Avdat

Republicans don't care about deficits

Here's a profile in political courage shameless pandering: Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling calls for making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Slashing taxes and red tape is the way to unleash the economy's potential, writes Bowling, and boy do we need that now, poised as we are for a double-dip recession. If you're worried about increasing the deficit, well, Bowling adds, cutting spending rather than raising taxes is the way to balance the budget.

OK. Fine. Time to bring out the chart again:

Again I will point out that you cannot make meaningful cuts to federal spending by eliminating pork barrel projects in someone else's congressional district. You will have to raise the retirement age, and/or cut Medicare, and/or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drastically reduce America's military footprint abroad. Which cuts does Bolling support? Funny. He never gets around to saying.

Targeted tax cuts can spur economic growth, as we see in the case of new home sales, which have tanked since the tax credit expired at the end of June. But permanently eliminating the estate tax and cutting income and capital gains tax rates will deprive the federal budget of hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decades, just as retiring baby boomers make unprecedented demands on Social Security and Medicare. That's irresponsible.

Look, we have two problems: in the short term, the economy stinks, and in the long term, a rising tide of red ink threatens to swamp the country.

The solution to the short term problem is deficit spending to jump start the economy, ease the pain of the unemployed and aid state and local governments whose tax receipts have plummeted but who can't run deficits. The solution to the long term problem is some mixture of tax increases and benefit cuts, such as raising both the retirement age and the amount of income subject to FICA taxes, which stands at $109,000. It would also be an act of fiscal responsibility not to start any more dumb wars, to say nothing of respect for human life, international law, etc., etc.

Republicans have it exactly backwards. They voted against extending unemployment benefits, against emergency funding to save teacher jobs, and they will vote for making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. That's a recipe for pain now, and red ink in the future.

But they don't care. All they care about is cutting taxes for the rich, their most reliable constituency.

In the Woods

(Spoiler alert).

Adam Robert Ryan is a murder detective in the Dublin, Ireland police force. He's also the sole survivor of a bizarre child abduction and murder that occurred in the woods surrounding the subdivision he called home in the mid-1980s. Searchers found Adam catatonic, gripping a tree so hard his nails were embedded in the bark, his shoes full of his friends' congealed blood.

When Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate the murder of 12-year-old Katy Devlin in the very same woods, does Rob bother telling anyone about this potential conflict of interest? Why No! And so we're off with Rob and Cassie as they both try to solve the Devlin crime, and pierce the fog of repressed memories in Rob's mind about the unsolved disappearances in the woods a generation before.

There's no end to the possibilities. Little Katy's body was found on an altar unearthed by archaeologists, the site soon to be paved over by a new highway, a highway Katy's father was leading a campaign to stop. Katy was soon to go off to a school for the arts to further hone her dancing abilities which had been displayed for all in newspaper reports. So was it some kind of ritual pagan sacrifice? Payback by the developers for her father's opposition to the highway? A pedophile who read about her? Has a child murderer in this bucolic subdivision awakened once again? Are the woods haunted?

In each chapter, the author Tana French slowly reveals information that makes one or more of these theories seem plausible. We see Ryan and Maddox's partnership and friendship in all its resilience, resourcefulness and tenderness. And in each chapter French allows us to watch the slow disintegration of Detective Ryan through his own retrospective gaze; Ryan is the book's first-person narrator. Too much pressure and alcohol; too little sleep, and too many ghosts from the past to exorcise. One of the trickier aspects of reading this Whodunit is trying to decide whether the narrator is to be trusted.

I enjoyed the possibilities laid out far more than the solution of the crime, which didn't quite ring true to me. Yes, Ryan was a mental case by the end of the novel, but his sudden and spirited defense of Katy's sisters Rosalind, who was clearly off-kilter to begin with, and, as we all recognize at the end--a psychopath--seemed out of character, even for him. Of all the mean girls out there, do any really possess the utter lack or remorse and capacity for manipulation that this teenager did? Enough to fool a cynical murder detective? And are sad sacks like Damien really capable of such monstrous crimes? It raises the question of whether doing evil is an act of strength or weakness.

Of course there are psychopaths; people do manipulate and allow themselves to be manipulated. Maybe my problem with the climax is that I'm too naive.

On the whole, I found reading In the Woods a thrilling and pleasurable experience. This one will stay with me for a while.

More Clay Marzos in the pipeline

A classmate of Ethan's shreds it at Virginia Beach this past weekend:

Refudiating religious bigotry

The Times-Dispatch editorial board missed an opportunity recently when it wrote, "And while we recognize the sponsors' right to erect an Islamic center on the controversial site, we question the wisdom of the project." As if this project were akin to flag-burning or Nazis marching in Skokie--one of those envelope-pushing first amendment exercises we have to put up with in a free society.

The so-called Ground Zero Mosque is neither a mosque nor is it located at Ground Zero (although if it were I wouldn't mind a bit). It's a community center, not unlike a JCC or a YMCA, and it would stand a couple of blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood. Why does this bother anybody? What could be more routine than people peaceably assembling to pray and play together?

Muslims too died in the 9/11 attacks. The United States is not at war with Islam, as President Bush (for all his faults) reminded us when he distanced himself from General Boykin's ill-advised comments that cast the War on Terror as a religious war. The only reason why anyone would take offense at a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan is if they were operating under the erroneous assumption that the United States is indeed at war with Islam.

No doubt many people do labor under that erroneous assumption. Politicians and pundits, if they aren't completely worthless, would do us all some good by disabusing them of that notion. And yet here they come, from Joe Lieberman to Sarah Palin, pandering to ignorance, ginning up resentment, tarring the innocent with guilt by association.

There's been a lot of it going around lately: Shirley Sherrod the racist. Tinkering with the 14th Amendment. And now nationwide outrage over what really ought to be a rather pedestrian issue for the planning and zoning board in New York City. When things go wrong, blame the dark-skinned people.

And things are going wrong. Lots of people are out of work. In Iraq, we find ourselves in the denouement of a war, not so much at the end of the war, much less having achieved victory. In Afghanistan, things are going from bad to worse; who knows whether this or any strategy will work? Who knows even how to define victory in Afghanistan?

But manufactured outrage over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque will not put a single person back to work, make the world a safer place, or undo one bit of the damage we've done over the past seven years.

What I did on my vacation

Not a lot, actually. We spent a week at Sandbridge, Virginia, just south of Virginia Beach. There are no highrises, waterparks and boardwalks at Sandbridge, but there are a lot of people in the surf by day, packed into beach houses and condos on narrow lots by night.

Fortunately, the beach borders the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, so if you really want to get away from it all, you can just ignore the Access Prohibited sign on the beach, and before you know it, you're surrounded by sea gulls and sandpipers. Although there's nothing you can do about the Navy fighter jets roaring overhead.

Which is where I found this honking huge clam shell, still intact. I'm pretty proud of it. I am no kind of hunter, not even a shell hunter. And there it was, being played with by a seagull. I exercised my God-given dominion over nature in a rather high-handed way; I clean took it from him. I looked up the shell in my mother-in-law's guide book, and come to find out it's a Quahog, an Algonquin name. Lives in the sand from the low tide line to 50 feet of water.

I also found a beautiful Shark's Eye (not pictured). And as it turns out, the shark's eye preys on bivalves like the Quahog by boring a hole through its shell, and eating the meat therein. My Quahog has one little, tiny, perfectly round indention, but no other evidence of penetration.

My brother-in-law and I took Ethan fishing, caught a few spots that made for a nice accent piece on the dinner plate, and Ethan caught a stingray. Proudest moment of his life--sting rays being one of his peculiar obsessions. We threw it back, and I was proud that Ethan didn't mind. 

The water was a tad cooler than I'm used to, vacationing in North Carolina, but the waves were crashing the first few days we were there, and full of sand and brine, so it was invigorating. Unfortunately, I seem to be allergic to salt water. Every trip to the beach, but only when I swim, the skin on my chest and shoulders turns red, feels like it's shrunk two sizes too tight, and tingles, like I've become a pin cushion. I saw an allergist about it once. He said he had no idea what I was talking about, and hustled me out of the office with a handful of Claritin samples. I think he thought I was lying. 

Mainly what I did on my vacation was not troll the internet. The house we stayed in had no connection. At the end of the week, my mother-in-law figured out that she could get on through the neighbor's router if she stood on the deck. I checked my email, read about some loose ends I have to tie up from that summer school class I taught, and breathed a sigh of relief.

If hating that thing you have to have is an addiction, then I've developed something of an addiction to the internet. Mainly blogs (political, religious and sports-oriented) and Facebook. This is how it happened. I don't have a TV show I'm following; I don't like to watch movies because I get up so early, and all the reading I do at the library extinguished my enthusiasm for pleasure reading at home. So the internet filled my evenings. But I'm sick of it. It's no way to spend a couple of hours, checking and checking again to see if a site has been updated, like some glassy-eyed old lady feeding a slot machine with quarters, hoping this time something will turn up.

I need a new relationship with the internet. And I'm bound and determined to do it. I had a great meeting with my adviser and the Dean before we left on vacation, and if I work hard, I think I can take my comprehensive exams in January rather than May. I need to get out of grad school ASAP. Money don't grow on trees. And I can't get out ahead of time checking Facebook every 15 minutes.

So, no internet by day, unless I'm searching the library's catalog or one of the library's many online databases. I will blog and/or look at web sites after 5:00 PM, and for not too long. And I will fill my time with other stuff. I picked up the Aubrey Maturin series again, mainly out of desperation, and was delighted to discover that it charmed me as much the second time around. Just because my work is reading all day doesn't mean I can't do it for fun by night.

Carl Hiassen on manly Christians

It's all here: Bibles, sharks and the word "stiff":

Victor DeGregorio had spent nearly seven months dying,during which time he repeatedly made his wife swear on her communion Bible that she would scatter his ashes off the coast of southern Florida. It was there, aboard a charter boat called the Happy Hooker IX, that Victor DeGregorio had once reeled in a hammerhead shark. He considered this the foremost masculine achievement of his life, and kept a jar filled with the shark's pointy teeth on his desk at the John Deere outlet where he worked as an inventory manager. Sometimes Victor DeGregorio would present one of the teeth to a customer or a visiting big shot from Deere headquarters, and the recipients were always impressed. Also on display was a framed nine-by-twelve of Victor posing on a dock beside the gaping stiff behemoth, which had been chained up by its tail and chalked with the number 193 to proclaim the weight. Victor's friends eventually forbade him from mentioning the hammerhead--even toward the end--because he'd told the goddamn story about a thousand times.

Star Island. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

I'm pretty sure now that the fish Jesus charbroiled for the disciples was swordfish. Or blue marlin.

Man church; male culture; man time

Ben Myers dutifully calls our attention to the sub-Christian religious organization called Man Church. What makes Church a Man Church is that it's

church the way a man expects it to be done. No singing, short sermon, time to talk with other guys, no women present, and coffee and donuts. That's the way men want to do church. The topics of discussion will have a definite manly focus - being the best possible husband, father, employee, leader - being a real man. In fact, every aspect of Man Church is geared for men - not like any other church you have seen. This ain't your mama's church!

I remember when I was 8. I didn't like to go to children's choir; I couldn't sit still, and my mom had to make me invite three girls to my birthday party. I daresay this sounds like Boy Church, not Man Church.

A few months ago my younger son created an event he calls Man Time. In Man Time, he jumps on me and punches me as hard as his 4'6", 60lb. frame will allow. When I read Myers' post I asked my son, "Would you like to go to a Man Church?" "Oh, yeah," he replied. "And what makes a Church a Man Church?" I asked. "Wrestling each other to go first in the communion line." I'll bet they don't do that at Man Church. I'll bet they just give noogies when they pass the peace.

Myers bats them around with a choice quote from Karl Barth, thus challenging their manhood, I suppose. The Barth quotes also challenges what we Presbyterians call Circles and, come to think of it, the entire monastic tradition. (A topic for another post, perhaps.)

Related note: Adam Kotsko recently composed a far ranging blog post on male culture. You should read the whole thing, but this, I think, is the heart of it:

I’ve always been very impatient with the way that male-dominated groups have been built on a toxic combination of homoeroticism and homophobia, and in college, I think that my male friends could detect that and therefore didn’t try to involve me in the often fully nude homoerotic horseplay that took place in our gender-segregated dorms. A related factor is the way that it’s built on a desperation for women’s esteem combined with misogyny — and the misogyny is the controlling factor here, as the value of women’s esteem is determined by the “male gaze” (i.e., you want a “hot” girlfriend, but you don’t want to seem too deeply in love with or dependent on your girlfriend). In both cases, this inherent contradiction serves to keep young men in a constant state of fear — they can never be sure that they’re performing their gender correctly (and here I reveal that I think Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity applies most intuitively to the straight male experience), and they’re terrified of the mockery of their peers (mockery which is normally itself motivated by each peer’s own fear of mockery). This is how male culture can manipulate weak-willed men into doing things they’re not comfortable with.

Kotsko goes on to speculate that when male academics sharpen swords over Hegel, disdaining that personal experience stuff you find in feminist theology, it may be an extension of this dysfunctional male culture.

I am a cafeteria Mennonite, Part Deux

Nathan Lilje's comment on my I am a cafeteria Mennonite post is so good I'm posting it here, hoping it'll get the attention it deserves:

Well, one might say by this logic that most modern-day Mennonites are also cafeteria Mennonites. The Anabaptist commitment to nonviolence arose in a time when the whole tradition consisted of converts from Catholicism, focused on propagating their beliefs, and facing severe persecution for it. Eventually the Anabaptist sects decided to largely abandon proselytizing in order to remain alive. Consequently, the voluntary nature of the church is mostly a formality; participation in Anabaptist traditions is more genetically determined than for any mainline tradition. To say that the Mennonite commitment to nonviolence stems from the voluntary nature of the church is merely an historical formulation--it continues not because of the free choice of believers but because of the persistent influence of tradition. This is evident by the fact that the Quakers, who have no baptism whatsoever and wide tolerance for divergent beliefs, have maintained their commitment to nonviolence as well. There is no theological reason a Reformed pacifism or a Catholic pacifism could not be just as stable, they just doesn't have tradition behind them. In fact, I could formulate an argument that infant baptism is more conducive to nonviolent Christianity (were there to be a infant-baptizing tradition committed to this) than "believers" baptism, as it is currently practiced. It is true that once upon a time believers baptism implied a commitment to the ethical values of the church (including nonviolence when applicable). This was a time when most people in these sects were baptized in their 30's, and no one younger than their 20's. Today? The average Mennonite baptism is 13 (and in Baptist churches children are often baptized at nearly half that age). What does emphasizing the centrality of personal decision mean when you encourage people to make these decisions by age 13? Who takes seriously decision they make at 13? This seems to me to be a clear case of building your house on a foundation of sand. Thus, it might be argued, that Mennonite theology is undermined by current Mennonite practice. By contrast, the practice of infant baptism deemphasizes personal commitment and instead emphasizes God's calling. Of course, the Reformed theology is also undermined by current Reformed practice, as most Protestants no longer have their children baptized. But were this practice and theology to be wedded to a nonviolent ethical tradition, I think it would be equally conducive to this purpose as the old practices of the voluntary church, and more so than current Mennonite practice. For it posits that one's ethical commitments are not dependent upon personal volition, which is always changing, but upon God's immutable and inescapable calling, as evidenced by the practice of infant baptism. My point is, the Mennonite commitment to nonviolence isn't dependent upon their theology and practice but upon their historical tradition. Thus, I would say, why shouldn't everyone else admire them for that and ignore the rest if they don't buy it, to say, "Hey, maybe we should import their commitment to nonviolence to our different theological/sacramental tradition"?

Same sex marriage and foot in mouth disease

Bruce Reyes-Chow, former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), showed up at a Prop 8 rally last week and made this short speech:

According to his blog he's taken a lot of heat for it, so he's soliciting feedback at his site and elsewhere.

I think the problem here is that there is a whole range of people between enthusiastic supporters of same sex marriage and, say, the Westboro Baptist Church, but the speech doesn't really acknowledge that reality. So it might come as a surprise, and an offensive one at that, to opponents of same sex marriage who watch this speech and hear that they are oppressors and literalists.

Inertia, more than flat-out hate, is the biggest impediment to same sex marriage. I doubt that these comments will get the ball rolling in the right direction.

I'm also scratching my head about Reyes-Chow's authority to confess on behalf of the Christian Church for words and deeds which have incited violence. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers means that we can all hear one another's confessions and assure one another of pardon in Christ, but I'm not so sure that it authorizes us to confess on behalf one another. Certainly the Church has incited violence, and acknowledging that historical truth is a no-brainer. But confessing for the Church would seem to imply that he's been authorized by someone or some group to do that. It's as if he hasn't fully stepped out of his role as Moderator, and overstepped that role at the same time. Moderators are not popes or ecumenical councils. And when you combine that with a sharply worded and un-nuanced attack on homophobia, well then, small wonder the fecal matter has collided with the atmospheric distribution mechanism.

I say that as a former minister who has stuck his foot in his mouth more times than I care to count, so, No Biggee, Rev. Reyes-Chow.

A quibble with Gordon Kaufman

OK. So I read Gordon's Kaufman's In Face of Mystery in a directed study last spring. For me, this was not like venturing into a different theological camp. This was like falling through a wormhole into a different theological universe.

But it was a pleasant journey. I am not anywhere near Kaufman in terms of theological method or content, but I find his work enjoyable, accessible and thought-provoking, mainly because the man remains a Mennonite from Hutchinson, Kansas. For Kaufman, theology is not an exercise in sword-sharpening. His tone and content is irenic; his engagement with alternative points of view is generous.

In short: Kaufman's method leads him to conclude that God is not the Creator, but creativity itself. He cites at least six reasons why faith in a personal Creator is problematic:

1. When humans lived in a three-storied universe, it was easy to picture God as an old man on a throne in a "heaven" that was just beyond the faintest star in the sky. But today we live in a much larger universe, billions of years old and billions of light years across. The immense size and age of the universe renders belief in a God outside the cosmos "scarcely thinkable."
2. Agency--in this case, creativity--presupposes a social context. Thus the idea of a solitary agent is illogical.
3. We cannot trust that the image of a cosmic overlord will generate good ethical outcomes.
4. We don't lose much by jettisoning the idea of a creator God. It's the abstract images for God, not the anthropomorphic ones, that best safeguard God's transcendence.
5. Prior to Darwin, humans could only conceive of the work of creativity in personal terms. But Darwin has shown us that creativity can be a quality of impersonal processes as well.
6.  The idea that there is a personal God governing the universe who cares deeply about us is a balm to some, but to others it raises theodicy to a fever pitch. If God is a Father Almighty, then why doesn't he feed all his children and save them all from gas chambers and gulags? Conceiving God as the serendipitous creativity at work in the universe makes the problem of evil melt away. What we regard as sin and evil is usually our failure to go with the grain of the universe.

Now, one could make numerous responses to Kaufman's objections. But for a blog post, I do well to confine myself to just one:

Regarding number one, I have caught snippets of this Nova series on the nature of the universe as I come in late from here or there this summer. And from what little I've seen, it appears as though all matter and energy are composed of these vibrating strings of no mass. And the strings have some relationship to these so-called membranes. And when the membranes collide, they produced our universe, and possibly other universes. (Thus the answer to the question, Why the Big Bang?) And each universe has peculiar laws of nature, except for gravity, which seems to transcend the universes. Which further holds out the possibility of "communicating" with parallel universes via gravity. It's a mathematical theory that awaits empirical confirmation by one of these gigantic underground atom smasher racetracks.

On the one hand, this would seem to make the existence of God even more implausible. If positing a God outside this universe is "scarcely thinkable," then positing one outside a multiverse strains credulity even further.

On the other hand, what was once "scarcely thinkable," i.e,, that there was something outside the universe, is now seriously considered, and not just by science fiction writers. It's not God, but there it is. Doesn't this, in some sense, obviate Kaufman's concern? Put differently, doesn't the idea of a multiverse paradoxically make room for the idea of God again?

What do you think?