Some? Oh, Let's Try That Again.

I like Ross Douthat, though he isn't producing quite the same calibre of material writing for the New York Times as he did when he wrote for The Atlantic. He writes a pice in today's New York Times on Egypt, noting that Mubarak's Egypt is probably the place most responsible for Revolutionary Islam -- had Mubarak not imprisoned, tortured and exiled so many people -- especially clerics and religious activists -- there would be no international Islamic revolutionary movement. A little simplistic, but mostly true. He also notes the difficulty facing Washington policy makers in dealing with Egypt as the alternatives -- an Iran-style Islamic revolution (highly unlikely) or a return to Nasserist anti-Americanism (even less likely, I think, though who knows?) exist as possibilities with Egypt.

In the end, the, Douthat does understand something:

The only comfort, as we watch Egyptians struggle for their country’s future, is that some choices aren’t America’s to make.

Some? How about many? How about most?

This is What Happens When You Elect a Community Organizer President

Some fantastic nuggets in an essay by David Bromwich at the New York Review of Books on what the State of the Union speech says about how Barack Obama will likely govern over the next two (and possibly six) years. This is one of them:

A main inference from the State of the Union is that in 2011 and 2012, the president will not initiate. He will broker. Every policy recommendation will be supported and, so far as possible, clinched by the testimony of a panel of experts. There were signs of this pattern in the group of former secretaries of state, including Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, whom the president brought in to endorse the START nuclear pact; in the generals who were called on to solidify support for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; and in Bill Clinton holding a presidential press briefing on the economy. Obama, on such occasions, serves as host and introducer; he leaves the podium to the experts. The idea is to overwhelm us with expertise. In this way, a president may lighten the burden of decision and control by easing the job of persuasion into other hands. Obama seems to believe that the result of being seen in that attitude will do nothing but good for his stature.

This may be what he learned as a community organizer, to let others do the heavy lifting. Indeed, Bromwich said Obama appears to be modeling himself expressly after Ronald Reagan, who was master of the feel-good, empty phrase. Along those lines, Bromwich also notes this:

Barack Obama, starting in 2002—the year he declared at a Chicago rally his opposition to the coming war against Iraq—had a keen eye on his political rise, but he had slender experience and a narrow focus disguised by inspirational special effects. In earlier years, he was protected by the Chicago Democratic machine; after 2004, he was shepherded by leaders of the Democratic party who disliked the Clintons or feared that Hillary Clinton could never win a presidential election. His apparent convictions—-on the environment, on the Middle East, on nuclear proliferation: matters of more concern to him than health care—were resonant and sincere but they had never been brought to a test. It turned out that few of his convictions were as strong as Obama thought they were. [Emphasis mine - CHF]

"It turned out that few of his convictions were as strong as Obama thought they were." He never really had to defend or market his positions, never really had to convince others of what he believed. Was never really challenged and never really had to accomplish something in the face of adversity. As a leader.

I think there was the presumption that because Obama was a "community organizer" (I'm surrounded by people who aspire to be community organizers at a seminary which claims to train them, and I'm still not entirely sure what exactly that is), he was for justice and peace and whatever wonderful things came bundled with that. And that he would lead forcefully like that, though I don't think forceful leading is part of what a community organizer is. He was a blank slate upon which a lot hope was projected. There were a lot of people hearing Obama and thinking he actually meant something (possibly even Obama himself), and I think it's become clear he doesn't really mean anything. Or, as Bromwich concludes:

Today no one can easily say who Barack Obama is or what he stands for; and the coming year is unlikely to offer many clues, since all the thoughts of Obama in 2011 appear to concern Obama in 2012. 

Yeah, But Not *TOO* Broke

House Speaker John Boehner apparently said this recently to CNN's Kathleen Parker:

"Well, if you really want to talk about what the 'Sputnik moment' is," he replied, "it's the fact that we're broke. And American people know we're broke."

Too broke to fight two wars, ya think? Or dominate the world? No, probably not THAT broke. I'm guessing NEVER that broke.

Some writers over at The American Conservative think the moment will come when, having to choose between sending soldiers to fight in foreign countries and pay for grandma's health care, conservatives will choose grandma. But I don't think so. I think for many Republicans (possibly even most), grandma is expendable. National greatness is not.

UPDATE: I should add, at this point, I think more than a few Democrats will vote to throw grandma under the tank too.

Book Update

I have not forgotten the Payton book on the Reformation. It's just that it's written to and for conservative Christians and I am not one. But there are a few quotes I may put here in the near future, as I am almost done with the book.

I am looking forward to having a conversation with Peter Berger on Between Relativism and Fundamentalism: Religious Resources for a Middle Position.

What Does it Mean to Be Faithful?

What does it mean to be church? In the latest issue of the American Conservative, Richard Gamble reviews a book I might have been tempted to read, James Davidson Hunter's To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Thankfully, because of Gamble's review, I don't have to read the book and be disappointed (whew!). Gamble concludes:

Christians who have a higher allegiance to the church than to American society will not take encouragement from Hunter’s recommendations for “faithful presence.” Social benefits from such a reconfigured orientation to the world may be real, but Christians ought to have their eyes open to the costs involved. A church that trades less effective techniques for more might lose its integrity, the very essence of what defines it as an institution unlike any other, and the unique message it brings to the world. Anyone who spends much time with young Christians these days knows that a generation has been raised by spiritually nomadic church-hopping parents—or even by radically de-institutionalized “home church” families—who have not bothered to initiate their sons and daughters into the life of the church. They have sent their children to the right schools and to worldview boot camp, but they have left them unbaptized, uncatechized, unaccountable, and unhabituated to regular public worship. This trend is becoming increasingly noticeable even among the offspring of conservative homes. A higher and more urgent calling than engaging the world might just be engaging the church.

Hunter agrees that the church in America is unhealthy. Indeed, it is the premise of his book. But for him the evidence of good health is a church that “exercises itself in all realms of life, not just a few.” Hunter’s call to that comprehensive outworking of the gospel offers both diagnosis and prescription for the “post-political,” “post-Constantinian” church as it faces an increasingly alien “post-Christian” culture. His book will perhaps redirect the strategy, funding, and vocabulary of transformationalists aspiring to be among the cultural elite, but it will not challenge their most cherished presupposition, that the church’s faithfulness ought to be measured by the degree to which it changes the world.

The liberal church -- and by that, I mean the church of just about any political and social stripe in the social democratic or liberal democratic nation-state -- since the 19th century has decided that faithfulness is a matter of, to borrow from Marx, changing the world. But in doing so, the church becomes just another actor in the liberal democratic state, another bit of "civil society" debating terms set solely by modernity and playing solely by the liberal state's rules. The end result of all this is influencing the actions of the state. That's what it means to be effective, and its how the various flavors of the liberal church measure themselves.

A lot of this is the engagement with modernity, an engagement the church somehow has to pull-off (Rome tried not to engage modernity for many decades and looked silly doing so) and yet also emphatically state that the question the church deals with -- the salvation of humanity and humanity's encounter with God -- pre-dates modernity and will long outlive modernity. Liberal Christianity has surrendered to modernity. Neither refutation nor surrender works well.

But the church needs to be much more emphatic about what the sanctified community really is. Liberal Christians confuse that community with the nation-state (I think this is what Gamble means when he writes of a "mythic civil religion that commonly fails to distinguish between Israel and America," Israel in this instance being the called people of God, and not the nation-state of Israel) and thus act as if the promises made to the church and to the world through the church are made to the nation-state and through the nation-state. (This is an especially American problem, one Jim Wallis is just as guilty of as Pat Robertson.)

This is why I espouse a theology of exile. The church is not really at home in the world. We are in that moment before the eschaton where the promise, while real and manifest in times and places in the world (there are fleeting moments when I know I am living in that promise), is not the ruling reality of human existence. We are -- and should always remember that we are -- a wandering people who, outside of our communion of Christ, do not yet have earthly homes.

The 23rd Psalm as Lament

From a class exercise last year. Reposted from Facebook.

The Lord is not my shepherd; I am always in want.

He makes me to fall down in arid deserts, and he misleads me to bitter and unpalatable waters.

He drains my soul, and he leads me in the paths of evil of for its own sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I am constantly terrified, for God has abandoned me and is of no comfort to me whatsoever.

He prepares a table for my enemies in my presence. He anoints my head with acid, and my cup has been stolen from me.

Surely despair and cruelty shall follow me all the days of my miserable life, and I will wander aimlessly outside the house of the Lord forever.

On Revolution and Bad Food

I have some problems with the politics and promises of The Enlightenment and modernity, but I also realize they are very attractive and that there is no going back. Abbas Milani notes this about Iran for The National Interest, but he could be saying it about any state or society struggling with the promises of modernity and Enlightenment:

While the leftist, centrist and clerical opposition to the shah “overdetermined” politics to the detriment of cultural freedoms, the ruler, for his part, failed to understand what increasingly became the clear iron law of culture: men (and women) do not live by bread alone, and when a society is introduced into the ethos of modernity—from the rule of reason and women’s suffrage to the idea of natural rights of citizens and the notion of a community joined together by social contract and legitimized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular will—then it will invariably demand its democratic rights. That society will not tolerate the authoritarian rule of even a modernizing monarch capable of delivering impressive economic development. The shah tried to treat the people of Iran as “subjects” and expected their gratitude for the cultural freedoms and economic advancement he had “given” them. But he, and his father (and before them, the participants in the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century), had helped develop a new cultural disposition by creating a parliament and a system of law wherein the people considered themselves citizens and thought of these liberties as their right—not as gifts benevolently bestowed upon them.

The promises of modernity and Enlightenment in so far as government are concerned are very beguiling. They may be outright lies, or they may be completely unachievable ideals -- I'm not quite sure which yet. But they are the only game in town. I am not one of the people who believe old and tired adage that democracy is the worst of all possible governments except for all the rest. I am an anarchist with monarchist sympathies, and my ideal government is a pre-nation-state monarchy. But we don't live in that time. The bureaucratic nation-state is how moderns govern themselves. There are no real alternatives. What most concerns me is the exercise of state power, and the reality that it is no more moral when exercised on behalf of the people than when it is on behalf of God or some embodied sovereign person. In fact, I think power is actually less moral when exercised in the name of the people, but for now, that is neither here nor there.

To an extent, this is what we are witnessing in Tunisia and Egypt, what we see occasionally in Burma, what wiped out the Nepalese monarchy some years ago, what unseated Soviet Socialism in 1989, and what may rock the West at some point in time when it becomes clear that "democracy" is actually unresponsive oligarchy (though I'm not holding my breath; revolution may be impossible in consumer societies). I sympathize with all the folks who rebel -- rebellion is my inclination as well -- and I wish them luck, but I suspect many will be truly disappointed when, after their democratic revolutions, they discover they haven't really solved anything.

However, I also know this -- you do not tell hungry people that the food is bad.

An Awkward Question About "Investment"

If, as President Obama said last night in his great speechy thingy, that “[t]wo years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again,” why then does the government need to invest in things like “biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology?" Why can't these very profitable corporations do that themselves?

Just asking.

More (Mostly) Meaningless Words

I did not watch the State of the Union Address. I don't recall how long I've been boycotting these -- I think since the Bush Jong Il regime, when I no longer had to watch them as a part of my job -- but it's been a while. Barack Obama is merely the latest president who's pronouncements I've tried hard to ignore.

I want to say they're meaningless, presidential speeches, but I don't quite think that. Bush Jong Il's second inaugural was a majesterial declaration by the Bush regime that the United States seeks to liberate others by dominating them, a Bush take on Wilsonianism that really isn't that different from Woodrow Wilson's (given his racism). Presidential words mean a lot, but at the same time, they don't mean very much. If you listened to Bush's speeches on Israel and Palestine, for example, he sounded incredibly progressive -- he used the word Palestine to describe a place and a nation, not just a people (I'm not sure any previous president had ever done so). But his words were completely disconnected from what his regime was actually accomplishing.

Obama is a particularly beguiling speaker, mostly because he speaks so easily and so well of hope and faith -- a secular faith in America that at the same is laced heavily with religious and eschatological language. I've also come to the conclusion that Obama's language is, more often than not, meaningless, largely because the disconnect from what he says and how he actually governs is so vast. Greater than it was under Bush or even Clinton. I think Obama may even be beguiled by his words because I'm not really he really knows what he means past the wonderful sounding words. In this, I am with Jacob Bronsthner when he wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor:

[S]ince his inauguration, Obama's methodological political theory has proved thin and sometimes incoherent. He will never support tax cuts for the rich, until he will. He criticizes Bush's expansive view of presidential war powers, then adopts it. The list goes on.

It's not that he breaks his policy promises more than other politicians. It's not that he seeks compromise – a virtue. It's not even that his policies are wrongheaded. It's the fact that when he compromises, when he reaches policy conclusions, there's no sense that it derives from anything other than ad hoc balancing.

There is no well of enduring principle upon which he seems to draw. Even if he's a pragmatist, eschewing universal principles in favor of context-specific values and concerns, we still don't know what those temporal values and concerns are, or why he believes in them. So far he's the piecemeal president.

Bronsthner is convinced -- and I think he's right -- that Obama doesn't seem to really believe in anything. In fact, I'm fairly certain the point of his speeches (and Bush's before him) are to make partisan supporters feel good about themselves. (Chris Hedges writes about this kind of in his latest essay.) "We are on the right side of good and truth and beauty and history," supporters can say to themselves. And that is about all the words he speaks are worth.

Yet not all of Obama's words are meaningless. As worthless as the Cairo speech was in actually producing any real "change" in how America did things in the Middle East, in April of 2007, Obama spoke before the Chicago Foreign Policy Council and outlined what would become his approach to foreign policy, talking about using the "full arsenal" of American power (and ingenuity) to confront "aggression" and maintain American military superiority. (I've just reread it, and for the most part, it is a speech Bush could have given.) This showed that Obama was not a peace candidate in any meaningful way, not willing to consider the possibility that the United States might be an ordinary nation, and I think that speech meant something. Those were not empty words, any more than Bush's ersatz-Trotskyite missive in January 2005 was empty of meaning too.

Not all of the State of the Union was meaningless, as Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation notes:

He didn’t exactly trumpet American “exceptionalism,” and he didn’t proclaim America’s mission to remake the world, in so many words, but he inserted into his speech an odd phrase: “No one rival superpower is aligned against us.” Without saying so, he portrayed the United States, therefore, as the world’s lone superpower, an errant vision that reinforces the view of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that America has some vague responsibility for the rest of the world. “American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored,” he proclaimed. Really? Nowhere in his speech did Obama reflect on the necessary, humbling vision of the United States as a declining world power whose future depends on its reaching a series of accommodations with at least five or six other rising powers and regions.

But why else should expect different? In this, there is meaning. Obama's world is still an America-centered, America-led, America-managed world for the benefit of America (again, dominating others in order to liberate them -- more good progressive governance) so that more people can live in the abundance and freedom that America. And that is empire, the empire Obama remains committed to maintaining. Plain and simple.

A Quote Worth Remembering

I can take or leave The Nation's politics (mostly leave). But I really like it's longer cultural and historical pieces. This quote from French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss appears in a lengthy essay on the same, and I find it worth remembering:

Other societies are perhaps no better than our own; even if we are inclined to believe they are, we have no method at our disposal for proving it. However, by getting to know them better, we are enabled to detach ourselves from our own society. Not that our own society is peculiarly or absolutely bad. But it is the only one from which we have a duty to free ourselves: we are, by definition, free in relation to the others.

Attention to Detail

What's wrong with this picture of Pentagon spokesguy Geoff Morrell?

(Aside from the fact he looks like a plastic Dan Rather puppet?) 

The Pentagon is NOT in Washington. I know, this is a tawdry bit of detail to focus on, but it really toasts my poptarts. The Pentagon is actually in Arlington, Virginia. I'm not sure why the folks who run the place insist on placing the five-sided asylum in DC, save maybe that it will confuse too many people if the sign behind Morrell said, "THE PENTAGON - Arlington, Virginia." Perhaps it is designed to show we have a united, unified government, in one place sitting atop one people policing and securing one world. Who knows.

It wouldn't be THAT hard to actually put the Pentagon in DC. Because that's where it ought to be. The best -- and easiest -- way to deal with the lack of voting representation DC residents have in Congress would be to give most of the District of Columbia to Maryland (either give it to the counties surrounding or make it two small city-counties, Georgetown and Anacostia) with the core of the district -- I think everything south of K St., west of the Anacostia River and east of Rock creek -- to be retained by the Feds as the capital district. Everyone residing within these bounds would then be listed as a Maryland resident for purposes of voting and representation. 

Then expand the district back across the Potomac to include the Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, the Navy Annex, Ft. Myer, and Crystal City south to include National Airport. Everyone "residing" there would be considered a Virginia resident for purposes of representation. (DC residents would vote in federal elections but not state or local ones.) I wouldn't even bother having this rump city run by an elected council, but rather by a joint congressional committee with some appointed non-Congress members to help. Maybe appoint a high commissioner to oversee day-to-day activities or something.

How To Justify Mass Murder

Idealism is one way. Most everyone who hears JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" only hear the nonsensical idealism of the early 1960s. Service to the state as service to others. No one seems to hear that "what you can do for your country" quickly came to mean get drafted and fight in Vietnam. (Which was service to the state, right?)

Another, I think, is to provide bread to those who might otherwise oppose the mass murder. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment:

I'm not entirely sure what goes on with progressives/liberals, whether it's really THAT easy to buy them off with social welfare or what, but they really don't seem to care about the wars when they are waged by Democrats (and this was not true in the late 1960s; opposition to the Vietnam War by the left is probably what sunk Hubert Humphrey). They really don't. I guess it's okay for Americans to kill, maim, torture, bomb and invade so long as all of that state violence is done by progressives for good progressive reasons. So long as gays can do it too and a dollop of health care is provided. 

Not, of course, to those bombed.

The Purpose of History

Payton writes about history in his chapter on the Rennaisance. He says as succinctly as I can find the purpose of telling history:

People have been writing history for as far back as we know. From the earliest records of civilization, people have kept track of events that had taken place, listing and commenting on them. For a long time that record-keeping was oral, but eventually those records began to be written down and handed on from one generation to the next. These early accounts are often called annals (since they recorded what happened from year to year) or chronicles (if they took a broader scope). These could be bare lists of one thing after another, or they could be crafted to tell a story about a particular group, city-state, people or leader, often emphasizing the great thing done by them.

Any such narrative was intended to drive home a point. The narrator was not particularly concerned to "get the facts straight," and he would have been nonplussed by a call to try and be unbiased in considering the data. Chronicles passed on what needed to be remembered and should be believed; their purpose was to entertain and instruct. Through them people could remember what they should remember, learn what they needed to know and see how to live. (p. 54-55, italics in original)

History is a story that tell the meaning -- the story of who we are as a people (or who I am as a person). It may or may not be more than tangentially connected to what actually happened. Unfortunately, mythic histories tend to be acted out in a way that wants to bend reality to the meaning and supposed purposes of history. That is especially a problem with the powerful, or the self-destructive. I may (or may not) write more about that later.

Grace and Nature

I have used this blog in the past to muse publicly on what I am reading. It's been a while since I've done that, but I'm returning to that today.


The book I'm working on today is James Payton's Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings (IVP Academic, 2010). Payton is a Presbyterian pastor (if I read that right) and a professor of church history at Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ontario. It exists in that land between scholarly and popular, with a skew more toward the popular, as he uses it in university courses he teaches and intends it for congregations as well.


He has this to say about the rediscovery of Aristotle by the West, whose writings had not been well preserved in the monasteries of Western Europe:

But [Aristotle's] works, all focused on the world here below and all of which followed the same pattern of logical analysis and categorization, offered both a curriculum to used and a way of thought to be followed. Monastic leaders decried learning about the world God had made through the works of a pagan, but philosopher-theologians enamored of the possibilities Aristotle proffered for better understanding the world argued that Aristotle could serve as a reliable guide. The defense offered in the thirteenth century by Albert the Great and his student Thomas Aquinas was that we should distinguish between the realms of nature and grace. In the former, all that was needed in order to learn appropriately was using human reason rightly and humbly. Since Aristotle laid out the patterns for using reason rightly, and followed them himself in his multifaceted exploration of the realm of nature, his works could be utilized to study the world of nature God had made. Where Aristotle had transgressed the limits of reason to propound notions which violated the teaching of scripture--for example, the eternity of matter--Christian learning must humbly decline to follow the pagan philosopher and follow Christian teaching instead.

In due course this basic perspective carried the day. It was a significant development: for the first time, nature and grace were contrasted as realms or spheres. (p. 44)

"Nature and grace were contrasted as realms or spheres." I find myself wondering a few things with this. First, how much of the Christian understanding of "two kingdoms" is a result of this medieval synthesis? I realize this is identified as a Lutheran doctrine, but it really is a Christian doctrine justified by scripture but, I'm betting, having very different roots. You can justify with resort to scripture, but I'm not sure scripture is all that clear on the matter. As an example, much is made of made of this exchange in Matthew 22:

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his talk.  And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.  Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”  But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites?  Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius.  And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?”  They said, “Caesar's.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.”  When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away. (ESV)

A whole edifice of theology has been built on this quote (and a few others) claiming separate "spheres" for God and Caesar. But it's not clear from the passage that anything aside from the coin itself actually belongs to Caesar. I don't see the love, loyalty and duty owed to civil government that theologians have grown from this soil.

Anyway, as I read this book, I'm going to keep thinking about this matter of Aristotle and what Payton describes as contrasting realms of nature and grace in Western thinking. I'm not sure we can get rid of these ideas, as Aristotle in the foundation of thought in the West -- of modernity, for better or worse -- and you cannot destroy or alter the foundation without wrecking the entire structure. I'm not sure I'd want to in any case. There is also much good in it. 

Asking the Right Question

Jerry Salyer over at Front Porch Republic poses this question succinctly and beautifully:

Why do so many continue to act and speak as if history’s atrocities have always been committed in the name of God or Nation, never in the name of Liberation or Equality? 

Accountability is Worse, Apparently

Jason Dietz over at Antiwar.com is reporting the following this morning:

In a filing related to the detention of whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, the Justice Department argued that being a whistleblower and leaking information to the media was a “greater threat to society” than when a spy sells that information to a single foreign country.

The exact details of what Sterling was being charged with leaking were never made public, but there is speculation that it was related to James Risen’s book State of War. The Justice Department filing however insisted that the stance was a general one, and not case-specific.

This might explain why recent officials have shown so little interest in going after actual spies yet are forever riled up by the notion that the American public might have access to similar embarrassing information.

So let me get this straight: the desire to hold one's own government accountable by giving classified information to the media -- and thus to the people that government allegedly represents -- is worse than giving the same classified information to a foreign state, even an adversary.


The idea that government can be held accountable through mere democratic process is folly. Just as the excesses of government are often times kept in check by the possibility of revolt if the leaders of a state go to far (witness Tunisia, about which I hope to blog more later), those who rule can only truly be held accountable when the possibility that informal means will expose, and hopefully constrain, their actions. So what we are witnessing here, in the Bush/Obama regimes, is a state that wants nothing but the formal, constitutional forms of "accountability" which have, themselves, proven utterly incapable of restraining the actions of the state. Particularly the executive.


Because, I think, constitutional means were never really designed to. There is no process or system that can truly restrain the state if the leaders of the state do not wish to or not believe they should be restrained. The idea of the U.S. Constitution was to balance not just three branches of the federal government against each other, but also the feds against the states. But what if the states have been beaten into submission by the feds and all three branches work together toward the same end? Democratic government promises accountability, a kind of accountability to the people it governs that, supposedly, undemocratic governments cannot deliver. But I've become convinced the very promise of accountability is a lie. Not that democratic states fall short of the promise, but that the very promise itself of the accountability of democratic states is a lie, and has been a lie from the beginning. It only works when there are people committed to holding the state accountable (for whatever reason, whether they want the state to work better or, like me, they oppose the very state itself for moral reasons) and when they have the tools and courage -- or are willing to fight for those things. 


But if the state, which holds the monopoly of violence and the high ground when it comes to imposing meaning on a society, deprives individuals of the ability to hold the state and its agents accountable, then there is nothing restraining the state.

Early Saturday Observation

It is always interesting to note that, when things in politics are described as "complicated" or "complex," that's usually an excuse to justify or continue state violence.

Just sayin'.

Recycle or Reuse?

Noticed this on the back of a bottle of Simply Limeade. A bottle that I have been reusing to keep limewater in...

I mean, I don't get it. Isn't reusing a form a recycling? Well, whatever. So far, I've not dropped dead or gotten sick, nor has the bottle sprung holes or disintegrated. So why they say "Do Not Reuse" is beyond me. Don't know if this is another federal law or rule that I'm disobeying (because I am likely in violation of some number of federal laws and rules at any moment I am breathing), but if it is, maybe I should say that I'm planning to recycle the bottle now.

I'm not. It's a nice bottle. For reusing.

On Violence, Language and Public Responsibility

Civility. It is what we are all supposed to be in the wake of the shootings in Tucson, Arizona, last weekend. Because "uncivil" language in our overheated partisan political environment was alleged -- or suspected, or merely felt -- to contribute, in some way, to shooter Jared Loughner's motives when he shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (and 17 others), killing six people. I've already received Jim Wallis' "Peace and Civility Pledge" (yes, I somehow got myself on the Sojourner's e-mail list):

Part of building a better society is relating to others with whom we disagree on important issues without calling them evil. It is out of that work that we recommit ourselves to being peacemakers in our country. It is on that Covenant that we have based this new Pledge.

As the county sheriff in charge of the criminal scene in Tucson said on Saturday, this must be an occasion for national “soul searching.” In the midst of tragedy and violence, I believe this means every Christian must ask: “How am I responsible?”

I have also had many qualms about the nature of political language in the United States, particularly that of Republicans, which rhetorically creates a world in which the values of conservative, middle-class Americans (and the people who hold those values) are threatened and besieged from all around, a world in which only violence can redeem those values and the holders of those values. This has been their language for a long, long time, both in and out of power. It is a language with logical consequences. In power, it prompts fairly merciless state violence; out of power, it whips up and maintains unreasonable fears of those who have state power, and creates a rhetorical logic in which -- because so much is at stake -- that at some point the opposition must not be allowed to gain or continue its hold on power because that political opposition is the existential threat. The GOP's leadership have walked this line pretty carefully -- cultivating this violence rhetorically as a way of mobilizing and maintaining the base, and yet not cultivating so intently as to actually organize it and then kick it into action. It may be that people can live on that edge for years, even decades, without actually organizing to murder their neighbors. We're going to see. 

(I'm picking on the GOP because since the 1970s, it has been much more attached to the language of overt violence than have the Democrats.)

But precisely because the GOP has never kicked the violence into action, those bursts of violence that have happened seem to be the result of single, unstable individuals. (Or tiny groups of unstable people.) It appears that Loughner (and I don't know him) falls into this category, a lone individual suffering from some kind of mental disorder, very likely schizophrenia. Attempts by observers rummaging through his booklist or his Youtube postings to root his violence either in the ideology of the left or right, and thus blame the other for violence and incivility, is widely off the mark, as Laura Miller noted on Salon.com on Monday:

The sole ideological thread running through Loughner's list is an inchoate anti-authoritarianism. It's likely that what attracted him to "Mein Kampf" and "The Communist Manifesto" was less the political thinking in either book than their aura of the forbidden, the sensation that he was defying the adults around him by daring to read either one. The rest of his favorites -- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Brave New World," "Animal Farm" and "Fahrenheit 451" -- depict deceitful and oppressive regimes committed to squelching individual initiative and thought.

Ross Douthat, writing in Monday's New York Times:

But chances are that Loughner’s motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination. Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.

This is the world that gave us [Lee Harvey] Oswald and [Arthur] Bremer [who shot George Wallace in 1972]. More recently, it’s given us figures like James W. von Brunn, the neo-Nazi who opened fire at the Holocaust Museum in 2009, and James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel last summer to express his displeasure over population growth. These are figures better analyzed by novelists than pundits: as Walter Kirn put it Saturday, they’re “self-anointed knights templar of the collective shadow realm, not secular political actors in extremis.”

This is politics, yes, but it is not normal, reasonable, emotional politics. It is a politics unattached to reality, one that revels in the magical. I've listened to such rantings on the shortwave before (I actually find them entertaining, when I get them in short bursts). I'm not entirely sure how much a more civil political discourse in the United States would prevent crazies from acting out -- that's a little like asking how much rain didn't fall last night. It's a hypothetical question also ungrounded in the real world. We live in a world of violent language that mostly does not prompt violent action.

But I have two concerns that I expect will not be addressed by Wallis' (or anyone else's) civility pledge.

The first is the violence of the state itself. In effect, we are being told we must have a "civil discourse" about politics, which is the process we engage in to control the state, which is defined as that entity which has a lawful monopoly on violence. Those agents of state power, and their apologists, tell us who are subject to state power that we must be civil and eschew violence, but the state doesn't have to. It can still threaten, accuse, investigate, imprison, marginalize, bomb, destroy and annihilate, both in word and deed, as official policy or as something its apologists aspire to. It's agents can still use violence with impunity. How long, I wonder, until the next congresscrittur or pundit demands Julian Assange's rendition to the Black Hole of Guantano, or supports Bradley Manning's continuing abuse at the hands of the state, or continued bombing of Yemen and Pakistan (or elsewhere, violence that results in the very real injury and deaths of very real human beings), or an attack upon Iran? Will that be seen as uncivil? Why do I doubt it?

The truth is the state wishes to maintain its monopoly not just on violence, but the language of violence, and those who parry and thrust to control that violence must not themselves EVER use the language of violence in their struggle. State violence is sacred, and it is only to be used against enemies of the state.

This leads me to a second point. In principle, I have no problem with the notion of a public responsibility for language. Words do have consequences, in that they create an interpretive reality by which the world is understood and that understanding is acted upon. It is reasonable (though it may not necessarily be correct) that language steeped in violence and fear will tend those who accept that "interpretive reality" toward violence responses. It may also be that human beings are quite capable of living with quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for long stretches of time, and will only act upon fear and anger when actively prompted and organized.

But pledges like Wallis' seem disingenuous to me. More to the point, they seem like a power play, a way to dictate the terms of the debate, to gain advantage. What, exactly, is uncivil? How do we agree what is uncivil? We already know that "enemies of the state" -- at least those residing outside the boundaries of the state -- don't merit any civility from agents of the state and their supporters. What about opponents of the state (and not merely partisan opponents of whoever governs) at home? I have no doubt that Wallis and his ilk would like to marginalize anti-state and anti-government speech, to relegate it to the land of uncivil. And those who speak such language to the land of enemies who can be legitimate targets of state violence. 

Civility pledges, then, are -- like most efforts to rewrite rules -- a pure power grab. A way to privilege one speaker at the expense of another by thoroughly marginalizing language, ideas and those who speak them. 

Songs & Theology

I'm in the middle of writing a series of songs for the junior high school confirmation class where I am currently interning. It's a fascinating project, and I'm quite grateful I have our Bible year (as opposed to our Luther's catechism year, though that will be my next challenge) to draw from. Basically, I am writing one song a week on each of the Bible lessons, beginning with Genesis (the one song no one in the class has heard) through Revelation, according to the ELCA's "Here We Stand" confirmation curriculum. It's turned out to be a fantastic challenge, and not only have I managed to write the one song a week, two weeks I wrote two songs!

(We did David and the kings of Israel and Judah in one week, so David got a song and then I wrote a nifty little bit of blues naming all the kings of Israel and Judah in order, as well as good Deuteronomist reasons why both kingdoms fell and the hope that remains for Judah in the line of Jesse; and then I felt the need to separate prophetic condemnation from prophetic hope.)

In the process, I have had to teach myself to write simple story songs. Not what I have tended to write in the past. Most of what I wrote, from the age of 16 onward, were songs that communicated -- obliquely and obscurely, and mostly only to myself -- what I felt about things. My goal, I suppose, was not so much communication but self-expression. Scott Miller, of Game Theory and The Loud Family, once described many of his songs as "in-jokes for one person." Which is true of much of my stuff too.

Tough to build an audience that way, though. I've come to the conclusion that a song is, or should be, a story that a listener can emotionally connect to. We do that with songs either by understanding the story or apprehending some kind of shared emotion present in the song. I think the former is a great deal easier than the later. 

When I wrote and recorded The Lamentations Of in late 2009, the songs worked for some people I know because they understood and appreciated the experience I had gone through (and one person even shared a very similar experience). I'm still guilty of some obscurity in the words, and I'm not apologizing for that. I like language and I write primarily for myself. And sometimes, for me, the words don't tell a story but attempt solely to convey an emotion, what I have long called "word pictures" ("Learning Contract," for example). But some of those words were much more obvious than other things I had previously written. I love Scott Miller's music, and have since I discovered his stuff in late 1985 in Monterey, California. It spoke to me in some deep pain I was feeling at the time and I could feel the emotional connection -- this was an angst or suffering that I understood and that understood me. But, to be blunt, I'm not sure I can tell you three-quarters of the time what Scott is actually singing about. Miller's songs may be stories, but his language is too personal for them to make all that much sense (even as it is sometimes very, very clever) as stories. 

In these Bible story songs, I can't do that. I'm having to tell very clear and very simple stories. I'm also having to keep the theology concise, and do nuance in ways that have nothing to do with clever language or lots of words. Many of the lyrics I'm cribbing from scripture itself, and in the process discovering just how poetic scripture really is. (I use the English Standard Version, which is a much more poetic text than the NRSV, which has a flat and passionless feel to it.) Especially the prophets, and in both my prophetic condemnation and hope songs, I was shocked at just how little work I had to do get rhymes out of the text. It's funny, but I've found significantly more artistic freedom in the limits the Biblical text (and the ELCA's understanding of what that text means for us as God's people) impose upon me than I might with a blank sheet of paper and utterly no guidance. For example, my Joseph song is a libertarian warning against the excesses of power sung from the standpoint of Pharaoh (a legitimate reading given Exodus 1). And my Moses song is also sung from Pharaoh's view as well. (Which begs a question I cannot answer: why did I find Pharaoh's view so interesting?)

I think the exercise has already yielded a result in "Joyless (Because You Left Me)," a song I wrote for a friend and certainly the most accessible words I've ever written. By that, you can grasp the story the song tells without knowing any of the details of the real story. (The song will show up on a collection of pop songs from the teens, 20s and 30s that Angel Holland and I are ever-so-slowly working on. It's the first song I wrote on the ukulele, and it kinda sounds like a 20s pop song.)

So, right now, I've got 13 songs, all of which I think are very usable. Some are better than others, but that's always the case. I'll probably have another 10 or 12 by the time we're done. And the Bible collection already has a title: Red Letter Songs. And I've given myself some additional challenges. For example, when we get to Paul's letters, I am going to make at least one Paul song a cute little ukulele tune. Right now, I have two partial recordings, and I hope to record fairly good demos of all the songs by August. And then who knows. 

A Bit of Saturday Nonsense

Just finished watching season two of "Legend of the Seeker." I'm not a great fan of swords and sorcery stuff, and I did this mostly because I thought Jennifer would approve. Which she did. But it was, as someone once said, "good, dumb fun!"

Bridgett Regan and Tabrett Bethell were also a lot of fun to look at. World could use more of them.

The Violence of God

I am not a fan of Brian McLaren. He is one of these "welfare state=sanctified community, if not the Kingdom of God" kind of Christians whose thinking is a statist and nationalist as that of the conservatives he opposes. For him, the nation, and not the church, is the sanctified community, which makes him no different than a flag waving "God-and-country" Christian (who usually end up putting country first). Since the state is violence, to invest one's-self in the state and the outcomes of its actions is to invest in violence. To endorse it and support it. Something I believe the church has no business doing. Liberal Christians are deeply invested in state violence. Indeed, they cannot be liberals without their faith in the role the state plays either in humanity's salvation or sanctification.

But this is not a bad piece. I agree, more or less, with McLaren's essential statements here:

And the staggering reality is that Jesus didn’t kill anybody -- something that can't be said about Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, or Mohammed (no disrespect intended to any of them). He didn't hit anybody. He didn't hate anybody. He practiced as he preached: Reconciliation, not retaliation. Kindness, not cruelty. A willingness to be violated, not violation. Creative conflict transformation through love, not decisive conflict termination through superior weapons. Courageous and compassionate resistance, not violence. Outstretched arms on a cross, not stockpiles of arms, nuclear or otherwise.

...

Where do you primarily find God on Good Friday?

If God is primarily identified with the Romans, torturing and killing Jesus, then, yes, the case is closed: God must be seen as violent on Good Friday. The cross is an instrument of God's violence.

But if God is located first and foremost with the crucified one, identifying with humanity and bearing and forgiving people's sin, then a very different picture of God and the cross emerges.

McLaren forgets John 2, where Jesus makes a whip and chases the money-changers out of the temple. But generally, he is right, and I agree with him when he says that "God is with the slaves, not with the slave-drivers. God is found in the one being tortured, not the ones torturing. God is found among the displaced refugees, not those stealing their lands. And God is found in the one being spat upon, not in the one spitting. A very different scandal indeed -- and a very different cross, with a very different, but no less profound, meaning."

But I don't think McLaren's thinking on this is sophisticated enough. He posits four "ifs" about God:

• God is violent, and since human beings are made in God's image, we are commanded to use that violence in some times and places.
• God is violent, but God's violence is holy and righteous in a way human violence cannot be. And thus, while humans can be violent, it is only under God's explicit command.
• God is not violent, and is always a regrettable violation of God's image within human beings.
• God is not violent, and thus human beings are never commanded to use violence.

Where I think he falls short in this is his desire for an objective understanding of God. God is. But what if our ability to know and understand God is limited solely by our being finite, that the infinite's ability to communicate with the finite is limited by the finite's ability to perceive the infinite? What if, in our encounter with God, we cannot help but perceive God as violent in times and places, simply because God is God and we are humans? Just as we cannot help, in our sinfulness, but to hear God tell us we are being abandoned (Judges 10, for example, or Hosea 1), there are times and places where we cannot help but encounter God as or in horrific violence. Scripture and personal experience attest to this. That makes God no less a God of love, but it does mean that we must, in faith, keep remembering that God is love and is present as love to us even in the worst we do and even as the worst rages around us.

Corruption? Really?

Yves Smith wrote on the Naked Capitalism website yesterday:

Marshall Auerback explains how misguided attempts to reduce the deficit kill jobs, squeeze the working and middle classes, and inflate crude oil prices. And a corrupt political system doesn’t help.

A corrupt political system. I hear and read that a lot, from the right (it's one of the things Alex Jones claims to do, "waging war on corruption") to the left. But what exactly is this "corruption" that gets talked about? How is the American political system "corrupt"? Are we talking actual bribe taking--corruption in the classical sense, or possibly the Nigerian sense--or are we talking about the sense that politics is not, somehow, really responsible to the "will of the people?"

Those who speak of "corruption" generally also tend to speak of politicians and government as responsible to "special interests," as opposed to "the people" or some sort of general interest or common good. But what if there is no general interest or common good, and only special interests?

I've longed believed that there is no such thing as "the will of the people," that it cannot possibly articulate itself in any meaningful way. And any attempt to do so takes the polity in the direction of the dictatorship. (Dictatorship in the 19th and 20th centuries is largely founded in the will of the people.) Actors in a democratic polity will then be responsive (and responsible to) all of the myriad smaller actors in the polity, especially those who can mobilize the financial resources. This may seem unfair to some who believe that the narrow interests of others are being served (as opposed to their own interests, which are very likely just as narrow), but how is it corrupt? Especially as virtually every actor--even finance capital--in a democratic polity will claim their means and ends serve the alleged common good?

Obama the Elitist

David Bromwich, writing in the London Review of Books (in the November issue; I just got around to reading this) about Barack Obama and particularly the president's attachment to the very conventional economics of his advisors from world of investment banking:

Here the charge of elitism against Obama finds some basis in fact. He shares with his economic advisers the view that wealth is created by the banks and money firms from the top down: a healthy economy comes from money making money, not from people making things.

In this, Obama shares much with the clerisy as a people who do not understand where wealth comes from. This is both a liberal and conservative failing. The clerisy are by nature people who do not "make" money, who do not really create wealth (though through their work they may add to the wealth at large in a community or society), and so don't really understand how it comes about.

A Question About Nuclear Weapons

It's been a while since I've bothered to use this blog. That has happened more often than not, mostly because I like to muse publicly when I think people might be listening. Or reading. But, if I don't say anything here, they certainly won't be reading.

It occurred to me recently to wonder: does the Obama regime's commitment to "global nuclear disarmament" include Israel? If the United States government cannot even speak of Israeli nuclear weapons, how can they be eliminated?

Or, will Israel be the only country in such a de-nuclearized world to have such weapons?

I'm just asking. I'm a big fan of asking annoying questions. I just wish I was in a position right now to have someone hear those annoying questions. (No, I don't actually expect anyone to answer.)