Avdat

So much more than shoutin' Amen

With American Idol wrapping up another season, the CW seems to be how bad it's become.  But this year's crop of talent was so much better than last year's.  There was the Irish rocker, the Carly Simon look-alike/sound-alike, and no Sanjaya!

Plus, by now we've gotten the judges shtick down pat.  And wouldn't worship be so much better if we wouldn't limit ourselves to Amens, clapping, or stony-faced Presbyterian silence in offering feedback to the choir?  What if three different people got a chance to sit on the front pew each week to critique the music Idol-style?

Here's some pointers, if you're unfamiliar with American Idol.  You can be Randy, Paula or Simon:

Randy:

Yo, yo!  That anthem was Da Bomb!  A little pitchy in the middle.  But that was Da Bomb!

Paula:

You're so beautiful.  You're... so... beautiful.

Simon:

That praise song made me feel like I was in (select one) A. an airport lounge; B. a hotel bar; C. TGI-Fridays for karaoke night; D. my cousin's second wedding.  It made me want to (select one) A. put a gun to my head; B. slug Seacrest; C. call Sanjaya; D. go work out.

Superstar

Carly Smithson was one:

But they voted her off anyway.  My hunch is that American Idol is a heartland phenomenon, and if you're gonna sing a song about Jesus Christ it had better be free of irony and snark.  So, goodbye Carly.  But at this late stage, they're all pretty good.  Somebody had to lose.  Right, Tarheel fans?

Six degrees of seperation

Kevin Bacon, meet Jeremiah Wright:

I don't think this dog will hunt.  Richard Moore is the go-to guy for all things White, Male and Corporate.  BTW, I intend to vote for him.  Only the already converted are prepared to see Moore and Wright as some kind of John Brown-Nat Turner one-two punch in Whitey's mouth.

What else is unbelievable is this "argument" between McCain and the NC GOP.  Anyone who thinks that the presumptive Republican nominee couldn't squelch this in an instant is too naive for politics.  The "argument" lets McCain stay above the fray while his surrogates do the dirty work. 

Fine.  That's what surrogates are for.  Who the candidate is is of no consequence.  If Hillary were the front-runner, you'd be getting email forwards about her lesbianism, and right wing pundits would be clamoring for the Vince Foster case to be re-opened.   

An attorney recently told me, "In court, if the facts aren't on your side, you talk about the law.  If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then you talk about Mom, Apple Pie and the American Way."

The last option is what the Republicans are talking about.  Or more to the point, they talk about how those values are missing on the Democratic side.  This means that, even if you'd been under a rock for the last seven years, knowing nothing about Iraq, the credit crunch or torture, all you'd have to do is watch this commercial, and you'd know instantly who's side both the facts and the law are on.

Our media are awful

After they put up the pudgy little PA lady on the screen wanting to know why Barack Obama doesn't wear an American flag, a move that Charlie justified by appealing to the authority of email forwards, I decided to do a little experiment.  I would count the number of people the next day I spied wearing an American flag on their lapel. 

How many?  Zero.

Everyone in Salisbury, North Carolina hates America.

There are a couple of men in my congregation who regularly wear American flag lapel pins on Sunday, but that's it.  The men who don't include several vets.  Do they hate America too, Mrs. Pudgy Pennsylvania Lady?  What do you think, Charlie?

I think that when it comes to patriotism, we ought to apply the same rules that we apply to piety:

Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

This is not to say that wearing a lapel pin is wrong.  It's just fair warning that one cannot judge neither piety not patriotism by outward displays. 

Now Obama was right to say that this is a ginned up controversy.  But what I was aching to hear, either from Obama or from HRC, was something along these lines, penned by Tom Schaller:

May I interject for a second before Barack answers that question? We’re about a half hour into this debate and all you two have done is raise ridiculous, distracting issues that most voters don’t care about, yet you and others in the chattering classes are obsessed with. This is a debate about the near-term future of the Democratic Party and the long-term future of the country, so I’m sorry to inform you that it’s not a contest to see who can generate the coolest televised sound bite to brag about at next week’s correspondents dinner. George, having worked in the War Room during our 1992 campaign, you’ve been on the other side and ought to know better. And Charlie, you’ve been around far too long not to know better yourself. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be asked tough questions; we should, of course. But so far none of this stuff you’ve raised is breaking new ground, and meanwhile somewhere in America people are going to bed without health insurance or money for this month’s rent or food on the table, while some of our troops won’t get to go to bed tonight at all because they’re standing a post in Iraq. And you two want to talk about flag lapel pins? Ask a serious question or just let Barack and I have a debate between ourselves with the remaining time. It would be a helluva lot more productive—not to mention informative and probably entertaining—than what’s happened so far.

Mrs. Avdat reports says, "If Hillary had said that last night, I'd have ripped the Obama stickers off our cars."  Mrs. Avdat was furious with the unseriousness displayed by our society's very serious media elites.

My first presidential election was 1988. It turned, as I recall, on whether or not to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  Perhaps we can forgive the media of yesteryear for such banalities.  The economy was in good shape.  The Soviets were glastnosting themselves into oblivion. 

But we're fighting two wars, and neither is going well.  Millions of Americans are poised to lose their homes.  Food prices are skyrocketing.  The planet is heating up.  There are wars and rumors of wars in Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Uganda, Congo, and elsewhere.  And in response, our very serious media elites have substituted fashion for tea leaves as an oracle, a looking glass into our candidates' love for America.

God help us.

Live blogging Wednesday evening TV

• The call-in questions on American Idol are much better than on the Democratic debate on ABC.  And so are the answers!
• My kingdom for a candidate who'll tell Charlie and George, "That's a really stupid question."  You see, your well-meaning Professor of Educational Theory was wrong.  There are plenty of dumb questions.  Asking Barack Obama about how he can justify the political views of some guy he served on a board with, for instance.
• Hillary Clinton is crazy if she thinks she can win by attacking the Black Church.
• My wife is a Hillary hater, but she ain't crazy about Mariah Carey either, so we're back to the debate.
• Which reminds me of a fight I had to break up (Yes, a literal fight) when I was an RA in college between 2 guys who were arguing about who was better, Mariah Carey or The Black Crows.
• In the spirit of shallowness, in which Charlie Gibson revels tonight, let me say that I hate his red reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.
• Mariah Carey's been under the knife plenty of times since I was in college.
• My wife objects to my characterization of her as a Hillary hater.  For the record.

Paging Dr. Jacoby

Lee was a wee lad when Twin Peaks was on TV, but I'm delighted that, through the miracle of DVD technology, he's discovered the series in his thirties.  I wouldn't have put it this way at the time, but looking back it was the perfect mix of horror, camp, hallucinogenic sci-fi, and, of course, good pie.

I must agree with one of the commenters at Lee's blog who thinks it jumped the shark somewhere toward the end.  It seems like I recall someone surmising that Twin Peaks seemed like a mini-series that the executives inexplicably renewed, and Lynch didn't really know where to go after it's natural conclusion with Killer Bob's disappearance down the drain of the jail cell.

Twin Peaks was an obsession for me and my then girlfriend and current spouse.  There was a guy on the NC State campus who was a dead-ringer for Bob--long, straight hair and a jean jacket.  Seeing him could cause me to shiver on warm, sunny day.  The moment Laura Palmer's killer was revealed--Bob suddenly staring back from the mirror at a character neither of us suspected--was probably the scariest thing I've ever seen on a big or small screen.  That said, a cousin of mine was with us that weekend, and she was unfazed.  But she hadn't been watching the show up to that point.

Twin Peaks led to my next TV obsession, Northern Exposure.  The latter was billed as a suitable follow-up to the former.  But truth be told, they had nothing to do with each other except low hanging clouds over a coniferous landscape.  But I learned to like Northern Exposure for itself.  In seminary, we'd do Hebrew flashcards during the commercials.

I don't watch a lot of TV.  I tend to somewhat compulsively latch on to one show at a time.  It's interesting; the shows become important in retrospect for what was going on in your life at the time as much as for their own merits.  Mine go like this:

• Twin Peaks
• Northern Exposure
• ER (until our firstborn had to have open heart surgery.  Then we dropped it like a hot potato.  We needed to re-embrace the illusion of MD omnipotence)
• Picket Fences (which overlapped the above two.  "Get out!")
• Ally McBeal (until it jumped the shark with the kids in season 4 or 5)
• The West Wing
• EastEnders

Have I blogged at all about the last one on the list?  It's a BBC soap opera that Laura was first clued into by reading Bridget Jones Diary.  She looked for it on public TV and found it, and then turned me onto it.  It's not like an American soap opera.  There are ugly people on it.  Young and ugly.  And average looking people too.  And their accents are strong enough to justify subtitles.  And there's about forty characters.  It takes forever to learn all the plot lines.

But once you overcome those obstacles, it's really worth it.  Of course there's crime and love triangles, but the characters and plot lines are complex.  Walford is a neighborhood in the huge London metropolis, but the dynamics are small town and small church (long memories, dark secrets, and pettiness, cruelty and compassion all dished out on the same day--sometimes by the same people for the same neighbors). 

If I had to single out one trait, it'd be the dark secrets.  In fact, one might reduce all EastEnders plots to Jesus' maxim in Mark 4:22.  How the characters squirm, chafe and eventually come to terms (or not) with that ironclad law drives most of the story lines.

Problem is, the show runs in four, one-half hour segments in the UK, but WUNC only shows two per week.  So we're stuck in the middle of 2002.  Which means I can't visit their web site.  Too many spoilers.  But when I go to Scotland this summer, I will simply have to tune in. 

Laura will want to know if Dr. Truman and his long eyelashes will still be on the show.  But if not, there's always Twin Peaks on DVD, and the ability to gaze into Dr. Jacoby's eyes through those 3D glasses.

The Wire

I've escaped from Jennifer's virtual prison in order to tell you that The Wire is a really, really good TV show, and up there in Chicagoland there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over its demise.

At least I have it on her word.  I've never seen the show, but I did catch the creators on Talk of the Nation yesterday in which they advocated jury nullification as a way of reforming the nation's drug policy.  Jury nullification is jurors disregarding laws, evidence and judge's instructions and refusing to convict.  They argue that the nation's drug laws are so utterly broken, and the politicians so cowardly, that it's up to the people to solve the problem by simply refusing to comply.  Which is what they did during Prohibition.

They also did it in the Jim Crow South when jurors refused to convict white men accused of violent, racially-motivated crimes against blacks.  So jury nullification has a long and rather checkered history in American jurisprudence.

I'm not sure if this sort of thing can be lobbied for.  In both of the above cases, it "worked" because the law flew in the face of prevailing cultural norms.  But most people, I think, still tend to view hard core drug use as a law enforcement problem first, and a health problem only second.

But, there do seem to be cracks in the legal facade.  The sentences for crack offenders have now been brought into line with powder cocaine offenders, a discrepancy that owes itself to both racism and the fear, at the time, that crack was a worse threat than powder cocaine.  So maybe there is hope for our politicians, if not, at the moment, for the general American public who, as Jonathan Kozol puts it in his new book, would be more relieved than distressed if we woke up one morning and discovered that all the people in our nation's inner cities had disappeared.

Maybe the generation-long backlash against the 60s is starting to wind down.  Hyper militarism, the Religious Right, and the Drug War are all forceful reactions to the disorder and excesses (real or perceived) associated with movements for peace and social justice in that turbulent decade.  For the most part, the backlash has generated far worse ills than the excesses that inspired them. 

There's a sense in which this decade is the nadir, but just as addicts have to bottom out before recovering, maybe we as a society have to bottom out in terms of blood and treasure shed everywhere from our nation's inner cities to the streets of Baghdad before we can begin to move forward.

30 Rock

I don't think there's any question that 30 Rock has eclipsed The Office as the funniest TV show in the Thursday night lineup.  Maybe even on all television.  But I wonder if the laughs are worth it.  After every episode my cheeks hurt, but there's this little disquiet in my heart that taking delight in such deeply cynical material is imperiling my immortal soul.

Take last night's episode, an uproariously funny take on that perennial holiday dilemma, The family is coming to town.  Phyllis Diller plays Jack's evil mother who ruins his Christmas by making it out of Florida and up to New York just ahead of a killer hurricane.  But when Jack meets Liz's relentlessly upbeat and affirming parents, he ditches his Mom for them, in part because he likes them more than his wicked Mother, and in part because he can't quite believe they're really that nice. 

Turns out they aren't.  The old battle ax catches up with Jack and his newly adopted family, and reading her son's mind, sets out to discover and exploit any weaknesses in their sunny disposition.  When she succeeds in provoking a fight between all of them, Mother and Son are reconciled.  The ties of misanthropy that bind the wicked witch to her progeny are stronger than their mutual hatred for each other.

Now that's what Christmas is all about--bringing people together!

I questioned the wisdom of Al Gore appearing on the episode that aired during NBC's "green week."  It's tempting for reformers to make common cause with cynics because the latter can chip away at the veneer of respectability that entrenched interests cloak themselves in. 

But you're playing with fire.  In the end, cynicism reduces virtue and vice to the same level, and when that happens, vice always wins.  So we laugh at the corporate values of greed and stupidity, of which Jack himself is exhibit A, but we also laugh at anyone who appears to be the slightest bit earnest because we can't hear them without seeing them dressed in a green superhero suit.

Still, if I were a politician and I had to choose between getting on TV by sitting in a diner in Des Moines, and between sips of weak coffee, telling my waitress Myrtle, "Yes indeed, ethanol will save us all;" or appearing on a sitcom, well, that's a no-brainer.

Obligatory Pop Culture Post

Because all politics & religion and no play makes Jack a dull boy, I shall now blog about... American Idol! 

I watch neither the Sopranos nor Imus, so, alas, this post is not as cutting edge as it could be, but Idol will have to do. 

(And speaking of Imus, I just assumed that he shot his mouth off because he'd been drinking again.  Doesn't he always do his show drunk?  I don't watch him because I literally cannot understand the man's mumbling bass voice.  And they say we talk funny down here!)

I don't think that Ryan Seacrest was one of America's 50 Most Loathsome People last year.  Not at all.  I like Ryan.  In spite of myself.  There was a time when I would have hated Ryan.  He's a pretty boy, with a gift for gab and a great voice for radio (unlike Imus).  Once I would have assumed that he was shallow.  A Ken doll, just not as smart.

But at a workshop I attended on assessing candidates for ministry, we worked through some of the pitfalls of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.  The facilitator warned us minister types, most of whom are INFPs or INFJs, that just because someone doesn't present as a angst-ridden, shapshifter for social justice and personal healing, you can't assume that he or she is shallow.

Ryan, and many cheerleaders even, may have a rich inner life.  I don't know Ryan Seacrest, but I choose to believe that the man is a Marianas Trench of spiritual insight, intellectual fecundity and great taste in food, drink and music.

Besides, this year he's been wearing suits that Major Nelson might have worn.  Who would have thought that such a forgettable decade in men's formal wear fashion, utterly eclipsed by the counter-culture, could be resurrected!

Paula Abdul is a worthless judge.  She can't do constructive criticism.  At all.  You know you're in trouble with Paula when she begins by saying How Nice You Look.  But that's endearing.  You'd think that only piranhas would be able to achieve the kind of success in recording industry that Paula Abdul has.  It's nice to know that nice people can get ahead there.

Randy is the best judge.  Always a great mix of praise and constructive criticism.  Even if the Yo, Dog, Yo, Yo, gets a bit wearisome.

Simon speaks the truth.  He does not speak the truth in love.  But he always speaks the truth.  And it's not just his truth.  It's the truth in that totalizing, hegemonic metanarrative sort of way.  He's right.  He's always right.  So boo him if you must.  But he's right.

And thus I have written mostly about the judges and the host.  Because the contestants are so bad.  So forgettable.  None of them have really distinguished themselves in terms of personality, or in terms of vocals, except for Melinda, who really should have had a recording contract a long, long, time ago.

Second and Third Thoughts on Postmodernism

President Bush, May 1, 2003:  Mission Accomplished.

President Bush, October 26, 2006:  We're winning in Iraq.

Neil Postman explains:

Many of the President's (that is, Reagan's) "misstatements" fall in the category of contradictions--mutually exclusive assertions that cannot possibly both, in the same context, be true.  "In the same context" is the key phrase here, for it is context that defines contradiction.  There is no problem in someone's remarking that he prefers oranges to apples, and also remarking that he prefers apples to oranges--not if one statement is made in the context of choosing a wallpaper design and the other in the context of selecting fruit for dessert.  In such a case, we have statements that are opposites, but not contradictory.  But if the statements are made in a single, continuous, and coherent context, then they are contradictions, and cannot both be true.  Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context.  Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears.  The point is nowhere made more clearly to me than in my conferences with younger students about their writing.  "Look here," I say.  "In this paragraph you have said one thing.  And in that you have said the opposite.  Which is it to be?"  They are polite, and wish to please, but they are as baffled by the question as I am by the response.  "I know," they will say, "but that is there and this is here."  The difference between us is that I assume "there" and "here," "now" and "then", one paragraph and the next to be connected, to be the part of the same coherent world of thought.  That is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe I'm "coming from," as they say.  But they are coming from a different universe of discourse altogether:  the "Now... this" of television.  The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity.  And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist.

A couple of observations.  First, while nowhere in the book can I find the words "modernity," or "postmodernity," what Postman seems to be describing in his contrast between the typographic world of the 18th century, and the image-oriented world of our time, is a clash between Modern and Postmodern world views. 

The way Postman puts it makes me far less congenial to Postmodernism than I have been.  What ought to give us pause about Postmodernism is that this "world view" or "philosophy" is simply a way of dressing up an intellectually slipshod approach to logic, reason, and coherence of thought. 

Concerning absolute truth, of which Postmodern critics make much, I believe that "The truth is out there," but we are fallen creatures who glimpse it as through a glass darkly.  I don't think that's Postmodern relativism.  I think that's being rightly chastened by a biblical, realistic appraisal of one's own intellectual and moral limits.  Postmodern relativism treats the Truth the way we treat our favorite TV shows.  We can flick through the options, settle on one (or many more than one, thanks to Tivo), and not have to answer for it, because it's our preference.  This Postmodernism is window dressing for intellectual laziness.

Two, I have to admit I was wrong when, in the last election cycle, I observed that President Bush is our first Postmodern President.  Postman shows us that politicians have been getting re-elected in a postmodern milieu for a while now.  It's folks on the political left who seem to be most captivated by Postmodernism, for they can use it a cudgel against the "white male hegemony's" monopoly on the truth.  But it's more and more clear that Postmodernism is also a fine petri dish for growing all sorts of politically reactionary programs.  So take care if you want to hitch your Liberation Theology to a Postmodern Epistemology.  There may not be a bit and bridle out there that can keep that horse on the straight and narrow.