. The strong armed women, generally negresses, have the developed muscles of the pugilist and the daring of the pirate. They entice the stranger into dark passage ways, that innocent stranger, so unfamiliar, but so willing to be made familiar with the wickedness of a great city, who seeks out its most disreputable quarters and scours its darkest byways, to report to his mates, on his return to his country home, the salacious things that he has heard of, and a few of which he witnessed. In these dark and dangerous ways the strong armed women garrote and rob their victims, or they entice the innocent, but lustful, stranger to their rooms, and there, through the panel game, or by sheer strength or drugged potations, appropriate the innocent stranger’s valuables. Mortified and humiliated, the stranger usually has nothing to say to the police of the affair. Then the emboldened strong armed women go upon the street in couples, and rob in the most approved methods of the highwayman. Alone, one of these notorious characters is said to have pilfered to the extent of $60,000. She was, and is, a terror to the police force. Released from the penitentiary not long ago, she is now undergoing trial for a fresh offense. Approaching a commercial traveler from behind, she is charged with having nearly strangled him, and then robbed him of his money and jewelry. 

“Only one man ever got the best of E. F.,” said detective Sergeant C. R. W., of Harrison street station, who had arrested E. F. frequently. 

“Once she held up a cowboy and took $150 from him. He came up to the station hotfoot to report the robbery. We were busy and a little slow in sending out after E., whereupon the cowboy allowed he’d start out after her on his own hook. He met her down by the Polk street depot, and the moment he spotted her he walked right up close to her and covered her with two six-shooters. 

“You’ve got $150 of my money, now shell out nigger,” he said. 

“Go and get a warrant and have me arrested then,” replied the big colored woman, who wanted time to plant the coin. 

“These are good enough warrants for me,” returned the cowboy significantly, as he poked the revolvers a trifle closer to her face. “Now, I’m going to count twenty, and if I don’t see my money coming back before I reach twenty, I’ll go with both guns.” 

“When he reached eighteen, E. weakened. She drew out a wad and held it out toward him. But the cowboy was wise and would not touch the roll till she had walked to the nearest lamplight under the escort of his two guns and counted out the $150. Then he let her go and came back to the station and treated.”

Progressives, Behold Your Forebears!

Gosh, but it's been too long since I've posted here.

I have been downloading and reading books from Project Gutenberg. It's a wonderful site, and you should explore what they have. Mostly old books, and some of them are gems (I'm currently reading Samuel Johnson's rendering of The Illiad.). It's how we're keeping Jennifer in reading material right now. I download books and then put them on her Kindle for her. And she reads 40 or so in the span of about three weeks.

Me? I don't read so fast. Today, however, I found this little book from 1899, Chicago, Satan's Sanctum, by one L. O. Curon. The book doesn't say who he is, but if I have to guess, I'd say he's a Methodist or Presbyterian minister. And he spends the book railing against all sorts of things. Mostly, he is convinced that the City of Chicago is one giant den of iniquity, vice and corruption. I've not gotten to Curon's conclusion, but if I had to guess, I would think he is in favor of the civil service act, good government, women's suffrage, regular church attendance, prohibition, social and moral uplift, honesty, decency and good Christian living. I think he's in favor of those things. So far, he's more against than for.

Because it's clear what he's against: drunkenness, prostitution, bars open after midnight, houses of ill repute, gambling, dishonest policing (he spends a whole chapter, and a not so interesting one, on the corruption of the Chicago Police Department), dancing, street life, lesbianism, cockfighting (described as "the national pastime of the Filipinos"), and that constant threat to proper Christian life in America, negro music:

Strolling bands of negro musicians, scraping the violin and strumming the guitar and mandolin, or the home orchestra, composed of these dusky minstrels, add their alleged harmonies to the occasion, and, with nasal expression, roll of coon songs in the popular rag time, with their intimations of free love, warmth of passion and disregard of moral teachings. At times, with assumed pathos and mock dignity they warble a sentimental song with some allusion to “Mother,” “Home,” or “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me.” The spree goes on, with fresh additions from the bagnios. Women with the most repulsive signs of prolonged dissipation, of advanced disease, with the upper parts of the body exposed, not perhaps more than is customary at a fashionable charity ball, join in with salacious abandon.

(Perhaps Curon would have felt differently about "alleged harmonies" had they been singing "Nearer My God to Thee" accompanied by a harmonium in a church somewhere...)

My guess is Curon is probably opposed to race mixing, too. And if he's the late-19th/early 20th century pastor I full expect him to be, he's probably a progressive, in the way Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were progressives, believers in clean government, social uplift, labor laws, imperialism, and eugenics. Yes, liberals and progressives, these are your forebears. You may not have a problem with the "scraping of the violin and the strumming of the guitar and mandolin" by "strolling bands of negro musicians," but this kind of prissy nonsense -- that sought the eradication of anything remotely interesting in city life, and instead its replacement with "alleged" small town virtue (later combined with scientific management concocted at leading universities) -- is part and parcel of the striving for a state-centered society in America.