Avdat

Just what am I not supposed to forget this week?

It's going to be a long week of 9/11 retrospectives. Some will be thoughtful, moving and/or eloquent. Others will be sentimental and/or jingoistic.

I'm puzzled by how many remembrances admonish us to "Never forget," as if that terrible day weren't seared into our brains forever. Absent a diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease, how could any of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 ever forget it?

I suspect that some of the calls to "Never forget" are more about justifying everything that's happened since 9/11. Well, I don't buy that.

9/11 doesn't justify torture. 9/11 didn't justify the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 didn't justify the orgy of consumption in the 2000s which we are paying for now. 9/11 didn't justify the maligning of Islam, a noble religion practiced by a billion people. 9/11 doesn't justify continuing to fight in Afghanistan, propping up a corrupt government long after the architect of 9/11 has gone onto his eternal reward--such as it is.

What I will remember about 9/11, aside from the sheer horror of the day, is how badly we handled it. When we looked to our leaders to rally us in the face of evil, all they could come up with was, "Go shopping." Living well is the best revenge, they say, so living large must be so much the sweeter!

Like sheep we obeyed. The 2000s were the decade of the McMansion and the Hummer, conspicuous consumption on a truly baroque scale. Why, we made the Greed Is Good 80s look like an era of Puritan restraint.

And that's partly why we're in the mess we're in. Take away easy credit and cheap energy, and McMansions and Hummers will put you in the poor house. People have talked about bin Laden's goal of bankrupting America. He's come close, but indirectly, not by miring us in a land war in Asia, but by miring us in second homes in Vegas that we could never afford.

I'll also remember this decade's unique cast of incompetent and immoral public servants. The boomers have MacNamara and Nixon and Kissinger; the Gulf of Tonkin and My Lai. Gen Xers have Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld; WMDs in Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Young men join the military for a variety of reasons--love of country, hatred of the enemy, a scholarship, a paycheck, to see the world or test oneself in extremis. Some of these reasons are valid, others less so. But what we must never forget is that old men start wars for a variety of reasons--national security, fears real or imagined, vanity, ignorance, vengeance, meanness, lies. This seems to hold whether the cause is just or unjust. And every young man or woman needs to consider that before joining the military. I will not forget to tell my sons that unpleasant truth once they come of age.

I will also tell my sons that patriotism cannot be reduced to military service, for that would call into question the patriotism of the overwhelming majority of Americans who've never donned a military uniform--a strange proposition. I will tell them what the World War II vet John F. Kennedy said, "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."

We owe members of the military love and respect as human beings created in God's image and capable of extraordinary courage. We also owe it to them that we do not send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. We owe them adequate health care to heal their injured bodies and minds. We owe to ourselves and to them the work of making the society they've pledged to defend more just and equitable. On all these counts, we failed them over the past ten years. We shouldn't forget that.

We shouldn't forget that the evil of the terrorists rubbed off on us. There's no consensus on torture in our society today, thanks to the illegal acts and fearmongering of our elected leaders, aided and abetted by the media. The Viet Cong water-boarded our POWs. If we'd won that war, we'd have convicted their leaders and generals for war crimes that ex-Bush administration officials brag about in their memoirs.

History won't forget. History will judge them harshly, and judge us all the more because we failed to hold them accountable. After all, it's not as if America at the turn of the 21st century is a feudal state, lacking the institutions and mentalities to protect human rights and due process. We're without excuse.

I also will remember how inadequate "our" religion has been in the face of "their" evil. We Christians seem to have had three choices this past decade:

1. The crusader mentality of the religious right.
2. The shrill hectoring of liberal Protestantism.
3. The "I'm so over politics" pose of the communitarians.

Roman Catholics have been on the sidelines, first paying lawyers to strong-arm victims of abuse and their families and then paying out to the same.

The religious right is quite wrong about bin Laden representing Islam. They're quite wrong to want to dish out in the name of Christ the same type of treatment Christ received in their favorite snuff film The Passion. Liberals are right about consumerism and militarism, but no one's listening. Blame it on the low Christology, I suppose.

Communitarians are right that that church needs to re-group before it re-engages, lest it lose its soul, but they never get around to engagement. In fact they poo-poo it. It's no accident that thoughtful young Evangelicals flock to Hauerwas. Evangelicalism careens between Theocracy and Quietism. Hauerwas's ouvre is really a "thick Quietism" that gives young Evangelicals a way to choose the path not taken by  their Moral Majority parents without succumbing to a "Just Me and Jesus" sentimentality. But it doesn't give them a way to tell obvious truths like, "Election results matter."

Christians are ill-equipped to humanize politics these days.

Finally, we should remember the dead and their loved ones and friends. Remembering the dead is one thing that makes us human. And as the scripture says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep." But that should go without saying, shouldn't it?

If I sound bitter it's because I am. And yet, what right have I to be bitter? As Matt Yglesias is fond of pointing out, ours are the best times in human history. Is bitterness a conceit of the privileged?

I don't think so. Lamenting mistakes, missed opportunities and unnecessary death is appropriate, even given our relative comfort and affluence.

But despite all the stupidity and nefariousness of the past decade, some good things have happened. Americans put aside their age-old prejudices and elected a black man President. Quite apart from our bombs, Arabs are demanding democracy and reshaping their societies. Who knows how it will turn out? For the best, I pray.

Providence has its own tale to tell apart from the depressingly familiar narratives in the headlines and history books. We shouldn't forget that, either.

In which I get up-to-speed on the Belhar Confession

I've been out of the parish and holed up in a carrel long enough that the MDiv students now know more about church politics than I do. The Belhar Confession has come up several times in Theology II this semester, a class in which I am a TA. Turns out that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is voting this year on whether or not to add it to our Book of Confessions. I didn't know what the Belhar Confession was, so I had to look it up. (Shorter Belhar Confession: Apartheid is a sin).

In this afternoon's section, in which we were considering the relationship of the Church to society and reading the Confession of 1967 in that context, one student asked why there was any opposition to the Belhar Confession since the Constitution already contains a document that condemns racial discrimination, namely C '67. Another student replied that some people fear that Belhar is a trojan horse for approving gay ordination.

Sigh. This is pure guilt by association. And faulty logic:

Some people who support gay ordination also support the Belhar Confession.

I do not support gay ordination.

Therefore I cannot support the Belhar Confession.

No, I don't think it follows either.

I suppose one could argue that since our Book of Confessions already condemns racism, why add another confession that does the same thing? But the thing about a Book of Confessions is that you have multiple documents treating the same subject. For instance, a majority of our confessions contain expositions of the Ten Commandments. Should we get rid of all except one? No, because there is value in the particular treatment that particular documents give to a given topic.

That said, I have a feeling that amending our constitution in this way is just one more symbolic gesture. Presbyterians are surfeit of symbolism, but what we need are deeds, not words. Despite our formal and seemingly endless endorsements of diversity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) remains overwhelmingly white, middle class and on the far side of 55.

One student quipped that the Confession of 1967 would have been a much more prophetic document had it been the Confession of 1957. Too right.

And that makes an interesting point about our consideration of Belhar. There's a whiff of Donatism at work here--establishing one's contemporary purity on the basis of the purity of one's ancestors. Only the Donatists had real martyr ancestors. We Presbyterians invent them by endorsing their words ex post facto.This gets us perilously close to those Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during Holy Week--the ones who decorated the tombs of the prophets of yesterday while stoning the prophets of today.

Somewhere I read that the chief predictor of a congregation's multiculturalness isn't its denominational affiliation but whether or not it was established before or after 1970. So it seems to me that if we want a truly diverse church we need to A. Establish new churches and evangelize young adults (who don't have the hangups about interracial worship and marriage that their elders do), and B. Train pastors to transform congregations imprinted by the segregationist culture in which they were founded.

That takes more than amending the constitution. That takes money. Big money. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."If we care about breaking down barriers, to say nothing about making disciples, we'll put our money where our mouth is.

It also takes a willingness on the part of presbyteries to ordain and authorize people to work in new, creative and unorthodox ways to make disciples and found congregations.

I take it that either the money or the creative thinking is lacking given that the denomination has planted but 20 new congregations in the last five years. Whether we adopt Belhar or not (and let me be clear--had I been able to attend my presbytery meeting I would have voted for it), we are not a denomination that cares much about either making disciples or creating a multicultural church. Deeds, not words, tell the story. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Why should I listen to you? BECAUSE I HAVE A VOICE!

When we moved out of the seminary apartment and into a home on Brookland Parkway we found a Sherwood Park neighborhood newsletter on our steps. How friendly! Inside we found out about the neighborhood listserve, subscribed to it, and have continued to subscribe after moving across Laburnum Avenue last summer. It keeps us informed about lost pets, dubious door-to-door salesmen, and other Northside phenomena.

Over the weekend someone posted this to the listserve:

Neighbors,
     Are you aware that the former Holiday Inn is about to become a night club open from 9 PM until 3 AM every Friday and Saturday night? 
     This morning __________ handed me an advertising postcard and free grand opening pass for the Zodiac Night Club at the former Holiday Inn.  They are planning Hip Hop parties every weekend starting March 25.
     We need to organize and stop this before we have all the problems moving from Shockoe Bottom to our community.

After a few other posts rallying to this call to action, I decided to put in my two cents worth:

I think that more facts are needed before there's any organized attempt to stop this new nightclub. Who are the managers? Has anyone contacted them? Do they have a plan for security and crowd control? Do they manage other nightclubs, and if so, what's the safety record at their other locations?

If these questions can be answered satisfactorily, then the neighborhood doesn't need to organize to stop this, but to welcome a new business to the community. A well-run business in that location would certainly be preferable to a building standing empty. And I imagine that well-run nightclubs do exist; they just don't make headlines.

In short, the neighborhood needs to act out of a sense of curiosity, not from a place of knee-jerk fear, stereotyping and NIMBYism.

Yours,
Marvin Lindsay

In reply I got one "Hear hear" and one request to confirm my current residence in Sherwood Park since the home we used to lived in on Brookland Parkway was demolished last summer. "We live in Bellevue, at 1216 Greycourt Avenue," I replied, and that's the last email I've received from the listserve. But my wife has received several messages from the listserve since then.

I think I have been banned!

I guess it's because we've moved so very, very far from Sherwood Park, and live so much farther from the old Holiday Inn at Boulevard and Hermitage than Sherwood Park residents do, that I really have no business commenting on local matters:

Now that outside agitators like me have been silenced, the group can get on with assembling pitch forks and marching on City Hall.

Meanwhile my wife, who due to sloppy purging on the administrator's part is able to function as my Sherwood Park listserve mole, informs me that still another person has posted on the dread scourge of hip hop invading our community in the dead of night. According to this person, the nightclub's already been open for a couple of weeks now.

Imagine that: black folks dancing and rapping and they slept right through it! That sleep apnea machine works wonders, doesn't it?

Glum

For a while there I was relieved that Democrats had lost the House, relieved in that way you were relieved when your father finally got home after being threatened all day with, "Just wait 'til your father gets home." After a while there's no more dread, just an eagerness to get it over with.

But today I am glum because, as Kevin Drum points out here, it wasn't just the economy, stupid. The wretched economy probably cost Democrats 40-some seats, but they lost 60-some. So to some extent this election was a repudiation of Democratic policies. And this makes me sad because the policies were basically sound.

Nobody liked TARP; it wasn't even Obama's creation; it was President Bush's idea, but if Bush hadn't done it, global capitalism would have ground to a halt. Maybe in a few centuries people will have no more stake in keeping capitalism alive than we do keeping in feudalism alive, but we aren't there yet. Meanwhile, we're blaming the wrong guy for prescribing the right medicine for a serious, acute illness.

And then there's health care reform. The GOP didn't have the votes to stop it, but it looks like they had the moxie to demonize it. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: the bill the President signed was basically Mitt Romney's version of health care reform, the GOP alternative to HillaryCare in 1994, and yet the Republicans threw their own policy under the bus just to have something to run against. The cynicism is breathtaking, and you know what? It worked!

I know; I know; I sound like I'm shocked that there's gambling in Casablanca. Politics is a sordid business full of venal people. Being a student of history, I should not be surprised. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, and southerners have been punishing Democrats ever since.

I am sure that one day the outcry over being forced to buy health insurance will sound as petty as the outcry over being forced to serve all comers in one's business establishment. I just wish that good politics and good public policy aligned better, that public servants didn't have to wait for history to vindicate them. Maybe then we'd have better public servants.

P.S. Drum's chart does show that the Democrats were bound to lose the House anyway, simply on the weakness of the economy. So given the choice between doing nothing and losing, and doing something and losing, they chose the latter, and that was certainly the right choice. Evan Bayh is full of it.

Columbus Day Meh

I blew all my liberal outrage on other, noble causes, so I've got nothing for today. It's just a day in October that I can't mail a letter. So let me refer you to this post which not only competently makes the usual anti-glorification of colonialism points, but also convincingly argues that Italian-Americans need to drop Christopher Columbus as their hero, thus explaining in this process this map of Italy as seen by elite Italians:

I nominate Joe DiMaggio's birthday to replace Columbus Day. It falls at the end of November, and by replacing Thanksgiving as well, would increase the productivity of federal employees while simultaneously taking out another holiday that commemorates the screwing over of Native Americans. It gives liberals and conservatives a reason to vote for it. That's change we can believe in!

I wouldn't mind if Columbus Day went away, along with Confederate Heritage Month, the Washington "Redskins," and many other dubious cultural symbols, but I find the conflict over the symbols per se a bit tedious. I think it's more advisable to try to change the ground level conditions that such symbols are tethered to. Then they either fall of their own weight, or they're compelled to mediate a different reality.

An analogy: Congress' failure to do right by black farmers, who as recently as the 1990s were subject to federal discrimination, is far more egregious than Governor McDonnell's failure to mention slavery in his Confederate Heritage Day proclamation, but guess which omission has garnered more media coverage?

There are similar pending and long overdue actions that could right wrongs and change American Indians' material conditions for the better--like this bill, which would fix the strange problem that there are no federally recognized Indian tribes in Virginia, a problem created in part by a state official in the last century who changed the race on Native American birth certificates from "Indian" to "black."

So, less Columbus Day grumpiness posted on Facebook and more emails to your Congressman, please.

Cable news bizarro world

It's more convenient to set my iron up near the TV than the radio, which means that I've been spending a lot of time with Shirley Sherrod this week. What's utterly strange is how CNN has made this a story about the Obama administration rather than how Andrew Breitbart assassinated a good woman's character.

In this matter, the only thing that the administration is guilty of is being too credulous when it comes to its enemies in the right wing media. Breitbart, on the other hand, posted a doctored video that smeared a decent person and good public servant.

Yet as I stood here ironing this morning I watched an intrepid CNN reporter narrate his dogged attempts to reach the Ag department secretary who called Sherrod and asked for her resignation. "On whose orders did she make that call? What did the administration know and when did they know it? What will be the political fallout for the Obama administration in this affair?"

Look, CNN, why aren't you turning the bright, white media glare on Breitbart's yellow journalism? Sherrod herself acknowledges that's where the real story is. In your own report this morning, Sherrod went to bat for her supervisor, saying she'd done great things in the Ag department. She also said in effect that it would have been beneath the President's dignity to apologize to her.

Breitbart, like all right wing hacks, purports to hate the media, as if he isn't part of the media, as if the media is this unalloyed monolith. News outlets like CNN, on the other hand, really hate the internet media. "Those bloggers are just a bunch of out-of-work guys hammering away at a keyboard in their mom's basement," they say. Yet CNN clearly has a lot more energy for investigating a non-scandal in the White House than investigating a very real case of defamation of character. 

Makes you wonder if, behind all the rhetoric, Breitbart and the liberal media have each other's backs.

Just like that

Shorter Times-Dispatch editorial: "Can you think of the scariest brown-skinned dictator out there? Barack Obama is just like that!"

This editorial is wrong in so many different ways, and not just because they, you know, go there in this one--playing footsie with the race-baitin', Gadsden flag-wavin', socialist hatin' nutters that are calling the shots on the Right these days.

Increasing the pool of insured Americans is actually a way to restrain health care inflation because many of the currently uninsured are young and relatively healthy. In fact, you need to require them to purchase coverage in order to end the odious practice of denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Legislation that only does the latter would create a perverse incentive to put off buying insurance until after you've been diagnosed with cancer/run over by a car/suffered a heart attack. And that really would drive up premiums, because the pool of insured persons would be disproportionately sick and old.

Besides, who's afraid of federal authority to regulate health insurance rates? We already have Insurance Commissioners who, get this, approve or deny insurance rate increases. We already have utility commissions who, get this, approve or deny gas and electricity rate increases. And the last time I looked around, it didn't seem as though I was living in a Banana Republic or an African Thugocracy. 

Look, I'm all in favor of socialized medicine. The VA is socialized medicine and it works well. Medicare is socialized medicine, and it works well.

That ain't what this reform effort is; it is a modest effort to make our existing system of private insurance and health care providers more equitable and efficient. It's pretty much the health care reform that Republican Governor Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts, and new GOP Senator Scott Brown supported when he was a Bay State state legislator.

But to hear the Times-Dispatch tell it, if Congress passes a bill that contains health care inflation, expands coverage and makes insurance companies act like human beings then, just like that, we'll be serfs to some pimped out, narcissistic President-for-life. 

You Tube Friday: baiting Pat Buchanan edition

If you choose me to be your token white friend, what I can bring to this relationship is extensive experience in New Balance running shoes. Plus, I will be your Dungeon Master. (HT)

MLK

What Yglesias said:

By the standards of today’s discourse, King would be considered deeply unserious. Serious people understand that if you think something is important, the serious way to go about expressing that is by voicing support for having other people go kill other people. Doubts about the ethics of such action are loathesome moral equivalence and doubts about their wisdom demonstrate naïveté. King wouldn’t qualify as a “civil rights Democrat”—not enough bloodshed.

The irony is that adherence to nonviolence is one of the main reasons King is such an admired and mainstream figure today. If he’d decided à la Tom Friedman that the white south needed a “suck on this” moment, or followed the lead of Hamas or Shimon Peres in deciding the best way to teach the population a lesson was to terrorize them, he’d be a jailed or executed despised criminal. And the ethic of nonviolence that King appealed to has deep roots in the Christian tradition that unites the majority of black and white Americans. And yet even though this Christian nonviolence is in many ways the most mainstream aspect of this radical figure who’s become a mainstream icon, it’s something that none dare take seriously today.

Finally getting around to All Saints Day

A Daily Kos diarist had a vision of next year's Inaugural Ball.  Shame on me for slamming the writing over there!  Some highlights:

Guests began arriving early. There are no place cards and no name tags. Everyone knows everyone else here. Now, there’s a grand foursome - Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz sharing laughs with Martin and Coretta Scott King. Looks like Hosea Williams refused the limo again, keeping it real. And my goodness; is that Rosa Parks out there on the dance floor with A. Phillip Randolph?

...There’s Jackie Robinson swiftly making his way through the hall as the crowd parts like the Red Sea to the unmistakable sound of applause. "Run, Jackie, run!" Along the way he is embraced by Jessie Owens...

As usual, all the science nerds seem to have gathered off in a corner, talking shop. There’s Granville T. Woods and Lewis Latimer needling each other about whose inventions are better. Someone jokingly asked Benjamin Banneker if he had needed directions to Washington. And George Washington Carver was overheard asking, "What, no peanuts?"

...Dueling bands? Anytime Duke Ellington and Count Basie get together, you know the place will be jumping. Tonight is special, of course, so we have Miles, Dizzy, and Satchmo sitting in on trumpet, with Coltrane, Cannonball, and Bird on sax. Everyone’s attention is directed to the dance floor where Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is tap dancing. Right beside him is Sammy Davis Jr., doing his Bojangles routine. And behind his back, Gregory Hines is imitating them both. Applause and laughter abound!

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them... Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.  Hebrews 11: 13, 39-40

And theological correctness be damned today!  For since it is God's plan in Christ "to gather up all things in him," then for their sake too may the name of Christ be forever blessed.  Alleluia!