Avdat

The case for the Tour de France

The Tour de France starts Saturday! Now you're saying, Marvin, all I know about cycling is Lance Armstrong, and he's retired, so why should I care? Let me count the ways:

1.    The athleticism. This bicycle race is over 2,000 miles long. Almost as long as from New York to Salt Lake City. And every stage ends either with a jail-break sprint for the finish at speeds exceeding what you can do in your car at rush hour, or an agonizing miles-long ascent that you'd have to push your bike up, but they seem to fly up. If you like Olympic-type sports in general for watching the human body in extremis, you'll love the Tour de France.

2.    It's like NASCAR, only better. There's drafting. Also, the scoring is the same. Just as you can win glory by winning a race at Charlotte or Daytona, or win even more glory by winning the Sprint Cup, cyclists can win individual stages, but the famous yellow jersey is saved for the overall leader.

And, there are crashes! Brutal Crashes that kill people. In fact, 12 professional cyclists have died since 2000, a far greater number than drivers who have died in the Winston Cup series over the same period. If the body count matters to you (and let's not pretend it doesn't if you're a NASCAR fan), then you'll love cycling.

3.    It's your patriotic duty. Surely we're beyond the Francophobe, Freedom Fries days of the last decade. According to Nadeau and Barlow's The Story of French, we English-speakers owe the French language like half of all our words. The French also gave us the Statue of Liberty. Heck, if it hadn't been for the French fleet blockading Lord Cornwallis and his redcoats, you wouldn't be grilling out on Monday! Zut alors! Why, we'd be curtsying for Camilla Parker Bowles today! Mon Dieu! And George Washington would just be some guy the government hanged in the tax revolt way back then. Sacré Couer!

My hometown is home to the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Operations Command. And who's my hometown named for? A Frenchman. That's right. So on this Fourth of July, get up, listen to the annual recitation of the Declaration of Independence on NPR, watch some fireworks, then watch Stage Three of the Tour, which will feature a thrilling sprint finish in Brittany. USA! USA! Vive la France! Vive la France!

4.    Bob Roll. The gap-toothed Roll is just as ugly as David Letterman, and even funnier. What can I say about Roll that this 2007 Esquire article hasn't said already? The man has no filter, cannot talk without wild gesticulations, provides "color commentary" by drawing from an unfathomable storehouse of bizarre and hilarious metaphors, and hates the French. Which should help the Tour go down better if I didn't convince you on #3 above.

5.    Nothing else is on. The NBA is done. Even if the NFL owners hadn't locked out the players, training camp wouldn't begin until several weeks from now. And as I said in the previous post, baseball is boring. So you may as well watch the Tour de France.

6.    It's the economy, stupid. Maybe the Great Recession has deferred your dream of a European vacation. No worries. You can watch the Tour de France and see lovely chateaus, the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast, vineyards, the snow-capped peaks of the Alps, and the sights of Paris: the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe. Beat that!

7.    You've seen The Triplets of Belleville. Now see what the fuss is all about.

 

It's a good thing I don't have any tattoos because baseball is a boring sport

Deadbeat Dad Frank McCourt losing his custody battle with MLB reminds me of a time so far away it seems like another life--a time when I cared about baseball and loved the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Everyone remembers Mr. October. Well, I remember Bob Welch striking out Mr. October with two on and two out in the top of the ninth in the '78 World Series. Everyone I knew was cheering for the Yankees that year but I, always compliant, never oppositional, (!) rooted for the Dodgers. They lost that year, but they beat those Damn Yankees in '81.

I went to seminary in Atlanta. I had nothing but contempt for the Atlanta Braves. The Dodgers were a proud franchise. The Braves were living off the legacy of one player--Hank Aaron--and he had retired years ago. I spent most of Greek school running my mouth about the Dodgers (who were in the same division as the Braves at that time), not parsing verbs.

Then a funny thing happened. The Dodgers choked. The Braves won the pennant--the first of fourteen straight division championships. I picked a horrible decade to short sell the Braves. I sank into a deep depression over the weekend as I thought about all the crow I'd have to eat on Monday.

Fortunately my classmates were Christians, not jerks.

I learned that weekend that losing hurts worse than winning feels good, and from that moment on, I cut most of my emotional ties to sports. Does it make sense to hitch your emotional wagon to college kids playing games? To millionaire 26-year-olds? It does not. In fact, it is madness.

I still follow some sports: college and professional football, college and professional basketball, and oddly enough, the Tour de France, the only competition with more performance enhancing drug usage than baseball. I do like it when my teams win, but my teams don't win too much, which has also contributed to my more philosophical take on this aspect of human existence.

It also gives me a strategic advantage over my rivals. They care; I don't. So when they beat my team, I go "Meh," but when my team wins, I turn the obnoxious meter up to 11. If losing hurts worse than winning feels good, then nothing feels better than schadenfreude. Which is why I've been posting articles about the UNC football scandal on Facebook--to torment the Tar Heel fans who care!

I don't follow baseball anymore. Baseball is a boring sport. Watching a double play in person takes your breath away--the grace and athleticism. But mostly it's guys standing around spitting and scratching. Watching guys on TV spit and scratch? No thanks. And please don't go George Will on me, waxing poetic about the open, non-linear, no slave-to-the-clock nature of the sport. Nothing much happens in baseball. I don't have time to care about who's winning a game in which nothing much happens.

So it's a good thing that in the late '80s the only guys with tattoos were Hells Angels, WWII Navy vets and Axl Rose. If tattoos were as popular then as they are now, you know what I'd look like? I'd probably have "Dodgers" in cursive on my right arm, and a Big, How Bout Dem Cowboys star on my left arm.

And that would be bad because while I'm indifferent to baseball, I positively hate the Dallas Cowboys and their homer fans. Because when I cared more about sports, I was a homer fan. Cowboys, Dodgers and Lakers--you can tell which decade I came of age in!

I'm in grad school. I can't afford tattoos. Fortunately, I'm old enough so that I don't need to be able to afford tattoo removal.

Today's counterfactual: Rome fell because it wasn't deep enough in debt

For E.J. Dionne, Weinergate was an epiphany: we are living in Late Imperial Rome. Andrew Sullivan realized it when the country almost put Sarah Palin in a position to finger the launch codes. Sullivan asked his readers for their opinions, and he got everything from the Clinton impeachment to the Terry Schiavo case.

Now the correct answers were, 1. Comparing our nation's decline to Rome's fall is erroneous because Rome never "fell," it just relocated to Constantinople, and 2. If this is a "fall," what a splendid fall it is!

But let's play along anyway. One reason why Rome fell was that maintaining an empire is awfully expensive, and the Romans lacked an instrument to pay for imperial upkeep that we enjoy today: bonds.

To pay the bills, the Romans had but two options. They could devalue the currency, which they did on several occasions in the third century--to disastrous effect.

Or they could raise taxes, but this meant employing more revenuers to beat the bushes for tax-evaders. Those extra tax agents had to be paid: a vicious circle.

The rich were able to stiff the tax collectors by retiring to their country estates, well-protected by their own private security details. Small farmers could not, and crushed by the burden of high taxes, many simply abandoned their property. In his book Before France and Germany Patrick Geary estimates that 20% of the arable land in the late Roman West sat idle for just this reason.

If you're a barbarian living in a hovel across a porous border with the greatest empire in history, whacha gonna do? Nature abhors a vacuum. You're gonna help yourself to some land nobody's missing. Now the Romans recognized that this was a problem, so at times they settled whole tribes of barbarians on empty tracts of land within their border, provided that said barbarians would secure the border against any further incursions--a late antique guest worker program. And this is what historians call, "The Barbarian Invasions."

And that is How Rome Fell. Or rather, that is how Rome came to be under new management.

No public debt.

And that is why we aren't living in late imperial Rome. We've got plenty of public debt.

Too much really. The projected growth in health care costs means that in a generation Medicare alone will consume the entire U.S. budget. We have to get our long term debt problem under control, and if we do it sooner rather than later, and with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases (our tax rates are as low as they've been since 1950), the pain will be spread around so as to be barely noticeable.

But if the nation ever adopts some of the right's crazier ideas, like a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, then we will be doomed. Public debt allows the country to find a safe harbor in economic storms. That safe harbor is future prosperity. And if the government issues bonds to make wise investments in the common good (education, transportation, health care), future prosperity will be greater than it otherwise would be. And that makes judicious borrowing against the future a smart choice.

If you don't buy my analogy with late imperial Rome, there's a lesson to be learned from our own history. The last time the Federal Government paid off the national debt was in 1835. Two years later the country sank into a deep depression.

So as Congress and the President negotiate the terms of increasing the debt limit, it's important that the agreement not limit our ability to nurse a fragile economy back to health or to lay the groundwork for a more prosperous future.

Avatar is probably the worst movie Hollywood has made since Star Wars

Avatar: Gawd Almighty; what a stoopid movie.

You disagree. You saw that movie in the theater. You were cringing in your stadium seat when that thantor was rooting around for Jake. You were dazzled by Pandora's 3D flora and fauna. "That movie was awesome!" you said. You can't shut up about that movie. It's like, the best movie since... Titanic!

You are wrong.

We, on the other hand, watched Avatar on my laptop in the privacy of our own home. Deprived of the 3D effects, we were forced to evaluate the movie based on, you know, plot, character development and dialogue. And by these metrics, this movie fails miserably.

When Neytiri tells Jake, "It is hard to fill a cup that is already full," I groaned out loud. This is what passes for indigenous wisdom? Do Na'vi watch re-runs of Oprah when they aren't out deeply respecting nature?

When the dude back at the base asks Jake, "What do they want? Education? Medicine?" I said to myself, "I know; I know! They want to be left alone! They want self-determination, which a colonial authority cannot impose. Dude, don't you get the irony of your imperialistic project? You would sooo get it if you had a copy of Orientalism on your shelf, or a Che Guevara t-shirt in your drawer."

Can you walk out of a movie that you're watching at home? Yes you can! You close your laptop; turn on the TV, and watch the Britcoms that are on every Saturday night. We watched an episode of As Time Goes By we'd seen a thousand times. (Watching As Time Goes By with Mrs. Avdat is one of the dues I pay in my marriage. If you're married, I'm sure you have your own dues to pay, and I'm sure they're well worth it! As are mine.)

At any rate, the re-run we watched was no more predictable than Avatar. You can see it coming a mile away. Jake and Neytiri fall in love. Jake goes native. There's some sort of event in which Jake has to prove where his loyalties lie. The only thing I couldn't predict was whether the final battle would go the Little Big Horn route or Wounded Knee. Dances with Wolves in space. And I checked the Wikipedia article and found out that I was, by-and-large, correct.

You see, I had to "walk out" on Avatar. I was afraid that somebody would call Jake an "old soul." I trembled that there'd be a Na'vi  assembly in which some chief would intone the truism that whatever decision they made tonight would have to be with the seventh generation in mind. Even worse: the possibility loomed (like an iceberg in the Titanic's path!) that some Na'vi might solemnly swear that Pandora doesn't belong to them; they belong to Pandora.

If the dialogue had resorted to any of these platitudes, I might have had to engage in an act of symbolic resistance to such cinematic cant. I might have set fire to the spirituality and self-help aisles at the nearest Barnes and Noble. Or assassinated Deepak Chopra.

Look. Avatar's politics are my politics. I'm an anti-interventionist environmentalist. But when I go to a movie, I don't want my politics served back to me in the form of cliches pimped out in gaudy special effects. Tell me a good story. Surprise me. Scare me. Make me care.

And regarding the title of this post, Yes, Star Wars is seven different kinds of stoopid. You only like Star Wars because you saw it when you were eight, and for the special effects. Read this:

Vader: When I left you I was but a learner. Now I am the master.

Kenobi: Only a master of evil, Darth.

How is that not utterly wretched dialogue? Those movies are full of crap like that, and light sabers can't redeem it. Even an accomplished actor like Alec Guinness can't made lemonade outa them lemons. If you disagree, I swear we will have to argue about this, and I may even have to fight you over it.

Snap judgments about world religions

If you weren't in the religion that you are, what religion would you be? This question kept occuring to me when I taught Intro to World Religions last spring. Let's review the options:

Judaism. This would be a logical choice for me, a Christian. Christianity's founder was a Jew, and Jews and Christians share many of the same sacred texts. I could probably affirm Moses Maimonides's 13 articles of faith with not too many problems, provided that no one presses me too hard on what sense I consider the Torah to be immutable.

Best of all, Judaism has a better sabbath than Christianity. Calvinists made the Christian sabbath a day of tedium. In reaction, today's Christians largely ignore the sabbath. We may shoe-horn worship in between soccer and the NFL, but for Jews, at least from my outside-looking-in perspective, the sabbath seems to be a day of true rest--a day of joy, deep peace and renewal.

Islam. I couldn't be a Muslim. Not because Islam is violent. A Christian accusing Islam of violence is the pot calling the kettle black. It's something I can't place my finger on, but there's this foreboding austerity to Islam that I find off-putting. And, I'm not about to give up a glass of wine with dinner.

That said, if I were a Muslim, I'd have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that'd be pretty neat. I like to travel! Traveling in the name of God--so much the better.

Hinduism. Which Hinduism? I think I read somewhere that there are as many deities in India as there are people in the United States. On the one hand, What's not to like about Gandhi's Hinduism? He was monotheistic, non-violent, and he had a deep respect for Jesus. And his favorite Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, is edifying stuff.

On the other hand, I can't see myself worshiping a god with an elephant head. If veneration of images is going to be in my new religious milieu, I'd want to worship a perfect human specimen--like the Greeks did. And the Ganges River is just too brown and polluted for me to want to bathe in.

Buddhism. I appreciate Buddhist meditative techniques. I'm sure that the Centering Prayer method I've learned from the Trappists is more Buddhist than Christian. But I frankly recoil from the Buddhist concept of anatta, "no-self." I suppose I'm too Western in my thinking, too sold on individual rights and an image of God as personal, to think that the self is illusory.

I don't want to extinguish myself. I want to perfect myself. Or rather, be perfected. Is that so wrong?

Daoism. Click here for my opinions.

Animism. I think it would be cool to live in a universe where everything hums with spiritual energy--the tree, the river, the rock escarpment. In some sense I already live in such a universe. I'm a monotheist, but the God I worship is immanent as well as transcendent, although my awareness of divine immanence is not so much rooted in a conviction that every object is haunted with one sort of spirit or the other, as it is in uncanny experiences in which the veil between heaven and earth drops for a moment.

The problem is, animism is a religion best born into and not adopted. Adopt a primal religion, and what you get is Sedona, Glastonbury, and Dances with Wolves. In other words, you get a certain amount of goofiness, hucksterism and sentimentality that's not befitting of religion.

Scientology. No.

Rastafarianism. Sorry, but I could no more smoke pot than I could cigarettes. There's carcinogens in pot. And after you read this blog post on magic mushrooms, you'll have to admit that psilocybin is a far better pharmacological path to transcendence than THC. So despite what I wrote about primal religions, I'd be more likely to dissolve the space-time continuum under the care of an Incan shaman than I would to roll a big ol' fatty with some news friends I made on a trip to Jamaica.

Atheism. Not an option. I don't think that a purely materialistic worldview can do justice to the complexity of the human being's encounter with the universe. The mystery that surrounds us is an ever-receding horizon we'll never reach. It's a abyss our knowledge will never fill. It's an act of faith to say that the abyss has a face, but not altogether unreasonable, either.

To conclude, it looks like it'd be the Torah and shrooms for me! It's good to have options.

(And for what it's worth, I'm aware that Christianity is equally vulnerable to this type of superficial analysis. There's the fuzzy math of the Trinity, the ritual cannibalism, and the strange phenomenon of a nice guy like Jesus attracting such jerks for followers.)

Marvin's garden: June 24, 2011

My brother-in-law's wife is who you want to be when you grow up. She can do it all. She's hiked the Appalachian Trail. She's a civil engineer. She builds hospitals! She's run the Boston Marathon. Heck, she's run 5Ks into her ninth month of pregnancy. She's mother to a great niece and nephew of mine.

She's also an epic chef. Behold her Asian peanut slaw salad!

Now here is where I have to do a little braggin' on myself too. See, the purple cabbage that gave its life for this amazing dish was raised in our garden. And I would be remiss if I didn't brag on our boys, for they helped me put in the cabbage on a President's Day school holiday.

Every so often I post pictures of our garden on Facebook. It's a form of self-discipline. If people are going to see the garden, I've gotta weed it! Here's the situation as of today:

 

Not all that impressive, I'll admit. But there's a reason. It's a small garden, so we had to wait for the spring crops to finish up before planting the summer crops. And we have learned this year that brussel sprouts take up a lot of space and take their sweet time to mature. No wonder they're so expensive in the store. On Tuesday I pulled them, even though a lot of the sprouts were mere nubs. Gotta make way for the okra! And that's what I hope will fill that empty spot in the middle, where the brussel sprouts used to be.

Ah... tomatoes, summer squash and okra. Not the nasty, slimy boiled okra, but lightly breaded and cooked in a skillet with a little olive oil. If it weren't for the fresh vegetables, southern summers would be unbearable. As it is, I often wonder in July and August, How do we not starve the other ten months of the year?

Unsolicited fashion advice

I'm no Peace Bang, but I'm not letting that stop me. I am here to tell you. Yes you, the hipster sitting in the bank lobby with me today. You are out of your frakking mind wearing that knit hat on your head in Richmond, Virginia in the summertime.

I don't care how obscure the vintage clothing store was where you bought that thing. Your life is at stake. Your reputation is at stake! If you stroke out on a 99 degree day in Monroe Park, your well-meaning mother may insist that the mortician wash your hair before you're laid out for public viewing. She might even go shopping at (God forgive me) The Men's Wearhouse to buy a blue blazer to bury you in.

These things happen. Did you know that people have gone to their eternal reward wearing white bucks? Don't let it happen to you. Don't be a slave to fashion. The life you save could be your own.

Our trivial media

So yesterday, the President announced his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan; the feds nabbed a notorious mobster, and another Midwestern town was poised to disappear beneath flood waters. Sounds like a big news day to me!

But did I learn these things from CNN's American Morning, the media outlet that usually keeps me company as I Stand Here Ironing? Nosiree, Bob. I had to learn them from... (I'm almost ashamed to admit it)... The Today Show.

Because the radio (NPR) was in the other room and because CNN's lede at 7:00 AM EDT was something even more important--something YOU need to know--something SO BIG that, well, Don't take my word for it; watch it yourself:

 

"Who cares about war in wild Spain?" the Roman poet Horace asked. And who cares about war in wild Afghanistan when CASEY'S MOM AND DAD HAVE GIVEN UP ON HER????!!!

OK, being shocked that the media would play to the public's morbid curiosity about a toddler's murder is like being shocked that there's gambling in Casablanca. In the good old days when we hanged criminals in public, the newspaper owners made a fortune writing up those very hanging crimes in prose that was lurid, melodramatic and/or sensationalistic.

Still, that doesn't make it right. Or good.

I'm sure that CNN would protest that they're simply responding to public interest in the case, but that explanation fails to admit the media's responsibility for stoking said interest (HLN is wall-to-wall Casey, and you really should read this hilarious send-up of CNN's sister-network's coverage). Last week I watched the American Morning anchors muse over the media firestorm surrounding Anthony Weiner as if it were some act of God and not a Frankenstein they'd helped to create.

Also, the "we're just giving them what they want" excuse is less than worthy of CNN's calling. If they're journalists and not pulp writers, and if journalism is a profession, then they have an obligation not unlike other professions (law, medicine) to give the public what they need, not just what they want. And what we need is in-depth reporting about the three wars we're involved in, the toll Mother Nature is taking on us, and the toll that burning fossil fuels is taking on Mother Nature. Preferably before the first station break.

This is the real bias in the news media. Not a liberal bias but a trivial bias. Bread and circuses for the unwashed masses.

The Reformation lives!

I taught Intro to World Religions this past spring. We covered religions great and small--everything from Buddhism and Islam to the Hawaiian deity Pele and Falun Gong. This left me with precious little time to devote to topics I actually know something about, namely, Christianity. We're talking the Reformation in 10 minutes. The Reformation in one Powerpoint Slide. Criminy!

So this is how I broke it down. 2 sacraments versus 7. Sola scriptura versus scripture and tradition. Papal authority versus... um, um, no papal authority.

Finally the whole faith and works question. I put it this way: Protestants believe that faith alone saves, and good works are a consequence of saving faith. Roman Catholics believe that faith working through love saves.

I pointed out that both formulas are based on Christian scripture. Indeed, they're rooted in the same book in the New Testament, Paul's letter to the Galatians. I therefore suggested that this was a distinction without a difference, noting that both formulas stress the importance of faith and works of love. I asked, isn't then the split in Western Christianity ironic, even tragic? I was putting on my best Ecumenical Catholic hat; I was getting in touch with my inner Karl Rahner/Hans Küng.

(And this is a great thing about being a grad student in religion. You can be an Ecumenical Catholic today, a feminist theologian tomorrow, and a Reformed scholastic the next day. Try 'em all on!)

But one student objected. "No, there is a difference!" she said. "And what's the difference?" I asked. "Well, in one, works come after faith, but in the other they happen simultaneously."

And that, for the Protestants, made all the difference in the world. They wanted to maintain a bright white line between the doctrine of justification, which has to do with how human beings are reckoned righteous in the eyes of God, and sanctification, which has to do with how human beings grow in virtue and shun vice. Reformed Protestants broke down salvation into a sequence of events, known by the Latin phrase ordo salutis, that unfolded in this way:

• Predestination
• Calling
• Regeneration
• Faith
• Repentance
• Justification
• Sanctification
• Glorification

A couple of observations. First, the book-end steps happen in eternity, and the intermediate steps happen in time. Our experience of salvation is the temporal unfolding of a divine decree. Ack! Predestination!

Second, for Calvinists, the human being is passive until the sanctification stage. So faith itself is a gift of God; it is not an individual's "decision for Christ" that can be made freely apart from God's gift of grace. More predestination!

Sure the determinism of this scheme is bound to chafe. But there's another sense in which it makes perfect sense. None of us get to choose our parents. Some Reformers likewise insisted that we don't get to choose God for our Father. We are children of God only because God consents to being our Father.

Moreover, God has to choose us, because we are sinners and so enslaved to sin that we wouldn't have chosen God even if we could have. Also, there is space for human agency in this scheme--once God has made provision for it.Sanctification, which literally means growing in holiness, results from a dynamic interaction between the promptings of the Spirit, and a human being freely responding--once his/her will has been freed from the power of sin.

Now I doubt my student knows the term ordo salutis. And she self-identified as a Methodist, so I imagine that she's not down with predestination. But her dis-ease with faith and works temporally overlapping suggests that some classically Protestant concerns are bubbling up underneath. If that bright, white line breaks down, then perhaps where we stand with God is determined partly by us and partly by God. If that's the case, then we're on the hobby horse of pride and despair. Either we give ourselves credit for that which belongs to God alone, or when we fail--and we're bound to fail--we despair that God will still claim us as his own.

So maybe there is a difference in the distinction. Maybe these issues cannot be finessed. And it was a Methodist who stood up to me! Silly me. There I was thinking that Wesleyans were Protestants who'd gone wobbly on justification.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

Climate change denialists are getting more sophisticated. They've gone beyond harrumphing about Al Gore; they've got statistics now!

Sunday's Times-Dispatch ran a letter-to-the-editor from a certain J. Richard Ganahl (click here and scroll down) that slammed wind power, expressed contempt for the carbon footprint concept, and dared readers to produce one (just one!) scientific study showing how the earth's temperature can be controlled by the "minuscule amount of CO2 levels we contribute." All this with figures to the ten-thousandth place!

Trouble is, the figures don't add up.