Avdat

Political roundup

• Strictly speaking, Wes Clark's statement that getting shot down over Vietnam doesn't qualify one to be President is true.  And, strictly speaking, it's an incredibly tone-deaf statement to make.  But while we're speaking so strictly, let me just say that I've heard much worse about McCain's performance in his A-4 Skyhawk jet--from Republicans.  I remember back in 2000 a Bush supporter with whom I happen to be quite close disparaging McCain, saying, "If he'd been a better pilot he wouldn't have gotten shot down in the first place."  Now, if Wes Clark wants to ape Karl Rove and attack the opposition at their strongest, not weakest point, that's what he should have said.
• A lot of liberalshave found a silver lining in last week's Supreme Court ruling on gun control.  In establishing an individual right to own a gun, the Court has taken the "They're comin' fer yer guns" argument off the table.  Now we can have a debate about what constitutes reasonable regulation of firearms sales without it being tainted by all sorts of slippery-slope arguments.  I thought it was a pretty good decision.  That the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership is conventional wisdom in these parts.  And the 5-4 majority opinion would seem to look with favor on keeping guns out of the hands of felons, the mentally ill, children and DV offenders.  So let's do it.
• Hey, Pat and Liddy, Why can't we have windmills off the NC coast instead of oil rigs?
• The great political realignment continues apace. 

Thinking out loud toward Sunday

It's not entirely clear that Karl Barth advised ministers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Still, it's not a bad homiletical strategy.  Applied this week, it seems to cry out for some reflection on a creation God deems "very good," and the bodies of children floating in the storm surge of the Burmese cyclone and crushed in the Chinese earthquake.

I'm not sure where my sermon is going yet.  But in addition to the Bible and the newspaper I'm relying on David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea, a short volume about theodicy in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. 

In response to the book's subtitle, "Where was God in the tsunami?" Hart is surprisingly sympathetic toward atheistic complaints that such disasters must needs overthrow faith in a loving, omnipotent God: 

After all at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world would want to disparage.  For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they never would have occurred to such consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

And he is surprisingly harsh in dismissing Christian apologists who (apologizing for what?  Their faith in God?  God's ways in a world of tsunamis?) would justify the calamity by appealing to God's inscrutable plan, or simply chalking it up to rough, divine justice.  I found myself remembering this post from my Ivy Bush days which cites the Calvinist Jesuit John Piper as an example of all Hart finds wanting in Christian discourse in those shocking, waning days of 2004.  Hart uses Ivan Karamazov as a blunt object to smash such apologies to smithereens.

Hart's argument is that we need to reclaim the biblical worldview that the world, though created good by God, is nevertheless in servitude to evil forces.  The world that is is not the world that God intended it to be.  And examining the fossil record or feasting one's eyes on the fauna that rings the Indian Ocean cannot teach us this.  Only when history is seen in light of Revelation do we see it as fallen, yet hoping for redemption.

God's sovereignty, as Hart sees it, cannot be understood in terms of God being the author of all that happens, for even if God's willed it for a greater good, that would still make God the author of evil, and any morally serious person ought to revolt against such a God, as indeed Ivan does.  God is the prime cause of everything, but things can and do run amok in the chain of secondary causes that God's sovereignty permits. 

For Hart, God's sovereignty must be understood as God's ultimate victory over all that has besmirched this world, including the corpses of children buried in rubble and floating in the flood waters.

Hart's argument wraps up with a bracing defense of God's impassibility and a passionate complaint against Calvinist determinism.  You can see the latter quietly developing through this short volume, but when the wave finally breaks, it's rather powerful.  What's interesting is that both God's impassibility and Calvinist determinism are in great disfavor in mainline Presbyterian seminaries these days!

At that old Ivy Bush post, I remarked that Calvin's high doctrine of providence was a pastoral argument.  It was meant to reassure suffering people that their lives weren't in the hands of a capricious fate but of a loving and sovereign Father.  Hart decries how that same argument, in the hands of Piper and his ilk, is used to reassure not the survivors of natural disasters, but those of us who watch from the comfort of our living room Lay-Z-Boys:

(W)ords we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety...

Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe (a survivor's) anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world.  Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words...

And this should tell us something.  For if we would think it shamelessly foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real... then we ought never to say them.

It is often remarked that Job's friends did well when they sat in silence with him for seven days.  Where they went wrong was when they began to open their mouths, for rather than comforting Job, they went about justifying God's ways in the world.  This earned them a sharp rebuke from Job and in the end, an equally sharp rebuke from the very God whose ways they sought to justify.

Hart admits that in the face of such massive suffering, silence might be the best option.  But he ventures to speak nonetheless.  So I have to speak on Sunday.  I still don't know what I'm going to say, but I think that I'd better not say anything unless I can imagine that between the Bible in my right hand and the newspaper in my left, an earthquake survivor stands in my presence waiting to hear what I have to say.

Thinking out loud

If there'd been no war in Iraq, and if there'd been sufficient force applied to Al Qaida and the Taliban in 2001to exterminate the movement--in other words, if world events and foreign policy had sort of proceeded along a straight line from the Kosovo War, wouldn't there be a hue and cry right now for a U.N. military intervention in Burma to get those poor people some help? 

Maybe not.  Maybe we'd be bogged down in Darfur right now.  Or maybe the Bush administration would have provoked a war in the Taiwan straights, which is where they seemed to think all the action was going to be when they were campaigning in 2000.

I don't know that going to war against a country that's just suffered 100,000 deaths from a hurricane wouldn't be adding insult to injury.  But you have to admit that going to war for phony reasons with no real plan for wrapping things up sure has a way of limiting your options in the future.

Wright is wrong

A lot of people have bent over backwards to defend Rev. Wright, and not without good cause.  But I was depressed to hear that Wright used his platform at the National Press Club to repeat the old canard that AIDS is a government-sponsored war on black people.  There's a difference between using hyperbolic rhetoric to make legitimate or even debatable points and using hyperbolic rhetoric to give credence to lies. 

Since it burst on the scene nearly 30 years ago AIDS has been politicized by both the right and the left.  The former said it was God's vengeance on alternative lifestyles, and we shouldn't get in the way.  The latter said that if you tell people not to have anonymous, unprotected anal sex you're infringing on their personal liberties.  It has hardly ever been treated strictly as a public health crisis.  This is partly why so many people have died of the disease.

Wright's comments are yet another regrettable effort at politicizing a medical problem.  Not only are they untrue, they cast the very institutions and resources that can help the people most at risk in the worst light possible.  It's unconscionable.

Holiday

McCain wants to suspend gas taxes during the summer driving season.  What a great idea!  An incentive to put more cars on the road for more miles, burning more fossil fuels, and less money to repair our crumbling transportation infrastructure.

Oh, now I get it!  More cars on buckling bridges means more dead people, and in the long run, fewer cars, and fewer CO2 emissions.  Genius!

My turn to be bitter

It's more than rich that Hillary Clinton is positioning herself as the champion of the religious right voter.  If Bittergate winds up presenting us with a November choice between a warmonger and a person who's not always on speaking terms with The Truth, well then, the American people get the leadership they deserve.

We are ruled by jerks

Local reaction to Governor Spitzer's resignation:

In (Spitzer's) wide-ranging probe of the mutual fund industry, Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. and merger partner FleetBoston Financial Corp. in 2004 agreed to a $675 million settlement. The bank declined comment Tuesday. Many at the bank, though, were saying "what comes around, goes around" when the news of the prostitution case surfaced, one source said.

No.  No.  No.  No.  No.

Whatever social wrath and legal penalties Eliot Spitzer must bear is payment for his purchasing sex, not for the legitimate exercise of his oversight authority.  The board room snickering is truly galling--the soundtrack of our decadent Second Gilded Age.

Laugh it up, bankers.  That's Margin calling on line one.

Request

Less gee-whiz reporting about how Moo-U can text it's entire student body within ten minutes of a massacre, and more reporting about latent prejudice against mental illness and the abysmal shape of our nation's mental health treatment system, Please.

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My reactions to the presidential race:

Obama won by a larger margin than I expected.  He seems to be in the driver's seat.  His victory speech wasn't quite the Gettysburg Address moment that a lot of pundits have touted it to be, but it was a good speech, as usual.  In good Rovian fashion, Obama's detractors are attacking his strengths--his public speaking ability.  His rhetoric is too soaring, they say.  He's bound to disappoint.  Or, talk is cheap, they (HRC) say.

All that may well be true, but I sat in Old Testament classes with a professor who said crazy stuff like, "The text doesn't merely describe God.  It conjures God!"

"Come again?"

"Well, would the Lord be a shepherd if the psalmist hadn't said it?"

"Grumble, grumble.  Dunno.  Grumble, grumble."

So I'm down with the performative power of rhetoric.

It's really a choice between Obama's bipartisan rhetoric of transformation and Edwards' class warfare rhetoric.  And I use the phrase "class warfare" in a non-pejorative sense.  I'm also down with class warfare.  Edwards warned a crowd today that monied interests are out to thwart the democratic process, and I agree with that, and I don't think that makes me a pitchfork wielding lunatic.

I'm not sure whether the best way to enact a progressive agenda is to co-opt the loyal opposition or beat them to a pulp.  I hope, however, (hope being Obama's trademark word) that it'd be the former.  I'm tired of the whole red state blue state partisan gridlock.  So I'm leaning toward Obama more than Edwards at this moment.  Plus, Obama was right on the war to begin with. 

But I'm glad Edwards is in the race.  He tells the truth.  It says something about the state of political discourse that Edwards' calling a spade a spade is the object of so much elite derision.

Edwards had to be bitterly disappointed about his showing in Iowa.  Surely there was a lot of spin in his statement that, "Iowans voted for change" Thursday night.  But if you're in second, it's not a bad strategy to try to make it a two man race. 

Add to that the fact that the spin was true.  Democrats are proud of the 1990s.  Peace, prosperity, and fiscal discipline.  But they're ambivalent too.  After the health care initiative went down to defeat, the Clinton administration settled for incrementalism and centrism.  Welfare reform, more cops on the street, a children's tax rebate.  It was unavoidable, given the country's general rightward drift and the insane hatred that the GOP leadership had for the Clintons. 

But we're in a different place now.  The modern conservative movement has cratered.  This is an opportunity for bold initiatives, not centrist competence.  Hillary Clinton is a smart woman, a good U.S. Senator, and a public servant that we can all be proud of.  But in a sense her day is past.

HRC said Friday that we need a Democrat who is both electable and able to hit the ground running come January 20, 2009.  The latter is a good dig at Obama's inexperience, but I'm not sure that there's anything to the former.  This notion that Hillary has survived the right wing attack machine and can throw down with them from now til November is a loser.  She's a polarizing figure.  Even Democrats recognize that.  And while Democrats are eager to beat the Republicans, they aren't eager to reprise the nastiness of the 1990s.  Even Edwards' class warfare goes down easier than HRC because he didn't murder Vince Foster find himself the target of a truly weird and vindictive political vendetta back in the day.

And so here is the irony:  because Republicans have demonized HRC, Democrats will probably put up somebody more liberal than she to avoid baiting them.  A Democrat is likely to win this year.  And the fact that it's going to be a liberal rather than a DLC centrist is something for which Republicans have only themselves to blame.

Then again, all this is moot if New Hampshirites demonstrate their famed independence tomorrow night.

Robert Bellah for President

I had a conversation with an area journalist.  He is not looking forward to this year.  It's not just the vitriol that accompanies elections.  It's a growing sense in his mind that the problems we face cannot be solved by the political process.  "Like what?"  I asked.  He talked about the need to raise a couple of generations of children better than we've raised the last couple. 

I'm of two minds about this.  Certainly there are things to be done in public life that can strengthen the private world of marriage, family and childrearing.  Affordable health care and good wages can reduce stress in the home, reduce the role of the TV as babysitter, and reduce the role of McDonald's as evening food provider.

That said, given the economic instability that permeates society, why do people persist in having kids they can't afford, have no time to take care of, with partners of dubious character and commitment?  I'm not sure that politicians can do anything about this.

I'm reminded of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, which identifies two streams in American social thought:  the Communitarian variety exemplified by the Puritans and Thomas Jefferson, and the Individualist variety expressed by Ben Franklin's economic self-reliance and Walt Whitman's self-expression. 

While the political battles of the past generation have been cast as left versus right, the bigger story is about an unchecked rise in Individualism.  For "liberals" who advocate freedom from traditional roles and institutions, and free market "conservatives" are really but two sides of the same coin.  What we need is a renewed sense of Community, which would entail a recognition of fundamental obligations to past and future generations, to members of our households, and to near and distant neighbors.

Where is the political party advocating a renewed, robust civic republicanism?  Who are the religious voices calling for a robust sense of covenant to define our life together as "one nation under God," rather than settling for the trappings of theocracy (manger scenes on courthouse grounds, prayer in schools, etc.)

I think of Roman Catholic social teaching, but that comes at a price:  forfeiting the legitimate gains in gender equity that the current high tide of Individualism has deposited on our shores.  I'm not willing to pay that price.

Maybe Robert Bellah should run for President.