Embracing the Shadow

The Burqa Battle

2010-04-24T07:44:00.005-06:00

The French government is working hard to outdo Swiss legislators in mistaking ethnic uniformity for national unity, crafting laws that are blatantly anti-religious and should, by any who truly value their religious freedoms, be opposed. As America watches this newest miscarriage of justice, it would do well not to imitate it.

The Swiss government's latest anti-Muslim volley banned construction of new minarets, but French President Sarkozy is getting a bit more personal about it by attempting to ban the wearing in public of the burqa, the head-to-toe covering worn by a very small number of Muslim women.

It's important to understand that France has a tortured history in terms of religious freedom. More than any other state in the European sphere, France has striven to be free from religion, at least in its public sphere. Indeed, its cathedrals are mostly museums, relics of a not-so-pretty past in which church and state, priest and provincial governor, ruled hand-in-hand. Even devout church historians have had to admit, belatedly, that it was a bloody bad marriage. The Reformation, at least in part, was an attempt at an amicable divorce.

The roots of official French intolerance reach far into its past. What is now France was once the de facto seat of European power during the Crusades. At the behest and with the blessing of a succession of Popes, French antecedents led the vast armies that marched to the Middle East to wrest the "Holy Land" from Muslim control.

Until the the crusaders arrived, Christians, Muslims and Jews had, for the most part, shared Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, traded with one another, and managed to live in relative peace. You wouldn't know it to look at the world today, but 'tis true: Muslim rulers, in obedience to the Prophet's declaration that Muslims, Christians and Jews were all "People of the Book," managed to be a bit more tolerant than either the modern-day French or Swiss.

That relatively peaceful epoch, of course, went out the window after European Christians swept like waves of locusts over the Middle East, killing not only Muslims, but Jews and fellow Byzantine Christians as well. The problems we live with in the Middle East now, we owe to those faithful churchmen who forever made the word infidel into an epithet. Europeans led by pre-French royals — not the Muslims — ignited the holy war that still rages in Palestine.

The Crusades were only the most spectacular of the many excesses of a wedded church and state. Secularists in France, seeking to undo the damage done, did what people often do when confronted with extremes: They had an extreme reaction. It's culmination was the French Revolution, every bit as bloody and mindless as the Crusades (albeit confined to France). Although the public thirst for the guillotine waned, that reactive mindset is still a foundational characteristic in French politics. France, above all, seeks its security, and French identity, in a profoundly secularist worldview.

That's the background for the current "ban the burqa" crusade. Polls indicate that only one-third of the French public actually supports such legislation. Another one-third favors a less restrictive law, in which, for security reasons, a burqa-clad woman might be required to unveil her face to abet proper identification. That means that another third oppose the restriction or have no opinion (see, for example, this article in the The Washington Post). But the total ban has the ardent support of the far right in France (political descendents of those who marched on the Holy Land and, frankly, those who accommodated Hitler in Vichy France).

Sarkozy has attempted to "sell" the law on the pretext that it protects women. Let me make clear that there is something to that argument. It is no secret that some groups within Islam would like to see all women forced to wear them. This same sort of group was behind the throwing of acid in little Afghani girls' faces because they had the audacity to want to go to school (one important reason why America and its allies are involved in the country — something those who oppose our efforts there as a "lost cause" conveniently forget). It is no doubt true that some women wear the burqa or other hair covering out of fear — fear even of their own husband's physical punishment. But it is also true that these groups do not make up the mainstream of Muslim opinion. And Mr. Sakozy's argument ignores the fact that a growing number of educated and otherwise fully empowered Muslim women are electing to wear head scarves and even the burqa as a religious duty — nay, as their freely adopted sign of devotion to Islam.

While the French government might rightly seek to help a Muslim woman escape from a burqa she is forced to wear, it must also, if it claims to safeguard freedom, affirm a Muslim woman's right to choose the burqa. One does not need to be a fan of the burqa or Islam to see the essential rightness of this in a free society. Any law that does not affirm and accommodate both realities is doomed to fail and is certain to further divide the nation that seeks, by that law, to be unified.

Sarkozy is right to oppose the oppression of women. But he is wrong to assume that the burqa is, by definition, an instrument of oppression. The reality is much more complicated, as reality almost always is. When we simply react, and seek no means to temper our fear and anger with wisdom and perspective, that with which we are angry ultimately controls us. In savage irony, we become what we oppose. We substitute tyranny for tyranny. A blanket anti-burqa law becomes, in its effect, just a bloodless and "civilized" attempt at what, in the Balkans and Africa, we might label "ethnic cleansing." And it is sure to be seen as such by Muslims now resident in France.

Indeed, despite Sarkozy's attempts to veil the burqa legislation in "women's rights" cloth, the law is actually one thread in the far right's overall mission: to more narrowly define what it means to be French. In the 2oth Century, Arabs, Persians and Palestinians were welcomed to France during prosperous times, to do the jobs French citizens preferred not to do. The French were glad to have them, and the newcomers were glad to accept better jobs than they were likely to find in their troubled home countries. Many, indeed, sought citizenship and planted deep economic and social roots. But by the 1990s, a faltering economy in France had dried up many of those jobs and, as displaced peoples are wont to do when they are suddenly poor and marginalized in their adopted land, many latecomers returned to the religion of their youth for comfort and security. The resulting unrest and the return to Islam alarmed the French far right, and the burqa has been politicized as a symbol of what is not French.

It's not difficult to make application to the current American political scene. It is easy to latch onto a simplistic view of national life ("America is a Christian nation," for example) and thus stir up the fears and encourage the anger that undergird the current "populist" uprisings. Fueled from the American far right by a litany of groundless and overblown fears, a growing number of Americans want simple answers to complex questions, and thus imperil the very foundations they seek to protect. (Obama as a"closet" Muslim, is groundless, for example, while the fact that "whites" soon will be out-numbered by so-called "people of color"— as if the latter were some kind of white-hating monolithic voting block — is an example of overblown.)

Those who call themselves Christians (I am among them) would do well to study Europe's past and present errors, and then resist the populist impulse to press (again) our own simplistic template of uniformity over the vast and complex diversity of American life — a template that ultimately includes only those who agree with "us" and excludes those who don't. It's the very stuff of the world's troubles — many of which our crusading Christian ancestors authored. And troubles that, history tells us without exception, are ultimately self-destructive.

If we insist on a Christian America (particularly a "white" one), and cannot regard those with whom we share the Scriptures — and those who read other "holy books" or have none at all — with not only tolerance, but love as well, then we have already lost the battle. To glimpse our future, we need only tour the empty cathedrals of France.

Obamacare Will Land You in Jail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-04-16T11:56:00.011-06:00

OK, now that I have your attention, let me first say that the above is absolutely not true. Sorry, I know its a cheap trick, but had I written, "Let's Take a Calm Look at Health Care Reform," you probably wouldn't be reading this. I'm hoping that those attracted here by that sensational headline will let the intended irony sink all the way in and then do themselves the favor of reading further.

The Republican party and its de facto media wing, FOX News — no strangers to cheap-trick headlines — took one of their own to task this week — Republican Senator Tom Coburn — at a recent town hall event in Oklahoma. Coburn had the temerity to say something reasonably respectful about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (and got booed). Then, when someone asked him about the possibility that people could be imprisoned for not buying health insurance under the recently passed Obama plan, he compounded his sin by trying to dispel the persistent rumor.

“The intention is not to put anybody in jail," Coburn explained, adding, "That makes for good TV news on FOX, but that isn't the intention.” If you're not familiar with the event, see this. Coburn, of course, paid dearly in the right-leaning press for his effort to disengage from Party of No rhetoric, after his FOX comment hit the airwaves and the Internet. And FOX News personality Bill O'Reilly categorically denied that anyone had ever said such a thing on a FOX program.

In this article, however, TIME magazine online blogger Kate Pickert reviewed FOX transcripts and found that, indeed, FOX personalities had given the "go to jail if you don't buy insurance" rumor plenty of exposure on several occasions. (Pickert also point out, for the record, that the new health care law specifically forbids jailing anyone who refuses to buy health insurance.)

To me, the most astonishing thing is not that right-wingers are so intent on misrepresenting the law, but that they are so upset by the idea of compulsory insurance in the first place. Opponents of "Obamacare" frequently appeal to the U.S. Constitution, claiming that the idea is a violation of their inalienable rights. But here in Colorado, if I want to own a car, I must buy auto insurance and that insurance must adhere to certain coverage standards. When I register my vehicle, I must sign a statement on the back of the registration certificate, which is preceded by warnings about the penalties established by law for noncompliance.

"Motor vehicle insurance is compulsory in Colorado," it declares at the top and then goes on to warn in bold type, "Non-compliance is a misdemeanor traffic offense. The minimum penalty for such offense is a five hundred dollar fine. The maximum penalty for such offense is one-year imprisonment and a one-thousand dollar fine [italics mine]." Further, I must sign a statement, declaring that I swear or affirm, on penalty of perjury (a separate offense that also can carry jail time), that I have purchased said insurance.

Auto insurance is, in fact, compulsory in most U.S. states. Many prescribe revocation of driving privileges and potential jail time for those who don't comply.

Now, I don't know where the Party of No and Tea Party folks were when their states took away their "right" to be uninsured drivers, but they can't blame that one on President Obama. And the fact that their home state government might put them in jail if they let their car insurance lapse ought to give the states-righters among them reason to rethink the secessionist rhetoric.

But the point is this: These U.S. states have made auto insurance compulsory because the costs imposed on society by uninsured drivers were very high. Those who responsibly insured themselves ended up shouldering the cost, in the form of higher rates, of the property-damage, medical and accidental-death judgments that their insurance companies were unable to collect from the uninsured. Because it was both unreasonable and unfair to penalize the responsible for the actions of the irresponsible (something a Teabagger really ought to resonate with), these states enacted compulsory auto insurance laws. Having every car owner in the insurance pool keeps rates down and ensures that all are protected against financial devastation when accidents happen. Does this argument sound familiar?

It should. This is the simple, sensible solution to high costs that Congressional health care reform advocates have sought for decades. What some see as a "government takeover" of health care is merely a long-overdue effort to regulate it, just like car insurance is regulated. The concept is neither new nor radical nor socialist — it's hard to make a case for it being "unAmerican" when so many Americans already dutifully comply with such a law every time they write that car insurance check. And in the case of health insurance — despite what the rumormongers still insist on telling us — there's no threat of jail time. So ... why all the angst?

Here's an idea: Let's take a calm look at health care reform.

Contract From (disaffected, white) America

2010-04-15T08:42:00.014-06:00

The NY Times reported the results of a poll, yesterday, indicating that those who identify with the "Tea Party" movement are predominately well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle class Americans. They also are predominately white, male, Republican (not a surprise) and married.

In the same issue, the NY Times reports on a new Contract From America, an allusion to the Newt Gingrich-led Republican effort called the Contract with America, which the G.O.P. took to the electorate in 1994 and recaptured control of Congress. Unlike the Contract with America, the Contract From America, as its name implies, is described by its compilers as coming "direct from the American people," rather than from elected officials in Washington. More precisely, the Contract actually comes from a segment of the American far right: The document was reportedly developed by polling some 450,000 Tea Party adherents.

The new Tea Party-inspired Contract asks candidates for public office — those who want Tea Party votes, anyway — to sign off on all of the following ten CFA planks (you can read the Contract at www.thecontract.org):

1) Tea Party candidates must seek to pass legislation that would require the authors of each bill before Congress to identify the "specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to do what that bill does." This one was supported by 82 percent of the CFA surveyees. Tea Partiers need to take another look at the Constitution's Section 8 before they get to excited: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States ... (italics mine)." Two centuries of U.S. judicial review have, of necessity, defined this "general welfare" clause in terms of our country's people (the government is, of course,"of the people, by the people and for the people"). And the trend has been to apply general welfare provisions to all its people, thus, landmark pieces of civil rights legislation. That clause includes the possibility that the federal government might want to help out with things like health care for people who cannot afford it. It's important to note, also, that there is nothing in the Constitution that specifically mentions (let alone favors) free-market economics. In fact, the "Powers" section specifically gives Congress permission to impose and collect duties and other taxes designed to control market activity. The Constitution, from the get go, was not a "free-market" document. We've never had "free-markets." In fact, the Constitution implies just the opposite, that there need to be some government controls. I'm no socialist, but there also is nothing in the Constitution which prohibits socialism, should the American people so choose it. Americans are free, of course, to oppose socialism. But it's not (sorry, Ms. Palin) specifically "unAmerican." Plank #1 really won't change things much. According to the Constitution the Tea Party folks are so anxious to protect, the Founding Fathers they revere anticipated questions of constitutionality and built into our system of government a mechanism for testing it. It's called the federal judidiary at the pinnacle of which sits the Supreme Court. (Also see plank#7).

2) Pols who want Tea Party votes must "reject cap-and-trade regulation of climate-warming gases." The CFA sees cap-and-trade as a strategy that will increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken U.S. global competitiveness, while making little difference in greenhouse gas emissions. CFA says 70 percent of the respondents called for this one. But even if Tea partiers are right and climate and environmental scientists who actually have done research into this are wrong, the job losses Tea Partiers predict from cap-and-trade enactment are unlikely to be anywhere near as severe as the unemployment epidemic that will follow combined action on planks 3, 6, 7, 9 & 10. Cap-and-trade actually is a very good way for companies that responsibly reduce the carbon footprint to reap a windfall by selling their carbon credits to those who don't, and cover the costs of doing so. It introduces a competitive advantage for those who act responsibly. Capitalism at its best.

3) Tea Party candidates must seek to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget and require a two-thirds majority in Congress for every tax increase. Has anyone been watching the fiscal circus in California the last two years? Taxpayer initiatives in this and a number of other states, have tied the hands of legislators during the downturn, precipitating cuts to and shut downs of vital services, among them public security and education. Tea Party people apparently see this outcome as a good thing, and want to (sorry, I can't resist) californicate the whole country (also see plank #5).

4) Candidates must press for a "simple and fair single-tax system" that can be described in a document no longer than the Constitution (a little more than 4,500 words). Cute, and frankly, I'm OK with this, personally. Most years, I could fill out the 1040EZ anyway. My life is not very complicated. But will well-to-do Tea Partiers really consider "fair" a tax code devoid of the myriad personal and corporate tax shelters and loopholes to which they and their armies of accountants have become accustomed? And think of the devastation this will wreak on said bean counters, who owe their profitable livelihoods to our current IRS code?

5) This one calls for a Blue Ribbon panel that will audit all federal programs for constitutionality, effectiveness and waste. Actually, this is mostly a good idea. But Mr. Obama had the idea first. Minus the constitutionality thrust (which is covered by the judiciary; see plank #1), he ran on this idea, remember? But both the Party of No and his fellow Democrats nipped that idea in the bud. Politicians and their constituents only want the other guy's programs cut (see plank #9). And who's to sit on this panel, anyway? Who picks these folks? The U.S. Senate can't even approve people to head minor government agencies or sit on a federal court bench without some Senator sitting on the appointment for six months or threatening a filibuster. What makes the Tea Party think there's a chance in the world that such a panel will ever be formed, much less that its members could actually agree about a program's merits?

6) Tea Party candidates must also impose a cap on the rate of government spending growth. This provision will be unnecessary if the Tea Party passes its balanced budget amendment. Since one-third or better of the economy is currently dependent on government spending, cuts to government programs will make the 2009 recession's and the Great Depression's unemployment rates look like good times by comparison. The effect on the economy will be immediate and devastating — just as it has been in California, where taxpayer-driven balanced budget initiatives (noted in plank #3) and forced cuts have helped drive California unemployment to levels far higher than in the rest of the country). Tax revenues will plummet, and the government spending will have to plummet along with the plunging revenues. Costing more jobs, of course. We'll all lose our shirts, but we'll have a balanced budget. The only way to reduce the budget deficit without running everyone's life in the process to grow the economy by encouraging job creation, collecting the increased tax revenue, carefully ratcheting back on costs (via such measures as health care reform, which concerns another 30 percent of the GDP) and, sorry, by raising additional revenues. If you're not willing to raise revenues, then your only other choice, if you truly want to balance the budget and keep it under control, is to go after Social Security. Like that's going to happen.

7) Tea Party vote getters must also "defund and repeal" the recently passed "government-run" health care legislation and replace it with an "open, competitive and transparent free-market" health care system and an insurance system "unrestricted by state boundaries." First off, the government didn't run it before, and it doesn't run it now. Second, Tea Partiers favored, in a recent poll of 2012 Presidential hopefuls, none other than Gov. Mitt Romney, who championed a health care plan very similar to the Obama plan in his home state (no one, to my knowledge, not even newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Brown, has yet proposed a repeal). Beyond the inaccuracy and inconsistency of Tea Party pronouncements on this subject, the more serious flaw in Tea Party reasoning here is that, apart from the state boundary limitations, what they're proposing is essentially what got us into the current health-care crisis in the first place. Are Tea Partiers really willing to go regress to a scenario in which insurance companies could cancel the policies of those who actually use the insurance, and exclude the most needy from coverage? If the Tea Party gets its way, insurance eventually will be accessible only to those who can afford to pay for most of their health care straight up, and largely unavailable to those who most need this social safety net. Here's what I don't understand: In the last century, state governments enacted laws that forced all car owners to carry insurance. Why? Because the costs imposed on society by medical and property damage claims involving a growing number of uninsured drivers were rising and becoming unmanageable. The costs of carrying the uninsured were ultimately laid on taxpayers (or added to public debt, which is the same thing) and therefore negatively affected Tea Partiers, whether they were aware of it or not. There were no mass protests when auto insurance was made compulsory. And those who do not comply don't just pay a fine (not a tax) but they also lose their driving privileges. And those laws have kept insurance rates remarkably stable. There is no difference whatsoever between that and requiring that all people who want health care buy some kind of health insurance. Including everyone in the insurance pool is the only way to control the individual's insurance costs. The risk must be spread over the broadest possible cross-section of society. No issue before the Congress in recent years has better met the Tea Party's test for "constitutionality" than health care reform. If the rising costs of health care and the fact that 47 million people have no insurance aren't matters of "general welfare" then nothing is, and the Constitution becomes a piece of brittle parchment full of hollow promises.

8) Tea Partiers want Congress to authorize exploration of "proven energy reserves" to reduce dependence on "foreign energy sources from unstable countries" and "reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation." Since this sounds a bit like something written by one of the folks that makes up the so-called Washington elite, I'll translate: "Proven energy reserves" means oil, presumably oil within U.S. borders. "Foreign energy sources" means imported oil. "All other forms of energy creation" include coal and nuclear. Both the Bush and Obama Administrations have actively supported (not just removed barriers to) alternative energy sources (solar, wind, bio-fuels) and Mr. Obama recently stepped up to support both new offshore drilling for oil and nuclear redevelopment. No major hydroelectric project has been prevented by regulatory barriers that I know of. The U.S. has been bullish on hydropower (a pro-hydro agenda that dates from President Roosevelt's (another socialist, by Tea Party standards) Depression Era Works Progress Admin. The Tea Party is strong in Nevada, but apparently has forgotten that Nevada owes both its water and its electric power to a socialist project, the Hoover Dam. (Ironic, eh?) So what we're left with is leaves coal, the other big polluter, which is what this is really about (revisit plank #2).

9) The Tea Party also wants a moratorium on Congressional earmarks until the budget is balanced and thereafter, earmarks require a two-thirds majority. This one made me laugh. Congress has recently passed bills designed to create jobs in the wake of the recession, and that has obscured for the moment what Tea Partiers don't seem to get: Congress has always been about the business of job creation. That's what pork is for. I wonder how many of those Tea Party folks have yet to realize that their reasonably secure jobs depend, at least indirectly, on the earmarked government dollars that their Senators and Representatives bring home to their state or district? If we cut all the pork projects tomorrow, a lot of Tea Party folks would find that their jobs — the ones they have been so worried would be shipped overseas — would simply disappear into the ether of Congressional inaction and gridlock. While we're on the subject of job protection, I'd just like to point our that in the Tea Party's free market, shipping your job overseas is something your employer is, well ... free to do, right? Either the market is free, and employers and Wall Street bankers can do whatever they think is necessary to increase profits and reduce costs — and we live with the bubbles and the bursts from their unrestrained greed — or the market isn't free. You can't have it both ways. Tea Partiers want to be free-marketeers only when it's someone else's job on the line.

10) Finally, the Tea Party wants a "permanent repeal of all tax hikes scheduled to begin in 2011." Let's look at the recent history on that. Politicians from both parties were so fearful of offending voters in the last two decades, that leaders of both parties have consistently proposed and approved tax cuts. this was done during an economic bubble when, presumably, they could have raised taxes a bit without too much pain and done something about controlling the then much smaller yearly budget shortfall. Far from favoring the poor, those cuts benefited most those who need tax cuts least, those in the upper middle and $200,000+ income circles in which many well-educated, successful Tea Party folk travel. Now that the bubble bash is over and we're struggling to pay the bills for the free-market excesses that got Tea Partiers where they are (and also brought retribution when the bubble burst), they want to repeal the Obama Admin.'s comparatively mild efforts to match taxation to our economic reality?

Tea Party folks may be well-educated in their narrow fields of endeavor and experience, but they appear to lack "big picture" knowledge of the political systems they hope to reform. They represent a conservative slice of the U.S. population that, unfettered by impediments such as unusual national or religious heritage, skin color and/or English as a second language, have established solid careers and settled lives in the predominant white establishment. They, therefore, have had little contact with the negative underside of public policy until recently, and, therefore, little real interest into looking into it (a common refrain among Tea Partiers is that, until recently, they "haven't paid much attention to politics"). While their recently piqued interest in the political sphere is laudable, there is a regrettable gap in their knowledge that explains, in part, the vagaries and inconsistencies in the CFA platform.

But lack of knowledge doesn't explain it by half. Let's forget the uncomfortable facts: that a vocal segment of the Tea Party movement supports the formation of citizen militias to "protect" them from their own federal government, that Tea Party adherents applaud secessionist rhetoric, and that Tea Party folks privately admit and sometimes publicly proclaim that their dislike of President Obama, in particular, goes beyond policy and politics and is rooted in race. It's no secret that white America is soon to become an American minority group. Under the veneer of Tea Party anger lies a vast reservoir of fear. It's what's left after all that is stripped away, however, that really is the crux of this matter. The fact that the CFA document was drafted for presentation on April 15th says it all: The Tea Party, for all it's concern about budgets and proper government function, is really motivated by the thing that motivates their "free" markets. Money. They believe that the current administration favors the poor and discriminates against the middle and upper income folks. It's my money. I earned, and I want to keep it. I don't want it to go to people who didn't earn it.

The Tea Party faithful want their government to work on a balanced budget, but have no intention of paying for it with any of their money. They want to safeguard their jobs in an ailing economy, but want to slash or kill government programs that support jobs and underpin a large portion of that economy. They want to tie their government's hands with two-thirds majority requirements that will stifle their government's ability to govern and will certainly prevent any action to alleviate the devastating financial and human costs that will certainly follow in the wake of the next economic bubble, which will surely come and burst spectucularly, if the Tea Party's "free" market becomes a reality.

The (not-so) Great Reversal

2010-01-24T07:41:00.015-07:00

The Main streeters who propelled Mr. "with all due respect ,it's not the Kennedy's seat or the Democrats' seat but it's the people's seat" Brown into the late Sen. Kennedy's former seat in Massachusetts put the fitting capper on a week that will surely go down in infamy.

They will now have to deal with the fact that it is not their seat, but a Republican seat, and that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's latest piece of rampant judicial activism, that seat ultimately will belong to the corporate interests most interested in keeping the gambling casino we call Wall Street out of the range of their populist anger.

Within a few days of the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court, this time a bare 5-4 conservative majority, has perpetrated on the American political landscape one of the worst cases of judicial activism on record, second only to Roe vs. Wade itself. Deeply ironic, in that it comes from jurists steeped in anti-activist court history. I can only wonder what rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the poster boy for Republican strict constructionists, might say?

As it did in 1973, the court has taken a small case, on which it could have ruled narrowly (and by all that is legally right, should have, given 100 years of legal and judicial precedent) and has overturned an entire body of law that, until this week, prevented corporations from directly funding political campaigns. The parallels with Roe vs. Wade should make it one of the most astonishingly and unexpected political reversals of this century, just as Roe vs. Wade was in the last.

What we now have is this unspeakable dichotomy:

A human, because it is alive and kicking but has the misfortune still to reside in its mother's womb, is not a person, but a corporation, which is a legal fiction for tax purposes, is. A corporation is now accorded full constitutional rights as a human being.

That "person" is now free to spend other people's money (the investors' cash) to promote a politcal agenda without having to ask the investors. Republican Newt Gingrich, with a logic that is best described as tortured, was thrilled by the decision. He defended this state of affairs by saying that all we need is to have corporations report on the Internet how much they spend and for what, and that that would make it fine. Never mind how that would make it fine. Mr. Gingrich imagines a world that will never be. Who will require this of them? The Supreme Court decision makes no mention of reporting obligations. More important, Who would oversee such reporting, ensuring that it is accurate and complete? Any liberal attempt to make the U.S. government the watchdog on corporate political contributions will be shouted down by Mr. Gingrich and his anti-Big Government cohort.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. And what makes it sooooo tragic is that this is a common sense issue that any preschool kid could rule on: Put before a four-year-old a mother with child and a stack of incorporation papers. Ask the child to examine both. The child will be delighted to put its hand to the mom's belly and feel the strong kicks of the little life within. But she or he will be briefly puzzled, at best, by the stack of paper, in part, because the child can't read, but also because that little pile is so obviously ... lifeless. Asked which is a human being, the baby not yet born, or the corporation represented by the stack of paper, could there possibly be any doubt about what the child will say?

You have to be an adult, and apparently also a Republican, to see it the other way around.

Even John McCain, was moved out of lockstep with his fellow Republicans. He briefly took up his "maverick" persona (so quickly jettisoned after his election defeat) to express worry about the effects the decision will have. Good luck with that. Now the corporate political contribution, like abortion, is a sacred right, protected by the First Amendment, any new law you pass will be struck down as unconstitutional.

You Teabaggers? Guess what? The moneyed fat cats just did an end-run on you. While you were electing your truck-driving, pretty-boy Republican (whose previous claim to fame was that he posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine), his Republican pals on the highest court were hijacking the electoral process, using the same tactics they've loudly opposed since 1973.

In one 10-day period, the already remote possibility for any meaningful health care reform and the likelihood that any truly meaningful reform of Wall Street banking practices were struck mortal blows by one local election and a single court decision. Gone with them is the likelihood that Main Street can ever again (if it ever could) count on Mr. Brown, Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama or any other politician to truly represent their individual interests.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You're the same folks who sit everyday with your faces glued to your TV screens, letting the Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks and other talking heads — show-business personalities, for God's sake — define and dictate the terms of public policy debate. You're the same folks who consider Conan O'Brien, who is walking away a very, very fat cat, with his $30 million severance from the Tonight Show to add to the millions he's already made on late-night TV, a folk hero.

Hell, people, don't you get it? Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Conan O'Brien — they're all rich people. They're not Main Streeters. They have a vested interest in keeping money and power to themselves.

Do you really still think that the Republican party cares a fig what you think?

This is the party that controlled Congress and, for eight years, the White House, during the time that your Main Street jobs were exported to Mexico, China and Malaysia by corporations.

This is the party that resisted with all its might any effort to develop alternative energy technologies that could be creating millions of new jobs right now had President Reagan not defunded the research back in the 1980s. ("Drill, Baby, drill" was the "maverick" Republican position in the last Presidential election, so we can only guess what diehard Republicans and their oil & gas corporation pals might have been shouting). Oil companies are among the largest of the corporations that will hugely benefit from the Supreme Court's decision!

This is the party who calls the Obama Administration's extensive and largely successful effort to encourage an effective multi-lateral campaign, so far, against the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan "soft on terror." President Bush, for all his trying, couldn't do even that in eight years.

This is the party that, for those eight years under Mr. Bush, quietly privatized a good deal of U.S. military capability. Blackwater (recently in the news because several of its operatives were suspected of murdering civilians in Iraq) and other private contractors now conduct roughly half of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. These corporations now collect billions of dollars from the U.S. defense budget. (You didn't know that, did you? Sorry, it's quite true.) Anybody care to guess what might happen if some of those billions are spent influencing the electoral process? Do we really want a political process in which the military (public or private) can buy an election?

This is the party that still believes Republican President Herbert Hoover's "do-nothing" economic policy would somehow have prevented the Great Depression when, in fact, the banking crisis of 1932 (just like the banking crisis of 2008-2009) was a direct result of government inaction?

This is the party that has made its single policy goal in 2009 the failure of the American presidency.

This is the party that, this month, finally betrayed its true allegiance for all to see, using one of the most egregious examples in American history of what it for so long rightly decried as "legislation from the bench" not to protect your interests, but to sell them out to the folks you swore in Mr. Obama just one year ago to oppose. How convenient. What a self-betrayal. It's truly stunning. One cannot overstate the enormity of it.

Now corporations won't just control the elected officials with its phalanx of lobbyists who bribe, blackmail and sleep with Senators and Representatives inside the Beltway. They'll control the elections themselves. The beauty of it is, they don't even have to control them all. As Mr. Brown's victory this week in Massachusetts demonstrates. they just need to make a few examples. The insurance industry, for example, could go after a single high-profile U.S. senator favorable to a provision they didn't like. They spend a pot of money to fund thier own candidate and drown out the incumbent's campaign with attack ads. They only need to take out one long-standing committee chair. A Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. A John McCain. The rest of the Senate gets the clear message, and votes accordingly.

And if you remain as guileless and gullible as you are now, my Main Street Teabagger friend, they'll control you, too.

One thing's sure. Things are looking up:

Your taxes will go up, because the corporations aren't going to be too wild about shifting the tax burden from you to them.

Your health insurance premiums will go up, and the number of uninsured will continue to climb, probably at a much faster pace, because corporations will make sure they're unburdened from the trouble of supplying you insurance as a benefit.

The number of companies "too big to fail" will go up, because the larger the corporations become, the easier it will be for be for them to dictate state and local legislative changes that will tip the competitive playing field in their direction. Ultimately, inconveniences like anti-trust legislation will go by the boards. If the corporate execs can't get Congress to overturn it soon enough — in the very unlikely case that some legislators actually grow backbones and oppose them — they can always just hit the delete button with a first amendment ruling from the high bench. How soon we forget that had it not been for populist legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, we'd long ago have had the corporate hegemony that the Supreme Court just made possible. (Teabaggers claim to be following in the footsteps of a great movement in U.S. pre-history, but precious few of them seem to be at all acquainted with that history.)

The cost of the next bailout will go up, and there will be one, because there will be nothing to stop Wall Street from designing inventive ways to tempt investors to gamble with money they can't afford to lose and corporations who were too big to fail this time will be even bigger. The bubbles will continue to come and burst, and you Main Streeters will foot the bill for the clean-up, one way or another.

And your cost of living will go up, because, of course, corporations have to protect their investors by showing profitable quarterly reports, so you'll soon see those few corporations that gobble up their weaker competitors and come to dominate the economic landscape inch your prices up, ensuring that you're ever in debt — and more to the point, in their debt.

The Climate Change Conundrum

2009-11-21T15:45:00.028-07:00

In one sense, I'm neutral in the climate-change debate. I have no access to the data, so I don't "know" what is true. But in the run up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming, I followed the news frenzy surrounding it with great interest, because I'm convinced that at no time since the Cold War's period of nuclear brinksmanship have the stakes for humanity as a whole seemed higher on a single use.

Based on geological evidence and climate data (temperature and other measurements recorded around the world since 1850), a large majority of climatologists have come to two stark conclusions. First, that we are in a period of global warming. The primary cause for this warming, they say, is an increase in "greenhouse gas" (primarily carbon dioxide or CO2) levels in Earth's atmosphere. Second, although geological evidence indicates that our world has been subject to periodic warming and cooling cycles, climate experts say this particular period of warming is, to some degree, fueled by carbon dioxide emissions generated by human technology coupled with human destruction of natural carbon storage mechanisms, such as rain forests.

The pace of warming and the degree to which the resulting climate change might alter our world is a matter of scientific conjecture — enlightened and informed conjecture, but conjecture nonetheless. We have no human record of another time like this in recorded history. Therefore, we have no precedent to which we can appeal. Hence, we face a conundrum.

People don't like conundrums, they prefer certainties. So as a political issue, global warming is proving to be difficult to manage in the public square. Those for and against the climate-change theory have drawn some predictable battle lines:

A large group of about 30,000 scientists and environmentalists (including a few tree-spikers who would rather see a lumberjack than a tree cut down) now believe that climate change is primarily the result of human agency. They point out that the average global temperature has recently, if I heard correctly, risen by one degree. Although that single degree sounds like "not much" to the lay person, these same scientists warn that a couple of degrees higher, on average, is likely to raise the ocean levels several meters and radically alter the climate. Some even predict utter disaster, spinning scenarios of domino-effect environmental crises — drought, famine, huge displacements of animal (including human) populations, pandemic disease, and finally, massive extinctions of plant and animals — that will lay waste to the planet's ecosystem and human civilization as we know it.

On the other hand, some scientists, inside and outside the climatology community (including a few funded by those most likely to lose if the battle goes the wrong way, such as oil companies) have cried foul, claiming variously that global warming is a fraud or, at best, a misreading of the data. Many attempt to discredit climatologists' climate-change research and/or discredit their conclusions. They have been joined by a motley crew of self-styled populists, including right-wing politicians and pseudo-libertarian TV performers, who add climate change to a long list of items that Liberals, Big Government and Obama have foisted on Main Street.

One of the roots of the debate is whether or not humans have the right to consider themselves more important than the other species in earth's ecosystem. For many environmentalists, our ecosystem is fragile, and its delicate balance must be maintained. To many of them, humans are the villains, aggressors who upset that balance and are to blame for most of the eco-ills we now face. Things for some have taken on the tone of a religious crusade: For the radical environmentalist, it's only a matter of time before Gaia herself rises to smite we human transgressors in just retribution if we do not radically change our ways. A smaller number, much like the most radical Islamists, aren't waiting for Gaia to do her work. They're ramming Japanese whaling vessels and performing other acts of eco-terror. No surprise, then, that some global warming apologists call those who disagree "deniers" — an obvious, calculated effort to set those who doubt climate-change science alongside those who doubt the reality of the Holocaust.

For naysayers, the earth is not so fragile, but is instead an ever-shifting, adaptive system that readily adjusts to what they argue is inevitable change. They cite a growing number of instances in which scientists have been wrong: Famously, the snail darter, a point of contention between eco-protectors and naysayers a while back, did not suffer extinction as eco-scientists predicted but instead flourished when their native habitat was "ravaged" by a hydroelectric project. These folks argue that Nature herself uses catastrophic change in positive ways: Notably, the lessons learned by foresters in the great Yellowstone Park fire. Foresters now use "planned" burns and "thinning" techniques to preserve the health of forests. Evidence such as this, the naysayers contend, shows that the eco-saviors are often wrong, and therefore, their "science" cannot be trusted.

What is undeniable is that global warming conundrum is a global issue. Representatives from more than 190 countries attended the Copenhagen congress — a meeting most who were there now admit was an almost abject failure. But the attention paid to the event, alone, indicates that the issue of global warming is the 21st Century's first great cause celebre. As in all such instances, the publicity surrounding it has directed outsized attention not only to those who compiled the data and published the conclusions on climate change but also to those who promote and castigate those results. There are papers to publish, speaking tours to negotiate. Talk show appearances. Egos and reputations are on the line. And, yes, there are paydays. Climate-change proponents and naysayers together have spawned a huge industry. It has generated books, TV programs, movies and become the substance of political careers.

There is considerable pressure to fan the flames of controversy when there are so many careers and dollars at stake. Controversy sells newspapers, and hype boosts the ratings of TV news organizations (their editors are desperate to save media models that in the Internet age might have outlived their utility). That does not make the climate change theorists or their detractors right or wrong, but it does whip up more than a little crusading zeal among the partisans. All this should prompt us Main Streeters to consider carefully and weigh with some skepticism the claims made on both sides.

The naysayers got a bit of a boost from the recent revelation of e-mails and other documents (3,000 or so, in all) hacked from the computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. The hacker's timing couldn't have been better, with Copenhagen just around the corner.

I find it particularly puzzling that no one seems to be interested in finding out who released those e-mails. You'd think the people whose e-mails were exposed would be howling for an investigation. Hacking is a crime. And discovery of a "denier" behind the hack would help level the public-relations playing field for the beleaguered e-mailers, two of whom have had to temporarily relinquish their posts pending investigations into their conduct by their respective universities.

The two gentlemen appear now to be in a bit of a pinch. The e-mails suggest there was an effort to evade requests for data disclosure under Freedom of Information laws in the U.K. and U.S. Refusing to honor a properly filed request under the Freedom of Information Acts also is a crime. I've begun to wonder if the "hack" was actually the work of a climate-change insider, (a disaffected climatologist?) who might be portrayed by "deniers" as a whistle-blower. Time will tell.

In any case, when the stakes in the debate are so high, it is tempting to bend the rules and plot the demise of the opposition — a temptation I think might have been too much for the scientists behind the e-mails. The paydays, influence and accolades continue only so long as the data support your conclusions. Scientists who are critical of current climate science are not being unfairly critical to suggest that there might also have been attempts to deny other scientists the right to publish. The quality of scholarship that results from a peer review process is, like anything else, dependent on the honesty of those who control the process. I think obstructionist activity in peer review should give all of us pause.

The e-mails made abundantly clear that the climate-change folks aren't interested in making their data public. Why? What possible harm could come from releasing all the raw data to anyone who requests it? If the raw facts, such as temperature measurements, support the claim that we are, indeed, warming, that would only help their cause. Right?

Well, maybe. Trouble is, the old saw, "Let the facts speak for themselves," is an attractive maxim, but has little basis in fact. In the real world, facts are just facts. Consider the recently hacked e-mails: The various news reports and commentators quoted identical texts of an e-mail verbatim but from there, it was difficult to believe they're talking about the same data. Some saw a plot to deceive the larger scientific community and us plain good folk on Main Street. Others saw nothing more than the crass side-comments of good scientists who privately betrayed that they, too, are human and can make bad decisions under duress. Each group found what it was looking for.

Add to that that much of the raw climate data is just ... numbers. I've had several friends who have been forced to take statistics courses in college. They've each told me the same story. Day one, the statistics prof stands up and says statistics are just statistics. They don't say anything. They must be interpreted. And often can be interpreted in many ways. The science of statistics is, well, actually a very difficult art. Thus, there are, as one e-mailer noted, "tricks" to help hide inconvenient statistical truths.

Just as the pols and pundits drew different conclusions from the data the hackers unearthed, so scientists have drawn different conclusions from the statistical climate data. We shouldn't be surprised by this: It's inevitable when folks come to the fray with political, social and, yes, metaphysical predispositions that no doubt cloud objectivity.

On that note, I am puzzled by a paradox of no small proportion: A number of religious folk have aligned themselves with the doubters, primarily out of a general distrust for science and anything else that smacks of "secular humanism" or is tainted by Darwinism, while many atheists are numbered among those prepared to call for unprecedented sacrifice to prevent a holocaust that in no way impacts an eternal future in which they don't believe they'll have any share. I would have imagined it the other way around. I continue to ponder this strange reality with awful wonder.

Although there are the deniers — those who refuse to believe we're warming at all, there is a growing group of naysayers (Ms. Sarah Palin is one), who don't deny that global warming is a fact, but insist that humans aren't the primary cause. Oddly, Ms. Palin and friends aren't telling us that we could survive three degrees of temperature change without some sort of catastrophe. Given that the dire predictions go unchallenged, Ms. Palin's assurances that I'm not the cause would be small comfort. If warming is simply the inevitable result of an unavoidable global cycle — something we cannot control — then my great grandchildren could be dead no matter what I do. Neither a happy thought nor a very tenable political position. Frankly, the possibility that we are at fault offers some hope, because it leaves us humans the option to stop it.

As I've said before, I have no problem with the general populace believing that global warming is a threat and that it is primarily a human problem. Whether global warming is real or not, we can't afford to wait until the conundrum becomes a certainty. It'll be too late. Despite the East Anglia e-mails, its hard for me to imagine that thousands of climate scientists in at least three independent working groups would conspire to use fraudulent data to foist on the world a lie of such frightening proportions just to cash in on speakers fees and become celebrities. Even if the climate scientists are dead wrong, the science that has demonstrated the realities of human-generated pollution and the fact that we are depleting our natural resources is indisputable. And both are reason enough to take the precautions climatologists are suggesting.

Ironically, polls almost universally show that "belief" in global warming is eroding in the U.S., and has been in decline since long before the East Anglia furor. Pollsters are not sure why, but one possibility is that the same short-sightedness and lack of will that brought on our recent massive financial meltdown (which reverberated around the world), and put off meaningful reform of the U.S. health care system — both huge contributors to the massive national debt we will pass on to our children — is now blunting the U.S. population's will to solve a problem to which we have, for most of recent history, been the largest contributor.

If I am a Christian in truth, I need to stop pursuing personal comfort, pleasure, prestige and wealth at the expense of others and our shared environment. And I need to urge those around me to do the same. We do need to care about this Earth, because it is our home and God's creation and because our children deserve better. For those who believe there is Someone beyond this world to whom we must give an account, inaction is the unthinkable option. Any possible avenue that could forestall or reverse such an outcome should be taken.

As a Christian, the health of the community is no less important that my own health. I do not have the luxury to chose between the individual and the collective, for my God affirms and loves both. Jesus Christ sacrificed himself to save his community. That's the standard. So I'd far rather drastically reduce my contribution to pollution, the hole in the ozone layer and the wholesale waste of natural resources and then find out later that I was mistaken. The alternative is to plug my ears, eat, drink and be merry, and then stand before God and answer for my dying great-grandchildren.

Neutrality — even in the face of a conundrum — really isn't a Christian option.

Interesting Article on Prayer

2009-09-20T08:46:00.003-06:00

Found this article in the NY Times Magazine on prayer, entitled "The Right Way to Pray?." It's an interesting commentary on our need for "proper technique," as if God were a puzzle to solve, a labyrinth to walk or a secret to discover. Author Zev Chafets, not a religious man, visits with a number of folks who sell a variety of approaches to prayer, and ends his story with a description of his visit to an old-fashioned Assemblies of God church, a place where people simply believe that God is, God is good, God loves them and the people around them and is disposed to respond if they ask (pray is the Old English word for ask) for help.

Mr. Wilson's Breach of Decorum

2009-09-16T10:56:00.003-06:00

Far too much has been said already about this Representative's outburst during President Obama's speech the other night. I wouldn't add to it were it not for the fact that much of what is being said is so ... shallow and ignores the fundamental issue that Mr. Wilson's behavior raises.

It's the character issue, of course. No one likes this subject because even most of those who write about this stuff don't like to be held accountable for their lack of it. But this needs to be said, whether anyone likes it or not.

First, character really is important. Before a watching world, populated in part by young, impressionable school children, a man elected to high government office shouted at the President (who had the floor) and called him a liar. To President Obama's eternal credit, he displayed for the watching world the good character to ignore the outburst and move on with the important business at hand. Mr. Wilson's statement was disrespectful, to say the least. And let's make sure that we understand that when Mr. Obama used the "lie" word, with respect to untruths circulating about his health care plan, he did not name names or impugn the character of any individuals. And on the other hand, he was careful to give credit for the ideas he was presenting to those who deserved it (including his rival for the Oval Office, Mr. McCain.)

What people in high places do sets the tone for our entire society. If we cannot model healthy discourse before a watching world, particularly the younger and more impressionable part of it, then we have already lost the battle for the future. Unfortunately, we've come to expect disrespectful talk from rappers, late-night talk show hosts, self-styled political pundits and the like. So its no surprise that elected officials are getting into the act. Mr. Obama, in contrast to Mr. Wilson, was an example of how to make a strong, forceful statement without being personally disrespectful.

Now the free-speech lobby will have a hey-day with that. They don't think it right to impede speech of any kind. So let's move on.

Second, the reasons Mr Wilson's outburst is an example of bad character go far beyond the issue of disrespect. His friends could argue, "Well, it's true. Obama is lying." Well, let's suppose thy could prove that (I don't for one minute believe they can, but let's just suppose, for sake of argument.) What of it? The House rules specifically forbid any House member to call the sitting President a liar in the House chamber. It's a breach of House decorum. Mr. Wilson and all his colleagues swore — they took an oath — to abide by the rules of the House. For that and that alone, the House was bound by oath to discipline Mr. Wilson (it should have been a unanimous vote) and, if he were a man of good character, he would accept the rebuke and apologize to his colleagues for breaking the rules to which they all solemnly agreed. We're not big on oaths today. We're not bound by our word anymore. But people of good character are. If we care about our future, so should we all be bound.

Here, we also go beyond the issue of character to the issue of respect for law — something we have far too little of these days. If you want your constituents to respect and abide by the laws you create, then Mr. Wilson, you first must set an example. You didn't, and you owe your colleagues and the American people something better.

Third, Mr. Wilson's behavior made yet another large contribution to America's truly pathetic addiction to "15 minutes of fame." Mr. Wilson's behavior deserved to be ignored during the speech, disciplined quickly afterward and briefly mentioned on the news the next day. But Mr. Wilson has become a star. The media made him one, and the surge in his campaign coffers the next few days indicated that the cult of celebrity, even negative celebrity, has permeated just about every walk of American life. Why should anyone be respectful or follow rules of civil discourse when it's far more effective to be infamous for disrespect? (The only bright side to the news on this was that Mr. Wilson's opponent raised more money. I guess that's something.)

The media decision makers share a large proportion of the blame here. Pundits (left and right) have had a field day with this adolescent outburst, and news editors have allowed coverage of Mr. Wilson's new found right-wing stardom to overshadow coverage (again, as they did with the town hall disruptions, earlier) of the substantive issues Mr. Obama was attempting to address. The American people deserve something far better than this, too.

Mr. Wilson now joins the guy who who threw his shoes at President Bush in the negative celebrity Hall of Fame. The message to our kids? Being bad works. Disrspect sells (look at the multi-millionaire rappers, for example.) Disrupt a town hall meeting. Shout obscenities during speeches. Tell your teacher to go to hell. That'll show 'em.

And when you "grow up," you can graduate to taking a semi-automatic to a high school library or flying an airplane into a tall building.

Obama on Wall Street

2009-09-15T13:07:00.003-06:00

Word's out, of course, that Wall Street execs weren't any too pleased with the scolding they got from President Obama in his recent speech. I doubt any Wall Streeters ever frequent my low-rent end of the blogosphere, but, just for the record:

Sorry, folks. You'll get no sympathy here. You're lucky Wall Street still exists. It was a scolding well deserved. You made your bed, and now you get to lie down in it.

Your right-wing Republican pals, strangely enough, would have let you drown like rats. Seems they're so committed to limited government, they'd rather see another depression than admit it might be necessary for the government to step in.

As Mr. Obama made clear, you Wall Street folks owe the American people (who are, after all, the government). We bailed you out. We are your creditors. And you put yourselves in that position.

Instead of resenting the sermon on responsibility, you'd be wise to heed it. You're being asked to help craft new rules that would prevent your own financial demise. And ... you're whining? You're complaining that your pay's gonna be a bit short? That "creativity" will be stifled?

In my book, you're getting off awfully easy. Some of the shenanigans pulled on your watch were every bit as deceptive — and as damaging — as Mr. Madoff's ponzi scheme.

Maybe you'd like to join your pal Bernie Madoff in jail? Maybe next time, we should send you Wall Street execs to ... oh, I don't know. Guantanamo? Seize all your assets and redistribute them to the American taxpayers? Give your homes away, in a lottery, to poor families?

Despite the delusional ravings of your right-wing pals, Mr. Obama has suggested nothing of the sort. What he has suggested sounds pretty darn reasonable to me. I'd take that deal and the comparative wrist slap that goes with it and be very, very grateful. You don't get second chances on stuff like this.

Next Supreme Court Nominee?

2009-09-14T12:15:00.006-06:00

This federal judge mentioned in today's lead piece in the NY Times might make a good candidate.

District Court Justice Jed S. Rakoff seems to have the ability to cut through the lawyerly lingo to the real issues, and doesn't mind giving both governmental entities and powerful businesses a good kick in the pants, when it's needed.

In his ruling, Judge Rakoff overturned a settlement between Bank of America and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives just before the bank took over the securities house last year. The bonuses were not disclosed to stockholders before they voted to approve the buyout. The $33 million settlement “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality,” he wrote, criticizing the fact that the fine levied against Merril Lynch for the nondisclosure would be paid by the bank’s shareholders — yes, by the folks who were injured by the lack of disclosure.

The proposed settlement, according to Judge Rakoff, “suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties: the S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger; the bank’s management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators. And all this is done at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth.”

Apparently, this isn't the first time this judge has called out cozy regulator/offender dealings — this judge presided over the Worldcom debacle (Remember the Enron "cooking the books" scandal, and all that, a few years back?), and sent the government and Worldcom execs to the woodshed on that one, too.

I think we need more regulation of Wall Street, but first, we need regulators who actually want to regulate (rather than merely appear to do so) and we need more judges who are willing to call bullshit by its proper name and are willing to call out those who dish it up to the American public.

Mr. Obama, I respectfully suggest that you give this guy a look, if you get another shot at the Supreme.

Having made that request, please pardon my cynicism if I also add that I'm sure he'd never be approved for the highest court, here. (Especially if they change the campaign finance laws so corporations, which now have to get the cash to candidates through more surreptitious means, will be able to openly buy and sell Senators and Representatives.) The business lobbyists wouldn't let them. They'd figure out a way to "Bork" him, and if that didn't work, they'd no doubt try to find a way to "Clarence Thomas" him.

In many other countries, he'd be a marked man. So, I guess we should be thankful for that much. (Please hear the sarcasm. It's intended.)

But I'd still like to see him get nominated. If only for the fact that America needs some heroes right now. And they're out there, but the religious conservative Republicans who keep keeping getting caught in extra-marital dalliances (or feel thy have to shout "You lie" at the President), and the left-wing Democrats who are wringing their hands over who will fill Teddy's filibuster-proofing seat in the Senate (or blurting out that they're communists) keep distracting the media from matters of substance.

A dramatic Supreme Court nominee approval process would, at least, get the glare of the spotlight onto a person of substance who has earned the attention.

A New Low in T-shirt "Evangelism"

2009-08-28T19:39:00.007-06:00

I wasn't going to dignify this church's anti-Islam T-shirt campaign with a post, but one of the things I'm most upset about in the Christian church is how its intolerance always seems to end at its own door. So let me be clear:

Mr. Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center do not speak for me. If I may be permitted to say so this strongly, I do not think he and his church speak for Jesus, either. Not the Jesus I've come to know, anyway.

The irony is enough to make you cry: A church named after the symbol of peace making money on a T-shirt that defames the belief system of one third of the world's people. (I was kind of hoping we'd gotten past the bumper-sticker Christianity stage, but I see now that we've only graduated to the T-shirt stage.) Has anyone at the Dove church has ever actually spoken to a Muslim, let alone tried to find out what Muslims really believe?

I'll also bet that in the entire history of Dove Church in Gainesville, there has not been nor will there ever be a "conversion" of a single Muslim. Can you possibly guess why that may be?

Why would a Muslim want to come anywhere near the place? What about "Islam is of the devil" communicates God's love for Muslims? What about Dove's "Islam is of the Devil" campaign is remotely likely to attract a Muslim to the church or convince him or her that he or she might find something better at Dove church?

It's easy to galvanize a group against something. This pastor has taken the classic pastor's easy way out: Appeal to the worst in human nature. (Second only to building programs, which American Christians have a particular fondness for, because its a concrete mark of success, anti-whatever movements are the best way to get people to forget their differences and pull together in a fight against a perceived threat.) Did I mention it is lazy? Hypocritical?

Used to be Christians took pot shots at each other. That's why there are literally hundreds of denominations, many of which believe they, alone, are the true worshipers, the true bearers of God's image in the world, and that all others are headed to hell or fall far short of heaven. I sat under a Protestant pastor for a few years, who believed the Catholic church was of the devil (The Roman Catholics, he thought, were the great Harlot mentioned the book of Revelation). That was one of the many reasons I left that particular church.

Now, I guess we've tired of waging wars of words with each other and have turned our sights outward to the watching world. Now everyone can see what only those of us on the inside have had to witness for so many years.

In the Scriptures, the only folks Jesus ever identified with the devil were the hyper-religious folk who thought they had a corner on righteousness and therefore had the right to pass judgment on others. I always thought there was a message there for us. I just can't imagine Jesus with an "Islam is of the Devil" T-shirt on. But then again, I'm no Bible scholar.

At times like these, I wonder why I stick around. I have lots of friends who no longer go to church. They're Christians, but they've disowned the organized church. They are embarrassed by it.

I still hang in there. Christian churches aren't all like Dove, of course. But they all get tarred with the same brush every time something like this happens. Unfortunately, there lurks in every one of them that awful tendency to look out at the world (and each other) not with love but fear, and therefore open the door to hate, which is the classic coping mechanism of choice for the fearful. Pastors are always calling the flock to "take a stand" against that which they do not understand and, therefore, greatly fear. Leprosy, these days, takes many forms.

The apostle John said, "Perfect love casts out fear." We Christians have always had a tough time with that one. Hopefully, Dove is, if nothing else, a teachable moment for the rest of us. Who knows? Maybe Dove World Outreach Center itself will come to its senses and aspire to live up to its name. I still believe in miracles. I just haven't seen very many lately.

Health Care Reform II: An Abortive Effort?

2009-08-24T19:56:00.007-06:00

After spending weeks attempting to fabricate issues that would sink not only President Obama's health care legislation but also Mr. Obama's presidency, the Republican party has been handed a real issue this week that could get them their first wish, anyway.

The Democratic bill before the House apparently mandates that the bill's public (government-run) insurance option will collect from the people who elect it, funds that would be kept separate from "public" funds and used to pay for abortion services beyond those currently allowed through Medicaid (only in cases of rape, incest, and threat to the health of the mother). Moreover, private insurance companies that under the reform bill would be subsidized with public funds could elect to do the same.

Needless to say, I'm deeply disappointed. Mr. Obama excuses this before groups like Planned Parenthood by insisting that "reproductive" health care should be covered by the pubic plan. I couldn't agree more. But ... in what way is an abortion "reproductive"? A woman who has an abortion is choosing not to reproduce. Euphemisms, anyone? It's a bit like calling pornography "mature entertainment."

Worse, the provision provides abortion advocates a sleight-of-hand way around the Hyde Amendment, which in 1976, ended Medicaid funding for elective abortions. Since then, the U.S. government has not funded "elective" abortions and all but 17 states have followed suit, enacting similar restrictions for the use of state funds. The Hyde Amendment has been law almost as long as Roe v. Wade (yes, the Republicans are right here: Roe v. Wade was a textbook study in judicial activism and legislation from the bench). Pro-abortion Democrats ought to feel obligated to accord Hyde at least as much respect as they insist that others give to Roe v. Wade as "the law of the land." The fact-checkers have called this one out: It's a big change. Huge.

More disappointing is that it's a big change that has clearly been engineered not to look like one. Mr. Obama set himself up for well-deserved criticism when he responded this week that the health care reform package did not provide government funding for elective abortions. Technically, of course, he's correct. Instead, it requires anyone who elects the public option to pay into a "private" pool of funds that will be used by the government-administered plan to pay for elective abortions. Not exactly "pro-choice." Although Mr. Obama said, during his campaign, that he desired to find a way to reduce the incidence of abortion, the plan he's defending will make them easier to get and imply government encouragement of abortion. Inconsistent, at best. Defenders of the provision say, of course, that folks can opt for a subsidized private plan that doesn't fund abortions. That hardly changes the fact that the public plan will pay for abortions. A bit of bookkeeping chicanery doesn't change that.

These facts prompted serious schism in the reform ranks: Joining the alarm this week were anti-abortion Democrats — enough of them to sink the health care reform, if the provision is not removed. As many as 19 Democrats will refuse to support the bill if it doesn't clearly exclude funding for abortions.

There's no way the reform bill gets out of the House as it stands.

And that would be a travesty. I'd like to stand by my comments in my preceding post on health care reform. I take nothing back. Health care reform is something that needs to happen. If it doesn't get reformed now, it will demand a much more draconian reform in the future. And it will be even more expensive then than now. And if we don't get it, we'll dearly wish someday that we had.

(It's important to note that the provision for voluntary access to subsidized "end-of-life" counseling — advance planning, as in living wills, hospice care, etc. — was introduced and championed by a Republican, not a Democrat. And that Republican, pro-life U.S. senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia says the "death panel" nonsense was just that.)

Unfortunately, the very pubic squabble (one can hardly dignify what's been going on by calling it a debate) about health care reform is sure, now, to take an ugly and terribly unnecessary turn for the worse. No doubt the same crew that has been trying to tar-and-feather the President and run him out of Washington from the beginning will gleefully capitalize on this week's health care events.

Meanwhile, word is that Democrat Nancy Pelosi is in conference with the unhappy anti-abortion Democrats to try to come up with a "compromise." Here's a compromise: Take out the abortion coverage, and you can get your bill passed. If Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Obama are so married to funding abortions that they will permit a "must" health care reform effort to go down to total defeat, they will not have Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich to blame for it. They will have only to look in the mirror.

Those who support the provision, of course, protest that if abortions aren't funded by the public plan, then some low-income women would lose abortion funding they now have under private insurance policies. That is true. If Ms. Pelosi and her compatriots on the far left would like to see abortions funded, there is no law against organizing a private insurance group that offers abortion coverage as supplemental insurance. Those who care to take advantage of it can, and those who believe as Ms. Pelosi does are free to make that plan as affordable as they can make it. Those who want "choice," then, can choose to pay for it. (That would, in some small, oblique way, justify the "pro-choice" label.) More importantly, that would keep the government out of the abortion business, as the law clearly demands. And those among America's 45 million uninsured who rightly maintain that abortion is the taking of human life wouldn't be forced to choose between their conscience and the health of the children they chose to keep.

Health Care Reform: Avoiding a Darwinian Nightmare

2009-08-18T11:08:00.010-06:00

Republican-friendly media, like Fox News, the National Review and this outfit, are declaring a victory, today, for the Republicans — in particular, for the ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin — as the news circulates that the so-called "death panel" provision has been dropped from the House health care reform legislation.

After the left's pundits pummeled her recent resignation and declared her public future at an end, Ms. Palin vaulted back into the spotlight by raising the "death panel" alarm in the current health care reform debate. At issue, it turns out, is a statement made some years back by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and an adviser to the Obama Administration's health care reform team. Dr. Emanuel, apparently, contemplated at one time a plan to ration health care.

I'd like to comment on the issue. But before I do, let me be clear: I am in no way in favor of any plan that would ration health care. I am in no way an advocate for any plan that would fund or encourage euthanasia, forcibly deny health care to anyone for any reason, or even suggest to anyone that they voluntarily forfeit health care, no matter what the reason. When most of the country was criticizing the Catholic church and her parents for "interfering" in Terry Schiavo's adulterous husband's court fight to starve his comatose wife, I was one of the shockingly small number of Americans who publicly railed against the idea.

I don't recall Fox News or National Review or the Republican party rising up en masse in righteous indignation over that one. I heard very little about "judicial activism" in that case. (Nary a word from Ms. Palin or any of her friends. But I do remember a lone politician who stood up and took up the case of Ms. Schiavo's parents — the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who just happens to be black and a Democrat.)

And if I thought for one second that the Obama Administration actually intended rationing in its provision for funding voluntary access to "end-of-life" counseling, I'd be jumping up and down, screaming foul. But if we can get past the specter of "death panels" long enough to look at the realities of the Obama provision and the health care crisis we actually face, it might be possible to see things in a more calm and rational frame.

First, the bill currently before Congress had no such provision (see my previous post). There was no "death panel" awaiting Ms. Palin's son Trig or her aging mother.

Ms. Palin's angst is, at it's most pardonable, about her fears of what government involvement in health care might lead to if health care costs continue to skyrocket and the number of uninsured Americans continues to climb. All the more reason for Ms. Palin and friends to become partners in the discussion and help Mr. Obama find a rational solution to the issue of health care cost and availability, as we'll see.

Second, the Republican media machine now has managed, through innuendo alone, to create general distrust about health care reform. Ms. Palin's illogical leap and unfortunate choice of words provided just the right sort of sound byte right-wing commentators needed to muddy the waters of what Mr. Obama had hoped would be a clean, bi-partisan effort to reform health care.

(How is it that the Republicans, who have railed for so many decades against the bias and lack of objectivity of the "liberal media," are now so enamored of right-wing media celebrities who make no pretense to objectivity, gleefully sneer at anything remotely left-leaning, and cheer on those who disrupt public forums?)

I'd like to suggest that if we set Dr. Emanuel's rationing proposal and Ms. Palin's reaction to it against the proper backdrop, we might find that the two have ground for some agreement and, perish the thought, cooperation in the fight against something we should all want to avoid.

The pundits spend a great deal of time comparing the Obama proposal to health care systems now in existence in Canada, Great Britain, France and Switzerland. What they don't describe very well is what we'll get if we don't reform the health care system. For that, we need only look at the former Soviet Union. Just prior to its demise, health care in Russia was in an abysmal state. I remember reading an article about Russian Olympians at the time, who spent much of their earnings from the Soviet athletic training system stockpiling medical supplies, because in the Soviet Union's failing economy, the kind of health care most of us take for granted everyday was near nonexistent. While the Russian populace went without, what was left of Russia's system was reserved (in a survival-of-the-fittest fashion) for the famous (Olympians and educated technocrats) and the privileged (government officials).

Oh, I know, the Republicans will pipe right up and say, "Well, Mike, that's because, in the Soviet Union, the government ran the health care system." Sorry, that won't fly. Guess who's exporting quality health care all over Latin America? Not us. Sorry, it's Cuba. Its government-run health care system (patterned on the Soviet model) has quietly provided the doctors who are (dare, I say it?) revolutionizing public health care for the likes of Mr. Chavez and others left-wing wannabe despots in Latin America. My point? It's not that we should have government run health care. Rather, it's that we now have a private system whose only resemblance to the Soviet system is that its hell bent on bankrupting most of us and becoming the privilege of an elite. It matters much less who runs it than whether or not we can afford it. In a telling irony, Mr. Chavez has improved health care in Venezuela by exploiting the familiar free-market tenets of supply and demand. Cuba is only too happy to export doctors in trade for oil and cash. The market in action. Let me repeat: It's all about affordability.

Unfortunately, the market isn't handling the task so well, here, so the government has stepped in. The Republicans defeated Mr. Clinton's program 12 year ago, and then for eight years under President Bush, we saw health care costs rise at four times the rate of wages. We watched the roll of the uninsured grow every bit as fast during the good times as the rolls of the unemployed have increased during our current recession. Now we have another shot at cleaning up the mess.

The Democrats, at least, are trying. And, by all accounts, most physician's groups and professional health care organizations are onboard. Only the Republicans seem to prefer things the way they are. But that makes sense, doesn't it? The G.O.P. has for a long time been the party of the monied elite: Those who can afford to self-insure. Those who own the insurance companies. Those who believe the poor are poor by choice. It's no skin off their noses if 45 million Americans are uninsured. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't bear the cost of treatment for these folks at emergency rooms, because Beck and Limbaugh and their friends can afford the lawyers and accountants it takes to weasel out of the taxes that pay for it. Wall Street doesn't foot the health care bill for the poor folks who live on the side streets that branch off from Main Street. Main Street foots the bill.

Set against that backdrop, Dr. Emanuel's "rationed care" proposal, formulated years ago (and which he now disowns) still has no appeal. But it is understandable when we consider that if we continue on our present course, it would be the lesser-evil alternative to de facto rationing based on far less attractive criteria: Those who control the guns and money get quality health care. Everyone else gets what's left ... or nothing at all. Deja vu, Soviet Union. If we're going to be fearful about something, let's be fearful about that prospect, shall we?

Unfortunately, the Republican right seems bent on derailing Mr. Obama's attempt to avoid this truly Darwinian nightmare by postulating an entirely fictitious Orwellian nightmare, in which the government controls and predetermines our health care options.

We must be clear: The same thing happened with Mr. Clinton's plan: The right appealed to exactly the same fears, and there was no reform. Since then, your premiums and mine have climbed far faster than our incomes. And the rising cost of health care for the uninsured is paid for by the same taxpayers who see their premiums going up. (Actually, that's not really true, is it? It'll be paid for — maybe — by our children and their children, because its all borrowed money. Medicare, a key plot point in the health reform drama, is one of the largest contributors to our national debt).

Can we really afford to see health care reform go down the drain again? Do we really want to pass this problem on (again) to the next generation?

No one, not even Dr. Emanuel, wants to ration health care. That's why health care reform is on the docket. If it falls off the docket again because people fear what might happen instead of facing up to what will happen if we don't do something, then we'll inevitably get what Ms. Palin and Dr. Emanuel both fear most.

Now that the objectionable provision is no longer part of the bill, there's no good reason why Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Palin and their friends can't get on with a rational, productive debate about what might be the best way to do what we all ought to fervently believe needs doing.

That assumes, of course, that Ms. Palin and friends are actually interested in health care reform. The evidence, so far, indicates that assumption is unwarranted. Hope I'm wrong about that.

Birthers, Teabaggers, Townhallers & Death Panels

2009-08-08T08:05:00.017-06:00

First there were the Birthers, bent on proving that President Obama was not born on U.S. soil.

Then there was the group — this one, so low-profile (not to mention, just plain low) that it didn't even earn a nickname — that claimed Mr. Obama was a closet Muslim.

Then there were the Teabaggers, who twisted the message of the original Boston Tea Party participants from "no taxation without representation," to "no taxation," to prevent Mr. Obama from laying some of the burden for necessary health care reform on those most able to absorb its financial impact.

Now it's the Townhallers, who think that, by disrupting public meetings run by Democrats to push the health care reform legislation now before Congress and, thereby, preventing a reasonable discussion of the plan's merits and demerits, they somehow serve the interests of those whose medical burdens will continue to mount unless something is done.

It's no secret that an ever-more militant group of Republicans, not so sure that the Obama presidency will fail, are making it their business to ensure that failure. They openly desire his failure even if that failure means the country suffers a depression. Even though few regard the effort as anything more than a purely partisan effort to ensure that a Republican makes it to the White House next time around and that Republicans reclaim the Senate and House.

Unfortunately, this well-organized right-wing outfit, which was pretty laughable when it first surfaced as the "birthers," is now, inexplicably, proving quite successful. Mr. Obama's approval rating recently slid below the 50 percent mark. Part of the reason is that the militants have callously played on the fears of Americans economically devastated by a recession that was largely the product of Republican/centrist Democrat policy and that began with a Republican president in the White House. (Let me make clear, here, that I am no mere bystander in this regard. While I still possess a job, I have taken a near 30 percent cut in pay. I feel the ouch. I have experienced the fears. I'm looking over my shoulder, hoping I don't see the ax fall, just like every other Main Streeter).

In reaction, several liberal Democrats have gone so far as to characterize these folks as terrorists. Although its unwise to throw that kind of terminology around lightly, the truth is, a terrorist is one who seeks to inspire terror in another to accomplish a goal. The definition does not specify the use of a bomb or gun. It, therefore, could easily apply to these folks. (As I noted in my previous post, words are among the deadliest of weapons.)

Although this group would prefer to think of itself as a "truth squad," its current campaign centers on the completely fictitious accusation that the Obama health care initiative calls for "death panels" — government sponsored review boards that will decide who has the right to health care. (This term was coined, apparently, by now ex-Governor Sarah Palin, who really seems to believe that the government, under the Obama plan, will tell us when we have to die. Oh, Sarah, you seemed so promising when you first entered the national spotlight!) This isn't just a twist on the truth. Its an outright lie, of course. Unfortunately, in their eagerness to destroy Mr. Obama, truth is something this group of Republicans is all-to-willing to sacrifice.

Newt Gingrich, Senator Charles Grassley, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have encouraged this blatant falsehood. High-profile, right-wing pundits (the American Spectator, the New Republic, et. al.) regularly compare the Obama Administration's willingness to publicly fund access, on a purely voluntary basis, to "end-of-life" counseling to Nazi Germany's policy of forcible euthanasia for the physically and mentally infirm. The same tactic used by the same pundits discredited President Clinton's previous attempt to reform the health care system.

So ... why are they so successful? Well, let me first say that what I'm about to propose are unscientific observations. I have no poll data to present. No one gathers data on what Mr. Obama so rightly characterized as "what no one says in public but admits to in private." But they are observations I've made over a lifetime of involvement in the particular American subculture I'm about to indict. I know this crowd. I'm in it, and of it, but no longer, as you'll see, quite with it. And these observations are based, in part, on what I've heard folks in this subculture admit to, privately, combined with what are undeniably public facts.

Observation #1: The birthers/closet Muslimers, etc., have succeeded in large part because they have exploited a well-oiled rumor network that exists within conservative American Christianity. Christian fundamentalists, evangelicals and charismatics believe that human beings are sinful and in need of saving (and I'm with them on this). Unfortunately, that makes them all-to-ready to believe a bad report about someone, especially if that someone is not an adherent to their particular brand of American Christianity. If that report comes from another Christian of similar persuasion, well, then, it must be true! Christians are among the world's laziest citizens. They rarely check facts. Suspicious of the media's "liberal humanist" agenda, they reject any official accounts that differ from the rumors they've heard. If it sounds like the devil's work, it must be. The Glen Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the world (both claim to be Christians), do check the facts, but then selectively present them, with plenty of innuendo and illogical giant leaps. Thus, our newest supreme court justice, Ms. Sotomayor, was branded a racist and a "judicial legislator" even after the facts, when they finally were brought to light, pointed to a something much closer to a centrist bent on hewing to precedent.

Observation #2: American Christianity (conservative and liberal) is still one of the most segregated segments of American society. Despite what the Bible has to say on the subject, American Christians are suspicious of differences and take refuge in sameness and uniformity. Although Jesus intended that his church would be a powerful, nonviolent army of fearless lovers of all humanity (as was he), Christianity, particularly the highly organized American conservative kind, has become a refuge for — and a vehicle for the exploitation of — those who seek to escape from a dangerous world. Skin color, accent, educational and/or economic status, gender identity, haircuts, clothing, musical preferences, are only a few of the huge number of items on an exceedingly long laundry list that American Christians use to determine the boundary markers and litmus tests for group membership. For many white American conservative Christians, an educated black, liberal Christian president of the United States is simply incomprehensible. Obama's rise and election raises truly primal fears (race wars, mass rape of white women, you name it, we white Christians can imagine it). No matter that these were the very fears that our Lord, if we had only let him, might have overcome. Right-wing pundits love to exploit these fears by publishing predictions that, by 2050, white Americans will be outnumbered by people of color. It's no secret that white conservative Christians think a top item on the U.S. national security agenda should be the closing of our southern border with Mexico (see Observation #4, below). Conservative Christians are primed to believe any rumor they hear (see observation #1) about "them" — that is, anyone who isn't "us."

Observation #3: Despite the Bible's declaration that followers of Christ should be the most generous, giving people on earth (the apostle Paul encouraged giving by declaring the "God loves a hilarious giver"), Christians are perceived as stingy, and have earned that reputation in the watching world. Christians are the world's worst tippers. Ask any waiter. Restaurant employees universally hate it when Christian groups come in. Conservative Christians form the base for most tax protest movements and are well represented among the group that refuse to pay taxes, despite the fact that their Bible encourages them to do so. Although Christians give a good deal of money to their own causes (conservatives outdo their liberal counterparts here), even that amounts only to 2.5 percent of gross income, one quarter of the tenth (tithe) a Jew was required to cough up. They contribute very little to causes that directly benefit nonChristians. (United Way, for example, was off-limits for many Christians because a tiny portion of its funds went to organizations that had connections to "family planning"). And despite the fact that America Christians are beneficiaries of the world's richest economy, Christians in poor nations regularly out-give American Christians, per capita, based on percentage of income. We American Christians, therefore, are only too happy to throw in with Teabaggers and Townhallers. Any plan that is going to take money out of our pockets should be voted down — even if it would mean poorer health care or underfunded public education for our neighbors' children.

Conversely, we are numbered among the greediest of the greedy. Generally, companies headed by conservative Christians pay their employees less for the same work than companies run by nonChristians. This is especially true if that organization is engaged in work classified as supporting Christian causes. And for every Bernie Madoff, there are a hundred so-called Christian organizations that fleece conservative Christians with get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid sales schemes (Amway, anyone?), investment programs based on "biblical" financial success "secrets," and day-trader seminars (God blesses gambling, too.). Millions fell — hook, line and sinker — for the so-called "Prosperity Gospel." American conservative Christians are preposterously gullible, especially when the carrot is cash.

Observation #4: Conservative American Christians are in the vanguard of the group that believes the poor are poor by choice. I saw a bumper sticker one time that really set me back on my heals. It said, "Jesus is coming again, and is he ever pissed." I have no idea what the person who printed that bumper sticker was thinking, but when I think of the "they're poor because they want to be" crowd, the image of that bumper sticker always comes to mind. Republicans have exploited this heinously unbiblical belief to oppose anything that smacks of "welfare." It is profoundly ironic that American Christians wouldn't have government "welfare" programs taking money out of their pockets if their churches were living in accord with Jesus teaching. Taking care of the homeless, the orphan, the widow, etc., was always supposed to be our job. American conservative Christians really believe that poor people are just lazy and unmotivated.

The facts, of course, absolutely destroy that illusion. Take the case of the Mexican national who saves, over years, a small pile of pesos earned from a back-breaking job as a laborer so he or she can buy passage across the border to Los Angeles to work two jobs and send money back to Mexico to provide for his/her family. You could call that illegal. You could call that dangerous or desperate. You could call that foolhardy. But you can't call it lazy. People from south of the border have risked (and lost) life and limb for a century to taste opportunities that we would see as miserable options, all to better themselves and their families. Fact: American employers polled for the reasons why they hired illegals overwhelmingly reported that they did so because the illegals work harder than American citizens.

Observation #5: Despite the teaching of much of the New Testament to the contrary, and although we at times talk a pretty good game, American conservative Christians are (with a few notable exceptions) closet bigots: We are protectionist ("Buy American"), fiercely nationalistic (we have a deadly fear of and would gladly disband the U.N.), xenophobic, homophobic and misogynistic. (On that last point, there is no place on earth where women have so much opportunity for fulfilling employment but are denied it so fiercely than in conservative Christian church circles. There are Islamic republics that put up fewer barriers to female employment than women confront in spoken and unspoken Christian prohibitions.)

We are the world's worst serial profilers: We prejudge others based on how they look or talk. We cross the street to avoid anything that makes us uncomfortable. We are driven by numberless fears and misconceptions. We see demonic plots everywhere. We demonize anyone whose terminology or temperament makes us uncomfortable. (It wasn't long ago, for example, that a segment of the charismatic end of the church saw married couples attempting to cast demons out of each other in situations where other folks would assume they were having a common, ordinary martial tiff.)

There is, in fact, no place quite like the American conservative Christian church for rigid, black-and-white, me-and-my-own-and-everyone-else-be-damned, sound-byte analysis of the complex issue we face. We really prefer rules. Our lists of "dos" and "donts" do away with uncertainty. We want someone (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh , our pastor) to tell us what's good and what's bad, what's clean and unclean.

We Christians like things simple. We like leaders who make things simple. And we much prefer them to the One who challenged us to take off the religious blinders and, by faith, without certainty, see our fallen world through his loving eyes. The One who asked us to risk getting our hands dirty in the act of giving sacrificially of our "time, talent and treasure" to make the world His world.

If we American conservative Christians don't like what Mr. Obama has in mind, mindlessly following the lead of Birthers, Teabaggers and Townhallers is hardly the solution. Getting rid of Obama won't make our lives simpler, easier or less costly. The fact that so many of us reject Mr. Obama's call for some personal sacrifice in the interest of universal health care — something perfectly in keeping with a biblical faith — because he's black, a Democrat, and unfortunately isn't on the right side of the abortion issue, brands us publicly as the fools and hypocrites that we are.

Doing Unto Others

2009-08-08T07:29:00.002-06:00

The recent revelations of marital infidelity on the part of Republican U.S. senators Mark Sanford and John Ensign have sparked a lot of debate over the future of the Republican party, but very little discussion of an issue that (my opinion) might be far more important.

It disturbs me greatly that we who are shielded (in part, because we haven't the courage or vision to aspire to public service) from the glare of public scrutiny into our own moral failures often see the falls of public figures as entertainment.

Maybe I'm unusually beset by personal moral failure. Maybe most Americans sail through life, soaring over the ugly landscape that marks the affairs (illicit or otherwise) of the human heart. Perhaps most Americans, especially those members of the press who currently lead such inquiries, are indeed, without sin and, therefore, have earned the right to cast stones.

But I seriously doubt that. I have yet to meet one person who, after I really got to know them, didn't reveal that time (or those times) in their lives when they fell pretty hard in one way or another. We all have our own personal "Argentina."

Jesus intoned the oft repeated but rarely lived "Judge not, least you be judged" for just such moments. Broken promises, ours and others', are to be grieved, not mocked. They are to be mended, not made into occasions for verbal assassination or mockery.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that I condone adultery. Mr. Sanford should resign, and Mr. Ensign, too. But, frankly, so should have Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. We forget that JFK's dalliances with movie stars and gangland molls were arranged with the help of paid government employees while the press looked the other way. I'm certainly not suggesting a return to the JFK days. Exposure and a subsequent resignation, ironically, might have saved not only Kennedy's life, but Marilyn Monroe's as well. And it might have set a better tone for public life since then.

Sen. Ensign's affair with the wife of a campaign worker, and his family's sad attempt to conceal "hush" money under the legal fiction of a "gift" ought to be exposed. This is behavior that we cannot have in public officials. It's the type of behavior we shouldn't have anywhere.

But today, with the spectre of "coverup" hanging over their heads, the media/entertainment establishment has now fallen off the horse on the other side. A generation of journalists who grew up wanting to be "investigative reporters" now hover near the supermarket tabloid level as they expose publicly every pecadillo (save those of their own, of course), in as much detail as possible.

We don't need Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous red letter "A." We don't need to bind people, hand and foot in the Puritan stocks, to be mocked, spit on and ridiculed by the holier than thous. What we have today is far more effective: "The Daily Show" and David Letterman and Op/Ed columnists and other political assassins who masquerade as humorists and pundits — whose TV shows and newspaper columns make public ridicule into international events.

These folks know all too well that sticks and stones break only bones, but words ... well, words are the cruelest tools of torture ever devised.

There was a time when a public figure was faced with the evidence and (not for his/her sake, but to protect a spouse and family from public humiliation) given the opportunity to resign. But that doesn't sell newspapers and magazines. It doesn't inflate TV ratings. We've lost sight of the fact that sparing the victims was what investigative reporting once was all about.

To celebrate the moral failings of others — and make money from it into the bargain — is an act of unspeakable hypocrisy. That we revel in their self-destruction makes us no better than they, and probably far worse. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, when I meet my Maker, I would rather have to answer for her life than for Mr. Letterman's.

At times like these, it might be wiser to remember that "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," wasn't a suggestion. The Golden Rule comes with an implicit warning: When we visit scorn on another, do we not invite it on ourselves?

There but for the grace of God — and the fact that most of us live outside the media spotlight — go you and I.

Sarah Palin: Not Politics as Usual

2009-07-04T09:17:00.006-06:00

I'd like to suggest that if you have not actually listened to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's resignation speech, you owe it to yourself do so here.

I have listened to it twice, clear through, and I'm having trouble reconciling what my eyes saw and my ears heard with national press reports of an "often rambling" speech. I had no trouble following it. She stumbled over one word and, yes, she did attribute the "we're advancing in another direction" quote incorrectly to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But otherwise, her 18 minute speech (admirably short for a politician) seemed to flow from thought to thought just fine. I'm mystified that the speech could provoke responses like this from NY Times columnist Gail Collins.

Lest you think I'm just a bitter conservative Republican and Sarah supporter still licking my wounds after the loss last November, let me make clear that I am currently (but provisionally) a supporter of President Obama's economic and foreign policies. I think Mr. Obama is doing about as well as one could, given the hands he was dealt, economically and politically. I do not want him to fail. I don't believe, as Ms. Palin suggested in her speech, that a "Big Government takeover" is afoot.

Further, I voted for Mr. Obama. I do not believe that Mr. McCain's selection of Governor Palin as a running mate was a wise choice. Ms. Palin's subsequent appearances on public affairs programs made it pretty clear that she was not prepared to deal with U.S. foreign policy challenges. In fact, I determined to vote for Mr. Obama, in largeg part, because I believe that Mr. McCain's hasty choice of Ms. Palin was in character for a fighter pilot, maybe, but decidedly not the best trait in an aspiring leader of the Free World. The choice deserved greater deliberation. It was not in his own or our country's best interests to make such a choice rashly. Nor was it in Ms. Palin's best interests, as subsequent events demonstrated.

But that said, I certainly don't blame her for Mr. McCain's poor choice. I do think, however, that she would have been wise to quietly refuse the offer and wait for a better time when she was more seasoned and better prepared to take on the responsibility. Her resignation speech, therefore, indicates to me that she has, in fact, become wiser. She seems to me to be eminently in possession of her senses — especially the sense most often lost when one goes into politics: common sense. Her desire not to play the "lame duck" seems in character to me. Her acceptance of the fact that her unwelcome notoriety has made it difficult to govern effectively seems pretty clear-headed. She sees no point in "beating her head against the wall." I'd say that's quite a sane contrast to, say, Rod Blagojevich, for example?

The reaction in the press, nationally, to Ms. Palin's resignation speech says something quite uncomplimentary about the Fourth Estate, those who claim to uphold "the people's right to know." The reports of Ms. Palin's speech today from the self-proclaimed guardians of truth are hardly in line with that commitment.

And let me be very clear: I have no desire to deliver, here, a diatribe about the "liberal press." Journalists of all stripes — liberal and conservative — are abandoning even the pretense to objectivity. There's plenty of blame to share around. As a managing editor of two trade publications (a job on which most "legitimate" news hounds would look down their noses), I find this desertion of reporting in favor of propagandizing both objectionable on ethical grounds and dangerous to our country's future. It is precisely the sort of "news" that the government-run outlets in Iran are currently dispensing. If someone on my writing staff similarly misrepresented the facts in a story submitted to me, they'd be looking for another job.

Her comment about the devastation that the "politics of personal destruction" has caused both for the Alaskan government and for her family was poignant: The David Letterman incident should have been enough to convince anyone that she's been the target of it. One need only imagine how long Mr. Letterman would have retained his job had he made an offensive comment about Malia, Mr. Obama's daughter.

I remember thinking, "Be smart, don't react to it. Don't give Letterman's obscenely cruel and disgusting joke more publicity by responding to it. It'll just egg him on. Just let it pass." But that was the man in me talking. That was the politician in me talking. Against my advice, Ms. Palin faced the jerk down. She didn't give up. She demanded, and got, an apology. That's what you'd expect a mom would do. That's what a real person, not a cardboard cutout, would do.

My reaction to the incident says something quite uncomplimentary about me, not her.

So far, Ms. Palin's personal life stands in sharp contrast to that of other Republican governors and aspiring presidential candidates Sanford and Ensign, whose recently exposed adulterous affairs flatly contradict their public "family values" personae. (The latter's fall is particularly disheartening to conservatives, because in a savage irony, he was a leading figure in Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian organization that encourages men to be faithful husbands and fathers.)

Against the backdrop of Gov. Sanford's refusal to hear the calls for his resignation, the pundits are wondering why Ms. Palin would voluntarily resign and take such as risk with her political future. One commentator speculated, in fact, that her resignation could be attempt to pre-empt an impending "revelation of wrongdoing." But Ms. Palin is not, and never claimed to be, merely a politician. She said in her speech that faith and family are foremost. It's entirely possible that the answer is as simple as this: Unlike Gov. Ensign, Gov. Palin is determined to keep her promises.

Ms. Palin should not be confused with the hypocritical Ensigns and Sanfords, the noisy, narcissistic Limbaughs and the rest of the rudderless Republican party leadership. She, not they, best represents that working-class neighborhood, just off Main Street, where ordinary moms and dads work hard for increasingly little pay, but pay their taxes anyway; go to church and then actually try (though they sometimes fail) to live up to what they hear there; vote proudly (not cynically or not at all) and willingly send a disproportionate share of their sons and now their daughters off to fight this country's battles. She speaks the language of a demographic group for which the elite, the rich, the connected, the Wall Street players of both political parties have little respect and have been profoundly unwise to pay lip service to and then ignore.

Whatever you think about Ms. Palin's stance on the sanctity of human life, that stand is credible and admirable in its consistency: Her acceptance and love for Trig, her son recently born with Down's Syndrome, and her continuing public support and love for her daughter — despite the obvious difficulty her unwed pregnancy presented for a woman who was running on a conservative agenda — are worthy of respect, not derision.

"I never believed that a person needs a title to make a difference." With those words, Sarah Palin steps down as Alaska's governor and becomes a private citizen again. I suspect that time will show that she's right about titles. It's very unlikely that she'll disappear from the public eye.

Apathetic, she's not. And she's advancing in a different direction. Whether that direction is the right one, for her, for the G.O.P. or for the country she says she loves, is not easy to discern. Whether Main Streeters will follow her, history will decide. Who knows? I wouldn't count out Ms. Palin as a third-party candidate. It's not unprecedented in U.S. history. And times like these are very fertile ground for that kind of political upheaval.

At the politically youthful age of 45, time is definitely on her side. And next time, if there is a title to which she aspires, I bet she'll be prepared. If she succeeds in making a difference, we might even see an end to what she so rightly derides as "politics as usual."

Freedom Falters: Tiananmen Square to Haft-e-Tir Square

2009-06-30T08:15:00.016-06:00

Never a real democracy, Iran has been forced — by forces who favor the most basic of democratic freedoms, a fair counting of the votes — to expose its dictatorial underbelly.

Iran's Supreme Leader, spooked by Mahmood Admadinejad's now firm control of those who own the military hardware, has entirely deserted his customary above-the-fray position to declare, before the sham investigation into election complaints was even begun, that the election results will stand.

As the riot-police truncheons fell and communications jamming continued, word came that one of the protesting candidates had withdrawn his complaint. One can only wonder what deal or threat, or both, this self-described "selfless soldier for the Islamic republic" was offered. Others have retreated into silence or, like the leading opposition candidate, Mr. Moussavi, muted their protests.

Journalists on the ground in Tehran assume, probably rightly, that the hundreds of recent arrests (including arrests of hospitalized protesters, taken right from their beds) will soon issue forth in forced public confessions. It's hardly unprecedented in the evolution of Iran's 1979 Revolution.

The state-run media reported a week ago that President Ahmadinejad will be sworn in for his second term sometime between July 26 and August 19. I have little doubt that that will be the case. Today, Iran's Guardian Council, on the same day it had begun a partial recount of votes, hastily reported that it had found "no evidence" of voter fraud, reporting instead that, in some districts, the vote had even been more lopsided, and then declared with finality that the incumbent president would get his four more years.

And in perhaps the most insulting development of all, Mr. Ahmadinejad himself called for an investgation into the death of Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year-old student shot dead during a street protest, who has since become a potent symbol of Iranian hopes, particularly of its women. Mr. Ahmadinejad — whose government earlier in the week had insisted that Soltan's death was faked for the foreign press — now contends, of course, that "foreign powers" had her shot, in order to whip up protests against his lawful election.

The short-lived appeal for something resembling real democracy in Iran's sham revolution and the Iraninan elite's transparently obvious attempt to stamp it out hold grim lessons for us all.

Despite the efforts of Iran's conservative clerics and ruling politicians to divert world attention from their own underhandedness by painting the protesters as dupes of the Western press, this isn't a fight (despite some Western journalists' opinions) between "secular" and "religious" forces. The cries of "Allah-u-Akhbar" that still ring from protesters' rooftops in Tehran puts the lie to that simplistic assessment.

I saw no Iranian women tearing their head scarves off or desecrating mosques. In fact, the most remarkable and telling images of the protests were those of its covered women. Stories multiplied of girls and middle-aged women standing in the forefront of demonstrations, being clubbed to the ground and rising back up to continue forward, calling on the less-willing men around them to stand firm.

Indeed, Neda Agha Soltan has become a potent symbol of a battle that today underlies most others in Islamic society. The image of her dying in the street and the one of young girls in Afghanistan attacked by men who throw acid in their faces because they dare to want to go to school have been melded. These images have shocked Western and even some Middle Eastern sensibilities. And rightly, they should. They are horrific reminders that oppression of and injustice against women remain with us.

But before we blend those images together too seamlessly, let's set the record straight: Did you know that the number of women in Iran who are enrolled in institutions of higher education far outstrips the number of enrolled Iranian men? Percentage-wise, the woman/man ratio is greater than that in the U.S. We might want to curb our indignation long enough to sort fact from assumption.

Let me also point out, if I may, that we here in America have no cause to look down our noses at Iran. We have absolutely no grounds for self-righteous indignation. The women's rights movement began here, about 200 years ago. In fact, it was begun by Christian women, and then nearly quashed in the late 20th Century conservative Church by Christian men.

In America, religious or secular, we've never managed to get it right. Rosie the Riveter, for example, helped build the planes and ships American military men used to win WWII, only to be herded back into second-class citizenship when her G.I Joe came home.

And it still goes on: In the U.S., women are still paid much less then men for the same work. In American Christian churches, women are still systematically excluded from positions of power and influence, even in some of the religious groups that claim to be for women's ordination. (I know. I've seen it from the inside, first hand.)

After all these years, did we really expect that a battle not yet won after two centuries in the U.S. would be won in Iran in two weeks?

In their efforts to help Islam's women, many Western men are little better than their Islamic counterparts: French President Nicholas Sarkozy, for example, has now backed up his profoundly secular country's recent legislation banning head scarves in public schools with further calls to ban burkhas from any public place. Similar moves are contemplated in the U.K. Is forcing Islamic women to remove them any better than forcing them to wear them?

Lest we forget, as we compare the protests in Tehran's Haft-e-Tir Square with those that occurred in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, the latter was crushed by a fiercely secular state in reaction to a quasi-religious groundswell. This and the ongoing tension between Beijing and not-so-semi-autonomous Tibet have deeply anti-religious undertones. We need to ask, in all fairness, what about Sarkozy's anti-burkha campaign differentiates France from, say, China's recent security putsch against public displays during the anniversary of Tiananmen Square?

Whatever happened to the fundamentally democratic ideal of giving people the right to choose -- even to choose religious restrictions? Sarkozy would better serve women by offering to protect those who want to take the burkhas off, while also protecting the rights of those who wish to keep them on. Any other course puts Islamic women in a profoundly untenable position. But what does Sarkozy care? After all, he's a man.

Unfortunately, countries, corporations and churches, in the East and West, still operate, for the most part, on hierarchical systems. These top-down management schemes were invented by men, for men, to benefit men. They are power structures, not people structures, propped up by elaborate systems of authority and backed by the threat of armed force. They benefit the powerful, first and foremost. These organizations inevitably become insular, as they seek to preserve the primarily male-oriented institutions they serve. Sooner or later, they exist primarily to enable the "Good Ol' Boy" networks they inevitably spawn. (The "trickle-down economics" construct once in vogue here in the U.S. is a profoundly male approach to concern for one's neighbor.)

If you doubt my analysis, ponder this: If men birthed babies, there would be day care centers within 100 ft of every Good Ol' Boy's workplace. Tell me I'm wrong.

Ultimately, Iran's battle for freedom is not a fight between secularists and clerics or even women against men. It is a battle between socio-economic classes within Islam. Ahmadinejad's crew controls the rural populace and has the support of a military elite that (unlike the 1979 Revolution's ageing leaders) were on the ground in the bloody war with Iraq. (An Iraq which was supported by the U.S. and acquired from the U.S. the materials it used to make chemical weapons it employed against Iraninas in that war.)

Supporters of Iran's current president don't see the protest stories and images making the rounds on the Net. And they're fine with that. Like other generations who fear attacks from without, Ahmadinejad's cohort is fundamentally concerned with security. Despite its public claims, Iran's nuclear ambitions under the current regime do not spring primarily from the desire for peaceful uses. Iran sits on one of the world's largest deposits of fossil fuel. It's energy needs are not the driver. The motivation is much more understandable as defensive. Distrusted by the West, by Israel and by most of its Arab neighbors, Iran (like India and Pakistan) seeks the power to hold its many detractors at bay.

The current opposition in Iran comes not from Iran's poor and oppressed but instead from the middle and upper classes who have benefited most from the 1979 Revolution. Now better educated, and computer/Internet savvy, these folks have had the opportunity to view the world beyond and would like to engage with it. They're no longer willing to see life in revolutionary blacks and whites. They know that Britain and the U.S., in the past, contributed to the unrest in their country, but they also recognize that the times are ripe for re-assessing those past relationships. They accept that the children of a nation cannot be held to account for the sins of their fathers and mothers. They aspire, like many others, to be citizens of the world, not just Iran.

This is what poses a threat to Ahmadinejad's security-focused constituency. Indeed, the large protests in the three days after Iran's election might have been quashed immediately and much more brutally had it not been for the fact that Mr. Rafsanjani and other clerics also see the need to shed a simplistic world view. They know that it is no longer possible to use the threat posed by various sorts of "infidels" outside Iran to justify continued restrictions on life inside Iran. They fear, and are trying to resist, if only in the background, Admadinejad's increasingly obvious play for power. The current split among Iran's clerics and the surprisingly outspoken words from leaders of the 1979 Revolution are the strongest pieces of evidence that Ahmadinejad did, indeed, steal the election.

When security becomes the uppermost concern, there are predictable side effects. In the last two weeks, stories of Iran's Basij militiamen armed to the teeth and riding around packed into the backs of pickup trucks was a eerie reminder of the K.K.K. and other white supremacist groups whose adherents in the U.S. once openly clutched their quasi-fundamentalist sect's credentials in one hand and their weapons in the other. Although the latter, for years, have kept a low profile here, the God 'n' Guns clubs are hauntingly similar, no matter where you find them.

As if on cue, the news came this week that an American church pastor had invited folks to bring their guns to the parish sanctuary for a "celebration of their second amendment rights." Suddenly, carrying concealed to church, in some Christian circles, is right up there with fiery preaching in the pantheon of Christian celebrity.

This new development is defended, of course, from the Bible: Supporters pluck a single puzzling New Testament verse (Luke 22:36) from its context to justify their actions, ignoring that Jesus later told Peter to put away his sword, healed Malchus ear, and then refused to call down 12 legions of angels to rescue him from Pilate at his trial.

Despite their talk of protecting religious and political liberty, these almost exclusively white and either Southern or Pacific Northwest gun-toters are motivated far less by a desire to preserve their neighbor's freedoms as they are to protect themselves from their neighbor. If you doubt that, try honestly to imagine the enthusiasm these same second-amendment devotees would feel if a bring-your-gun meeting were held at the local mosque. Or in Pastor Wright's predominately black church in Chicago.

God 'n' Guns is all about fear and security. And there's always boogeymen to point to, to keep the troops in line. In Iran, this month, it's liberal journalists and President Obama. It is profoundly ironic that in America, the God 'n' Guns groups (and sympathizers like Rush Limbaugh and certain Fox News commentators) take aim at the same targets.

I think it's undeniable that the current gun groundswell is inextricably tied to the fact that we have an African American as President and the completely groundless fear the NRA has fanned into flame: That Barack Hussein Obama — who many conservatives still believe without a shred of evidence is a closet jihadist — will "pry their guns from their cold, dead fingers." As that pick-up truck bumper sticker slogan suggests, there are reactionary Ahmadinejad's-in-waiting, even here in America.

From Tiananmen Square in 1989 Bejing to Haft-e-Tir Square in Tehran, people who chafe under dictatorships see in Iran their own stories, played out again. But today, as always, there are still far too many (men and women) willing to abdicate their neighbors' personal rights to elites, religious or secular, that demand unquestioning allegiance in trade for the illusion of security.

These elites, no matter their ideological or religious bent or how well they wear the stolen clothes of democracy, seek not freedom, but control. I'm all for cheering on anyone who speaks out in favor of freedom and I deplore those who would trade freedom away for security. The current Iranian leadership is certainly an example of the latter.

Have we forgotten, in the stir of the moment, that we've traded away many of our neighbor's freedoms since 9/11 only to get Guantanano prison and a chilling public debate about the merits of torture as a security tool? That we, too, had a bitterly disputed election (remember hanging chads?) in which a president retained power after falling short in the popular vote? Do we now deny that, not unlike Iran, we were for eight long years distrusted and faced with censure in world opinion?

Let us not make the mistake of making Iran the boogeyman in our efforts to gloss over our own bloody history.

Iran in the Crucible of Democracy

2009-06-19T20:00:00.009-06:00

Iran's religious hierarchy and the Iranian people who have lived under its precepts since 1979 have together come face-to-face with the inherent downside of democracy: For someone, things don't turn out as hoped.

Someone wins, and others lose.

Democracy's positive side, of course, is that it presents a way for a people to govern itself without resort to bloodshed. It is a system (as originally intended, anyway) by which the people, who are the true governors and the governed, select those who will carry out the people's will. Under ordinary circumstances — that is to say, when the election is known to have been conducted fairly and all parties agree that the votes were counted and tallied correctly — those who have agreed beforehand to accept the verdict of the people generally grouse a bit, then go on with their lives and accept the result. They can do so, because they believe they had a fair shot at it, and fairly lost. They can do so because they are confident that democracy will give them another chance.

In Iran, this week, a sizable portion of the populace does not now have that confidence. While it's possible that Iranian pollsters are so backward and primitive that there could be a 30-percentage-point error in their calculations, its not even remotely possible that poll officials arrived at a certifiable count just two hours after the polls closed. In the U.S., even a mayoral election in a middling small town can't be certified before breakfast the next morning.

No wonder, then, that all the opposition candidates are unanimous in their opinion that election fraud has been perpetrated in Iran on a large scale. These same leaders have charged that their observers (in the U.S., we call them poll watchers) were systematically excluded from polling places. People within the Iranian ministry that oversees elections have admitted, anonymously, to journalists that the election was fraudulent. Members of the Iranian national soccer team were seen wearing opposition green at an international match this week. The Iranian clergy is now openly divided over the election. And the list goes on.

Iran's current leadership, clearly worried by the continuing unrest, has attempted to stifle free speech, disrupt communications, bar the international press from reporting what everyone already knows. In short, they've employed all the time-tested techniques that modern despots regularly use when the quieter methods of holding a populace hostage are no longer sufficient to keep people in line. But without what the political scientists like to call "the consent of the governed," democracy (let alone what many now suspect is a sham democracy) cannot be made to work.

Remarkably — and likely a measure of just how pervasive the unrest really is — Iran's Ayatollah did a striking about face mid-week, suggesting that a "limited recount" might be in order ... with the proviso, of course, that opposition leaders stifle their supporters. More striking still, nobody was buying that line. People continue to march, to shout from their rooftops, to e-mail photos and videos of protest marches and militia violence, to tweet the news out of Iran, a sentence at a time. Now he's trying to blame Gordon Brown and the international press for his troubles.

Although his options diminish daily, the Ayatollah does have one have real ace in the hole: Rather than a recount (which no one would believe, given who's in possession of the ballots) he should call for a redo, with multinational supervision. (Hey ... how about the UN? They actually have some expertise in this area!).

That's right. Respect the Iranians on Tehran's Main Street enough to give them a do-over.

At this point, there's little to lose: Iran's international reputation (with all but, maybe, Vladimir Putin) currently weighs in the balance. The government's legitimacy is in serious question, whether it likes it or not. There is no way, through inaction or threat, to regain public confidence.

Conversely, there is much to be gained: Assuming the second election goes in the incumbent's favor, the world, having not been able to put up, must then shut up. And Iran's leadership would get credit for openess. It will have bent over backward to assure its own people, it's neighbors and the watching world that it is legitimate. Further, it would buy itself a stronger place at the negotiating table in talks with U.S. officials, should it care to participate. It's really a no-lose.

And if by some strange and unlikely turn of events, the election goes the other way? Not to worry: The clerics can take credit for having been willing to accept the possibility that the election had been highjacked, and can celebrate with its people in the correction of what could have been a national travesty (Allah be praised!) ... and then deal with the minor officials who, they will shortly discover, colluded with unscrupulous minor politicians to commit election fraud. The current president and others too big to fail could be quietly expatriated to ... well, how about Russia? (Putin seems to like them. Let him have them.)

No matter how you cut it, this is an eminently sensible and, politically, wise and pragmatic move. Unfortunately for those who rule Iran, it might be too late to take advantage of this option. In any case, it's one they're unlikely to take. The Ayatollah and his friends in the Iranian clergy and military have sold its populace the proposition that Iran's Supreme Leader speaks for God. This insistence on infallibility puts him in an unenviable position: If he blinks, God blinks. For those who go in for that kind of thinking, the one option that remains is to act to protect God's honor: crush dissent, jail the opposition, turn the militias loose, and "re-educate" the populace with show trials and public executions. We'll never know who really won, so everyone will lose.

If Iran's real governors (those with the guns) take that option, they'll plunge Iran into political darkness for another decade. But they'll also sow the seeds of their own defeat. Everyone will know. Everyone will remember. That small taste of freedom that slipped their grasp will grow bitter in their mouths. The blood of the Green Martyrs will inflame their hearts. Someday, inevitably, that broken dream will lift them up again.

The Iranian people are learning this week what we in the West too conveniently want to forget. Democracy has rarely been instituted without bloodletting. Those who prefer to rule outside democracy's consensual strictures are forever loath to accept them without a fight. Only those willing to die for the vote ever get it or keep it.

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 5

2009-06-12T21:57:00.005-06:00

I had no intention of writing a Part 5. But sometimes you think you're done and realize, later, that you're not. In this case, it occurred to me that my recent defense and celebration of contrarians cannot properly end without consideration of those contrarians who, in the Church, we call prophets.

Prophecy has been a bone of contention since the 20th Century church (or at least parts of it) "rediscovered" the charismata after centuries of de facto cessationist rule. While many churches still resist this move of the Spirit, some have opened themselves to it, to various degrees.

For example, at the local church I attend, prophecy is encouraged, but within limits. Those who believe God has delivered through them a message for the church can check in with one of the pastors and, should the message pass muster, deliver it on Sunday morning, or at least have it paraphrased by the pastor. In such cases, the pastor who announces the upcoming prophecy usually provides some guidance to the gathered folk about the local policy concerning prophecy, particularly in regard to appropriate content.

There is nothing unreasonable about limits per se. To impose prudent limits to prophetic activity is indisputably biblical. The question is, are our sanctions in line with those we've been given?

Frankly, having prophets submit their prophecies to the pastor for approval probably wasn't what Paul had in mind. Hearing God speak through the spiritual gift of prophecy was intended to be a regular part of our corporate worship. In the "gifts" passages in 1 Cor. 12-14, Paul assumed that it would be. God would speak through the church to the church. And he affirmed this method of prophetic expression in a letter to a disorderly church, where prophecy and other gifts had been abused in the context of corporate gatherings. Paul is very clear about proper procedure in the Corinthians' public gatherings: "Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said." (I Cor 14:29) From the letter's context — throughout, Paul is addressing matters of corporate worship — prophets are plainly directly to speak to the church at large. Paul calls for order, but nowhere speaks about pre-approval.

So where are the limits? Again, Paul's word on the subject is simple and clear: In the weighing carefully. Anyone can speak, but the act of speaking makes no one's words into God's words. They are God's words only when they are tested and found to be true by the church (the others, in this context, cannot mean merely the other prophets).

Paul here affirms an operative principle that we can see at work in Jewish history: The prophets' words enshrined in the Old Testament came to be there after the nation of Israel sifted them (and was sifted by them) and time proved them worthy of preservation. Many prophets arose in Israel, but only a few spoke God's incontrovertible Word to the ages. A local church and the church at large finds its true prophets by allowing aspiring prophets to speak. Those who over time speak truth earn the ears — and the trust — of the church and, as a result, lay a claim to legitimate authority.

It's important to note that Paul also makes no statement about what is or is not proper subject matter for prophecy. Many churches have responded to this astonishing omission by instituting local rules. One can empathize with this tendency. We don't want people to be offensive or make accusations in public (at least, not until after having exercised the prescriptions outlined by Jesus for confronting sin recorded in Matt. 18). Besides, there are children in the room. The potential for hurt and misunderstaiding is very real. Our tendency to impose limits (Paul, after all, did not say we shouldn't limit content) is entirely understandable. But again, the question is, are such limits biblical?

One common guideline springs, I think, from a particularly unbiblical assumption: The prescription that all prophecy must be "encouraging." Unfortunately, that word has acquired a modern meaning roughly equivalent to positive. In practice, this often boils down to the baseless idea that prophecy must, in all cases, be nice or make people "feel better." This is not only a narrow definition of the word encouraging, but it also reflects a misconception — and this is the heart of the matter — of the essentially contrarian nature of the prophetic office.

(By the way, I do not mean Office. I do not believe that prophet should be an officially recognized position in the church. Nor should anyone wear the word Prophet before their name, as in Prophet Jane Doe. Paul says everyone should aspire to prophecy! That passage in the book of Joel (2:28-32) is pretty clear that God intended to "pour out His Spirit," on "all people," men, woman, old, young. Prophecy, in the age of the church, was not intended to be the special preserve of a chosen few. It's lay ministry.)

Here, a look at the wide sweep of prophetic history is helpful if not particularly satisfying. The prophets whose words are preserved as Scripture were (let's be honest, shall we?) an unseemly lot: And just in case you're still laboring under the illusion that only Old Testament prophets were a bit off, let's keep in mind that John, the forerunner of Christ, lived in the desert, ate bugs, and went about warning people to repent, and both he and Jesus variously referred to the respected religious leaders of their day as hypocrites, snakes and whitewashed tombs. Paul continued this practice in his letter to the Galatians, chiding that church in no uncertain terms for departing from the gospel and calling for the offending Judaizers to ... well, read it yourself. It's not pretty. And John the brother of Andrew, in the Bible's final letter, the Revelation, takes several churches to task for their shortcomings in surprisingly strong terms. There was nothing nice about any of this. With that as backdrop, it is difficult to appeal to Scripture in support of what are, at best, extra-biblical limits.

It is a sad fact that, within most church organizations, correction is no longer considered a legitimate prophetic function. (Unless, of course, you're the paid professional — one reason why my statement above about "office" should be heeded by the church). We need to reconsider what it actually means to encourage. Webster's says:

To inspire with courage, spirit or hope; to spur on.

It means to call up courage in someone. There is nothing to indicate that this is inconsistent with correction. Consider the following example, a wife pleading with her Marlboro Man: "George, you've got to stop smoking. I've heard you coughing in the morning. And you can hardly climb stairs without wheezing. You promised the doctor that you'd 'cut down' but I know you've been sneaking cigarettes on the 'walks' you take. Honey, I want the best for your health. Please, let's kick the habit. We can do it together." Have a problem with that? I don't. I'd hope to hear that from someone if I was addicted to nicotine. I'd want to be busted for sneaking ciggies on the sly and be encouraged to clean up my act with the help of someone who loved me enough to confront me. And I'm sure about this because that was the contrarian/prophetic message my Dad's wife delivered to him at age 55, after his doctor announced that Dad had emphysema and if he didn't quit the habit, he'd be dead in five years. What did Dad do? He not only kicked the cigarettes, but caffeinated coffee, too. (That cup of coffee and first cigarette in the morning were two of my father's favorite things ... he told me years later he still missed them.) Not only that, he kicked the excess weight, and exercised his way to better health at 60 than he'd had at 45. He lived long enough to celebrate with my Mom their 50th wedding anniversary and died in his 80s with her by his side to the last. Her prophecy was entirely consistent with Dad's best interest, but its delivery wasn't a happy moment for him (I know, I was there) and it issued from a warning of dire consequences.

Why should it be any different when one of the prophets who make up Christ's Bride pleads similarly with the those who stand in for the Bridegroom?

It shouldn't be different, but it often is, and while this disappointing, it's not surprising. Institutions are rarely open to correction. Religious institutions are no exception (also disappointing). Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches alike have historically silenced or otherwise sidelined those whose voices bring the discomfort that inevitably comes when the institution's or its leaders' shadow side is exposed to view.

Nor is this anything new: Before there was a Christian community or its Christ, God's Chosen People regularly killed their prophets and awaited the Messiah only to reject all who came in his name. (Jesus was not, by any means, the only one to make the claim and be killed for it.)

Killing those who question the received wisdom (as interpreted by the prevailing religious leadership) is a long, sad tradition in Christian polity. Read Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and you'll find that a substantial number of those who lost their lives for Christ did so at the hands of others who claimed the name of Christ. If you read closely enough, you'll find that most of that subset were contrarians who died for having the audacity to call the church to change that most Christians now take quite for granted: Advocating that the scriptures be translated into the vox populi, for example. Or how about printing the scriptures in book form so that someone not officially connected with the clergy or a monastery could actually read and study them? Yes, people died so you can have that leather-bound, gold-leaf edged, red-letter-edition family Bible on your coffee table.

Thank God, killing those who think outside the box is no longer an official option in most Christian churches. Sometime in the 1600s, people finally wearied of burning and drowning their neighbors and decimating the populations of neighboring realms over whether the communion wafer was or was not the actual physical body of our Lord. A wiser more aware populace began to see that leaders were not infallible and that the fact that God permitted evil leaders did not equate to a divine right to rule.

But we are far from rolling out the welcome mat to those bear gifts of correction. Today, we excommunicate them, stigmatize them, marginalize them — or boo them and heckle them at commencement addresses, as was done to President Obama recently at Notre Dame. (Yes, he's a Christian and, yes, if you are a Christian, he's your brother in Christ, whether you like it or not. And, yes, I'm saying that what he's said recently about the so-called culture wars might be prophetic. Are we willing to listen and discern before we pass judgment?)

Some marginalized prophets eventually go elsewhere and start yet another "protest" church, which accounts for much of church history (even monasteries were a less obvious form of schism). This phenomenon is largely responsible for the current mutilated state of the Body of Christ.

Some don't start new churches but, as is the fashion now, they write books, go on speaking tours and advocate leaving church altogether.

And I want to make very clear, I do not mean to imply that the issues that currently divide us are not serious. On the contrary, discerning what God is saying to his church about such things is of the utmost importance. But we cannot hear Him if we suppress the mechanism that God ordained for the airing of difficult issues and prayerfully, humbly getting at what God might want us to do about them. In it's absence, we inevitably settle for a veneer of "nice" beneath which germinate seeds of discord that, absent the purifying light of the Spirit, sprout in dark corners, like poisonous mushrooms, and emerge into view as full-blown conflicts. The result are bitter, prolonged and often terribly public battles that should have been family discussions.

Prophecy, properly understood, is a God-given means by which God's Family, when it gathers around the Lord's Table, is encouraged, both negatively, by warnings and the potential for negative consequences, and positively by the expectation of pleasing God and seeing His Kingdom advanced. The Scriptures are clear. Prophetic messages are not to be accepted uncritically. But they are equally clear that it takes a whole church to discern what God is saying to His Church. Rather than making extra-biblical rules, leaders ought to be practicing and teaching discernment (not to mention making use of those in the Body who have spiritual gifts of discernment of spirits).

Yes, that's the more difficult path. And it's messy — no argument there. But the church has been a mess since day one (imagine Acts 2 at your church this Sunday: Tongues of fire? OMG! Are they drunk??). At some point, we have to learn to love the mess, don't we? When you have small children, your house is never clean. You don't, for that reason, lock the kids in a closet, even when people come to visit. (Not if you're a healthy parent). Kids are kids. You have to let them be kids before they can grow up. Why would it be any different with prophets (or pastors, or missionaries, or church secretaries, for that matter)?

We all learn by experience. How can the members of the Body learn to discern God's voice unless we're all in a position to hear it? And we need to hear it unchecked and unmediated by man, no matter what that man's title.

If some of God's most articulate voices go unheard because what they say might make us uncomfortable, then we will be left to wonder, when disaster strikes, how did things go so wrong when we were feeling so comfortable?

Abuse of Authority: The Gitmo of the Heart

2009-06-10T22:02:00.004-06:00

The dust barely settled from years of revelations about its pedophile priest coverup here in America, the Roman Catholic church now faces another round of public exposures: According to this recent NY Times story, a nine-year investigation points a finger of indictment at the church for covering up an "endemic" pattern of sexual and physical abuse took place from the 1930s into the 1990s in church-run reformatories and special-education schools in Ireland.

Patterns of religious abuse, historically, are by no means limited to the Catholic churches. Evangelical Christian groups and a number of charismatically inclined churches, along with a host of religious fringe groups, have been called out in the past, in books, TV exposes, movies and legal proceedings, for a variety of abuses of organizational power. In May, for example, the nephew of Warren Jeffs, a now imprisoned former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS, the LDS splinter group that still practices polygamy), has broken his silence about the inner workings of the sect in a much touted book, Lost Boy, in which he reveals the full extent of the religious abuse that led to Jeff's arrest and trial. (Hear the National Public Radio program about it here.)

An op/ed piece in the May 20 NY Times, penned by someone who experienced life in the Irish Catholic system indicted in the report above, opens a window for those too young to have lived through the middle part of the 20th Century into just how differently things looked back then. The writer's account reminded me of my own childhood, when what we today consider to be scandalous abuse was often tolerated and sometimes condoned.

When I was a kid, there was a family on the next block where the husband beat his wife and his kids. How do I know this? Everyone knew. What went on in the home across the street stayed in the home across the street. You didn't interfere. There was a conspiracy, but not one of silence. And as I look back, I wonder how much we didn't know.

This "open silence" was the way. But it was not the right way. How do I know? This is how: By all accounts, the oldest son from that family was a real nice kid. Respectful to adults, he was the only kid I ever knew who unfailingly called my dad Mr. Musselman. He dated my sister. Yeah, he smoked, but back then, except in front of the pastor or priest, almost everyone did. Years later, however, he was arrested elsewhere for the murder of a neighbor in a rundown apartment complex in which he had been living as a bitter, friendless man. Nobody could figure out why. I know why. Abuse breeds abuse. Anger breeds anger. Perpetrators create perpetrators.

In this case, that boy's father was not religious nor was he raised religious, but that makes my point: abuse, no matter what the motive or who the perpetrator, ultimately begats more abuse. Religious people (like my parents and our catholic neighbors) tolerated such behavior because authority figures had broad discretion in my father's world, inside and outside the church. The worst that happened to an abusive dad like that was that he would have to pack up the family and move because of the gossip. When abusive dad's actions were cloaked with a religious veil — in the pulpit or by membership on the church board — they were untouchable. Who would bring down the church, even to save it from a monster? Sadly, it was more important to keep up the appearance of respectability. Although I look back and wonder, who exactly were we trying to fool? God?

And there were plenty of religiously veiled perpetrators in my neighborhood: Everyone knew that the great guy up the block, a devout Catholic, was also an alcoholic and, when he had a few too many beers, could get abusive. No one was surprised when his wife finally got up the gumption to confront it and divorce him. But no one was there to help her, either, and many criticized her. Divorce, of course, wasn't the respectable thing. An interesting sidelight: The oldest son of that family had the guts to take his mom's side and later married a woman whose career and independence he has faithfully supported all these years. He's still married, and happily — and not an alcoholic. But not a Catholic, either. More importatntly ... he was an exception.

In our neighborhood, there were some Lutheran families. In one, the father, a altogether respectable fellow, was an ingrained racist. The word nigger was a common noun in his household when the Freedom Riders cruised the South. Another beat his son and told him he was worthless. That fellow's son, 40 years later, still can't hold a consistent job and is still overcoming that judgment on his life.

And everyone knew that the stern but biblically conservative pastor (he preached against homosexuality, I remember) who served in a nearby church for many years had at least once (that, we knew) beaten his wife in a rage.

Scratch an atheist and, all too often, you'll find someone who, in some way like those reform-school kids in Ireland, suffered at the hands (if not physically then, mentally and spiritually) of a religious authority figure, at home, at school, in a church. A personal example: I learned my catechism one summer at the hands of my racist Lutheran neighbor's pastor during a week-long barrage masquerading as Vacation Bible School. We were seated at tables with printed copies of the catechism. We were told to memorize it. Then we were called up, one-by-one to face the pastor and serve it up without looking at our notes. This man of God never smiled, not once. I was terrified of him ... and, as a result, terrified of God as well. Those who managed the catechetical feat were treated as if it was only to be expected. Those who, like me, were too terrified to perform, were held in barely disguised contempt.

Every time one Christian victimizes someone else, in the church or out, for any reason, it becomes an effective argument against the reality of the church's connection to God. So we shouldn't be too surprised, therefore, that there is a sort of general horror at the idea of the Pope or some other religious leader "calling the shots" in public life. You've got a couple of generations of people who suffered under those leaders, who now write, speak and live as journalists, teachers, lawyers, judges and politicians. They're bent on protecting another generation from what they suffered, and if I were in their shoes, I might do likewise. (In fact, I am. Here. Now.)

We can't forget that Jesus himself said, "The world will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." And if we don't love one another? If what the world sees coming from the church isn't consistent with Jesus' message of love, but rather a holdover from the church's unfortunately lengthy history of abuse of authority, then who can blame them for their unbelief?

We have to face an uncomfortable truth: People whose "map" of Christendom has been drawn by abusers, angry right-wing politicians, uptight latter-day Pharisees and the like are very unlikely, apart from the amazing grace of a loving God, to find the Way.

There are implications here, of course, for the current debate over whether or not "enhanced interrogation" carried out at Guantanamo and other locations by CIA operatives were "useful." The Obama Administration has taken the admirable tack of stepping back and looking not just at the immediate result, which (for all we'll ever know) might have secured information that stopped some terrorist plots from unfolding. Instead, he's looking at how this plays in the Big Picture. He's asking not only how such actions affect the way the U.S. is perceived and how we see ourselves but he's asking the more important — the critically central — question: How are terrorists created?

I know how. I've known from childhood. Abuse breeds abuse. Anger breeds anger. Perpetrators create perpetrators.

You look at the history of the regions that now breed terrorists and you will find decades of ill treatment by those who have abused positions of power. Some of it financed by American money, and perpetrated by people trained by American military operatives. Afghanistan and Pakistan come to mind. Mr. Obama, I think, was right when he said that Gitmo has probably created more terrorists than it has stopped.

At least one U.S. soldier has taken this historical perspective to heart and, in a remarkable act of courage, questioned U.S. policy on this point by stepping forward to defend the rights of a single detainee. A SWAT team member in his civilian life, Capt. Kirk Black now trains Afghani policemen in counter terrorism. At first skeptical that any detainee could be innocent, Black investigated and then took up the case of a man held in Bagram (one of our "offshore" prisons in Afghanistan) even helping him obtain legal counsel.

Capt. Black, previously assigned to Gitmo, has learned by experience to question the wisdom of U.S. policy in the region. He's too young to remember the time when taking a suspect to the police station basement and beating a confession out of them with a rubber hose was a all-to-common law enforcement procedure. (And yes, I have spoken with an older chief of police personally, who acknowledged that fact from his own personal experience. I'm not just repeating "liberal dogma.") The fact that it appeared to be effective caused officialdom to look the other way for decades until court decision after court decision established beyond a reasonable doubt that confession by compulsion was a way to get a quick conviction, but a very bad way to get at the truth.

Mr. Cheney and others who defend America's treatment of suspected terrorists are children of a generation that accepted abuse of authority as a normal, even necessary, part of life, laboring under the illusion that those so abused can flower, somehow, into moral rectitude. Like Capt. Black, we must all acknowledge that such assumptions are not born out by the facts.

History indicates quite the opposite. Authority unchecked, is inevitably abusive. And more to the point, is patently ineffective at accomplishing good ends. Gitmo is a product of what is still resident in our community heart: The residue of a cultural belief that force, compulsion, shame, disrespect, dishonor and rejection are legitimate or effective tools for moral people to use in moral redirection. Whether we are protecting Americans from terrorists or our own children from the fires of hell, compulsion, castigation and cruelty simply don't work. They feed the disorder they intend to end. They kill the faith they meant to instill. They drive underground the discontents that can only be addressed in the light of day, with understanding and compassion.

Mr. Obama also is right to look to the future and resist retribution for those who created Gitmo. Mr. Cheney is sadly mistaken. But he is not a monster. He, too, is a victim. You do not silence the Rush Limbaughs of the world with vitriol. It is vitriol that feeds them. Peace, forgiveness and reformation never rise from retribution and shame. Do we not have the witness of the Reconstruction era and the aftermath of WWI as witnesses to that? The one gave rise to the Jim Crow South and the other to Nazi Germany. Do we not have the witness to the wisdom of rejecting retribution in the post-WWII period, when the U.S. helped Japan rebuild and gained, to this day, an important ally?

Gitmo has given an ironic form of aid and comfort to fanatical jihadists, giving them ample fuel to fan hatred of America in the hearts of Islam's dispossessed. It has made a negative impact on our collective soul and further soiled our already sullied reputation in the global community.

What we do about it has serious implications for our future. What does it say about our decades-long refusal to extend a hand of conciliation to Cuba? The refusal to speak with leaders of Iran? And countless other decisions the U.S. has made, from its position of power, that have often unnecessarily alienated both foe and friend?

Indeed, what does it say about campaigns to prevent gay marriage? Or reverse Roe v. Wade? The lessons of Gitmo might have special relevance for those on both sides of the abortion battlelines, since the wounds of this particularly painful "culture war" were opened afresh this week by the murder of a Wichita, Kan. physician who performed the procedure in the third trimester.

Abuse breeds abuse. Anger breeds anger. Perpetrators create perpetrators. And we, corporately and individually, still so easily become both abusers and victims.

It's time for America to close Gitmo and for each of us to close the Gitmo in our own heart.

Sonja Sotomayor

2009-05-27T17:40:00.005-06:00

Oh my.

I keep thinking I've seen the worst from the Republican spin team (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, etc.) but the news of their accusations of racism with respect to Supreme Court nominee Sonja Sotomayor really makes me wonder how low they're willing to go? I read her comments from the 2002 speech in context ... something Coulter and crew apparently didn't do or didn't care to do. Sorry, I just don't see it, folks. Seems like she's pretty well grounded in reality to me. Certainly not a racist.

If I didn't know better, I'd think these characters were double agents. The Democrats couldn't have hoped for these three to make themselves look so ... well, ridiculous. And without any help!

Hopefully, most Republicans can see through this stuff and distance themselves from it. But I'm more doubtful than ever about the G.O.P.'s ability to re-energize itself. It won't happen anytime soon. The conservative "voice" in this country has been highjacked by these self-appointed mouthpieces and their noisy cohort on the Fox "news" crew and made to look foolish. Thoughtful and compassionate people like me in the Pro-Life movement have little hope of advancing their cause with this kind of assistance.

One bright light: Their unwise comments could do a lot to help secure a more fair hearing for Ms. Sotomayor in the Senate. One can hope.

Ann Coulter Does Not Speak for Me

2009-05-02T12:22:00.010-06:00

For a long time, I've been hearing the name Ann Coulter. Apparently an evangelical Christian and pretty definitely a Republican, she has written at least one book that excoriates "liberal" values. In fact, the reason I first heard her name was in connection with the fact that she created quite a storm among her own constituency (politically right-leaning evangelicals — no, that's not redundant) for wearing what some thought was too-suggestive, off-the-shoulders garb on her book cover.

I ran across one of her latest salvos just now, in which she claims that Sarah Palin would have carried the day for the Republicans had she not been weighed down by her not-truly-Republican running mate, Mr. McCain.

I happen to be an admirer of Ms. Palin. As Ms. Coulter notes quite accurately, Ms. Palin has done a pretty good job in Alaska, confronting Alaska's good-old-boy Big Oil problems. Ms. Coulter conveniently forgets that her Republican pals were on the other side of that one. What is notable is that Ms. Palin, like her supposedly ne'er-do-well running mate, Mr. McCain, went against her party's typical stance on that issue, one reason she appealed to the "maverick." And she did, indeed "walk-the-walk" on social issues important not only to the so-called "religious right" but to many people across party lines.

But reading the rest of Ms. Coulter's diatribe, I got the feeling I had entered a parallel universe, one in which everything is turned upside down or inside out and nothing is as you remember it.

As I remember the run-up to the election, things went like this: Ms. Palin, the surprise selection as Mr. McCain's running mate, immediately boosted the Republican hopes in the polls. An attractive woman and a good speaker, she was initially a plus for the ticket, with her soccer-mom directness and velvet-fisted humor that made you think she was tough enough to duke it out with the big kids on the block in Washington. Politically, it appeared to be a shrewd and calculated move to disarm the Democrats by trumping them with a female running mate even as the liberal Democrats watched Ms. Clinton go down to defeat by Mr. Obama.

Ms. Coulter seems to have forgotten that the polls held, even after she "walked the walk," but her (and Mr. McCain's) fortunes began to fall when Ms. Palin's poor grasp of international politics surfaced in a series of interviews. I talked to some people, pre- and post-election, who were uncomfortable with her views on some social issues, but the people I know who voted against the Republican ticket this time around, without exception, did so because of two things: the fact that Ms. Palin was clearly not yet ready to step into the role and the fact that they did not trust the Republican party (no matter who was at the helm) to guide us through a growing financial crisis that was ever more clearly the result of so called "free market" policies Republicans have championed since the days of the Reagan Administration.

Despite Ms. Coulter's suggestion to the contrary, Ms. Palin would have lost the election whether or not Mr. McCain had been on the ticket. She was not ready to lead the country through the political and financial quagmires in which we now find ourselves. And even most Republicans were privately admitting that before it was over.

I have no argument here with Ms. Coulter about her philosophical bent (although we'd no doubt disagree on a number of issues). And I'm more than willing to ignore the cover photo thing. What I'm upset about is her plainly loose grip on the facts and her apparent pride in the fact that Ms. Palin could have exceeded Ms. Coulter's capacity to alienate liberals — the very people I would think she'd want, as a Christian, to reach and convince with her message.

Ms. Palin is a promising young face. She may yet help revitalize an obviously ailing G.O.P. But if she's to be worthy of the U.S. Presidency, she will take a couple of pages from the Obama playbook: Study to show herself worthy to handle the world's economic and political complexities, respect your foes, domestic and foreign (Mr. Obama makes no secret of the fact that several of the former presidents on which he has modeled aspects of his own political career were Republicans, and he's not afraid to talk to the presidents of Iran and Venezuela), and she needs to cultivate an ability to reach out to and open a civil dialogue with those with whom she doesn't agree.

The Republican party is reeling, and Rush Limbaugh and a small army of angry right-wingers are attempting, unwittingly, to marginalize it for a decade. Ms. Palin is one of the few who have the opportunity, should she care to take it, to remake the G.O.P. into a positive rather than negative force for conservative values. She might even get a shot at piloting the ship of state in 2012. But she'll have to shed some baggage along the way. Mr Limbaugh and Ms. Coulter, if they continue on their present courses, would have to be left with the bags on the dock.

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 4

2009-04-27T10:50:00.004-06:00

Yes, last time, I did actually say Jesus is a contrarian.

I realize that might be difficult to swallow, so I'm prepared to defend what may, at first, seem to be a rather extreme position (and therefore in need of contrarian balance) but the evidence is right there in his Book. So let's take a look through and see.

Let's look, for example, at Luke 11:27-28: As Jesus is passing by, a woman in the crowd calls out, "Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you." Now, I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a very nice thing to say. A compliment: Your mom is lucky to have had you as a kid! (No one, thus far, has said anything like that to me.) But Jesus does not say, "Why thank you." or more modestly, "You're very kind to say it." Or something rather gallant, like, "Well, I'm very fortunate to have had her as my mother." Instead, he says in response, "Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and obey it." Now, take Jesus out of the equation for a moment and insert, say, your favorite politician or movie star or, heck, one of your acquaintances. Kinda, well ... contrary. Maybe a little rude. But Jesus is after something else here. Even though He is certainly who she thinks He is, he wants her and all those who heard her to focus not on the "new prophet in town" (scholars tell us that as many as 500 such prophets came and went — mostly to their deaths — in Israel during the troubled times of the long Roman occupation), but on the message He's come to deliver.

How about John 7:21-24? Here, Jesus delivers a good contrarian retort to those who condemn him for healing on the Sabbath, exposing their hypocrisy. First, he offers a bit of balance to their worship of Moses ("Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs) ....") and then he asks, "Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing on the Sabbath?" Indeed.

A prime example is the famous exchange between Peter and Jesus at the foot washing in John 13: Peter, always a man of extremes, gets balanced not once, but twice. "You're not going to wash my feet," declares Peter, to which Jesus replies, "If I don't, you'll have no part with me." "Then wash my whole body," Peter exclaims, and he gets a lesson on the difference between salvation from our sin nature (happens once) and cleansing from the pollution of sin (an ongoing necessity and a service we are to perform for one another).

In fact, the act of foot washing was a bit of contrarian theater, if you will. Jesus was not trying to institute a new ritual for the church (most of us actually got that). Foot washing is not widely practiced today because Jesus was making a pointed statement not about religious practice but rather about the nature of leadership. The disciples were, to the hour of his death, convinced that Jesus was a closet Zealot, and would lead them all, somehow, to political victory and cultural autonomy in Roman-dominated Palestine. Jesus did all that he could, in very contrarian fashion, to suggest otherwise.

The foot washing and the mountainside transfiguration that preceded it are, in fact, the bookends in a contrarian teaching strategy. Jesus gives James, John and Peter a glimpse of his Glory on the hillside, then washes their feet like a common slave. Then in John 14, he calls them friends (bullseye -- the balance). Those contrasting images and the tensions they create have always characterized genuine Christian experience.

There's no more compelling example of that tension than the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 8). The teachers of the law and the Pharisees, the story goes, bring her into the Temple and show her to Jesus. They appeal to the Book: "In the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" Before I go further, it's important to note three things: They were upset and agitated, they were appealing to a recognized authority, they were looking for a fight and trying to set a trap. Now, notice also that Jesus was contrarian at each point. He calmly squats down and begins to write on the ground with his finger (sorry guys, I'm not buying into your game, I won't respond in kind). They keep after him for a while, so he stands up and, as my son would say, he "owns" them with that now famous line, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." After the guys all slink out, he asks the woman, "Where are they? Has no one accused you?" No, sir, she says. "Then neither do I condemn you." he says, but then, contrarian through-and-through, he adds, "Go, now, and leave your life of sin." He doesn't deny what the Law says, he just points out that only those who are sin-free have the right to pass judgment. And the woman gets neither pardon nor permission: She gets grace. She'll not be stoned, but she will be expected to amend her life. And so it is with each of us.

I must point out, before I go any further that if you're thinking that, by contrarian, I mean one who seeks balance in the sense of establishing a middle ground or forging a compromise, I have to say that you've misheard what I said.

Contrarians are not great compromisers. Jesus, the Great Contrarian, if you will, was to the modern mind, in particular, distressingly uncompromising. Consider his answers when questioned about the Jewish Law. In Matt. 18-22, for example, Jesus has just given a mini-sermon on forgiveness and then Peter pipes up and asks him, "Lord, how many times may my brother sin against me and I have to forgive him? Seven times?" Now, the rabbis of the time were in the habit of telling people that you had to forgive someone who has sinned against you — when asked with sincerity — at least three times. But then you were more or less off the hook. So ... Peter's thinking, perhaps, that seven might get him a solid "A" in discipleship class this morning. But no pat on the back is forthcoming. Jesus says to him, "I tell you, not just seven times, but seventy times seven!" And all the scholarly folks tell us that that was a way, numerically, of indicating that there was really no practical limit to forgiveness. We're never off the hook. Ouch, pretty harsh, huh?

Or how about Mark 10:2-5: Some Pharisees came to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to divorce her." But Jesus said to them, "It was because of your hardness of heart that he wrote this command for you. But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 'That is why a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh." So they are no longer two, but one flesh. For that reason, Jesus says, "What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." Back in the house, the disciples asked him about this again. So he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery." Double ouch!

There's more. During the mountainside discourse we've come to call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told a society which excluded the physically handicapped from the Temple environs to cut off their own hands or pluck out their own eyes if they cause them to sin, because it was better to enter heaven as a cripple than to be excluded whole. (We're still not sure what to do with that one.) He admonished an ethnic group that had once ruled the Middle East in great wealth under King David and Solomon and longed to reclaim its glory when the Messiah came that they should give no thought to what they should eat or wear but instead seek God's righteousness and let God take care of the rest. (Try quoting that one to the legions of your neighbors who are suffering from our economic follies in 2009.)

Jesus sought at every contrarian turn to impress upon his hearers the radical nature of the kingdom he was initiating by contrasting it in the sharpest possible terms with the kingdom the Messianic myth-makers had imagined for them.

He told Israel and by extension, all who seek salvation, not only that the Law was in full force, but that its provisions were far more demanding and severe than their rabbis had intimated. Such extremity caused Paul to exclaim, in his letter to the Romans, that "there is not one righteous, no not one, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." And those who heard Jesus say it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven asked in horror, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus answers: "With God, anything is possible." Even our salvation.

Jesus' entire life was a contrarian masterpiece. A contrast of extremes to illustrate an almost impossibly complex interweaving of sacred and profane that still defies our poor efforts to codify it into mechanical logic and simple steps on the one hand or magical mysterium on the other: The God born in a stable. The finite human who could die for the infinite sins of the whole world. The teacher who counted a tax collector among his followers but then took a whip to moneychangers in the Temple, who would eat dinner with the Pharisees and with those the Pharisee wouldn't acknowledge in the street. The Jewish rabbi who heaped scorn on Israel's religious elite then healed the daughter of a Roman centurion whose faith he had not seen among his own people. Who appeared after his resurrection first to two women among his followers, putting his appointed apostles second on the list. The One who would say that not one "jot or tittle" of the Law would pass away until all was fulfilled, then at almost every turn, turn the received wisdom inside out so that we could be changed from the inside out by the Spirit because we could not be changed from the outside in by the Law. The God/man, worthy of our worship yet tempted in all our ways and subject to all our weaknesses. The one to whom all power and authority has been given, and yet who was and is fully and ultimately submitted to his Father's will. The Savior who gave up His position and His freedom (he was not captured or detained against his will), so that we could be free. The One who would submit to death, and in so doing, utterly defeat and destroy it.

To be a follower of Christ is to live in the tension of attempting to find the balance between the righteous demands of the Law and reality of our freedom from its curse. Those who camp on one side of the divide inevitably fall into error. That's one reason why Paul insisted on unity in diversity (a contrarian notion if ever there was one). The Church, ideally, a willing assemblage of contrary folk who balance each other out on their common pilgrammage. It's always when that unity/diversity thing breaks down that the church gets into trouble. And as fragmented as it is, these days, it's clearly in big trouble.

Chase out all your contrarians, and your church becomes a cult. Or a monolithic institution run by an elite that slights its poor, or the rich, or the uneducated, or the educated, or its women, or whatever group(s) whose trait(s) do not happen to describe those at the top who make the decisions and wield the authority.

Cults and monoliths have dominated the religious landscape in the last century, and the Church is now hearing, again, from its contrarian children. May She find that ever shifting place somewhere in the radical middle, where saved sinners and sinners who need to be saved can find the acceptance and repentance, compassion and correction, freedom and responsibility, faith and works, exclusivity and inclusivity that are inseparable in the love and grace of Him who faithfully contradicts all we think we know about Him so that we can come to know Him truly.

Susan Boyle

2009-04-17T17:04:00.004-06:00

If you haven't heard the name, you're more computer-challenged than I am, and you have my deepest sympathies. I haven't provided the link, but you won't need one. Simply type in "Susan Boyle video," in your browser's search window and hit return. (I'll wait.)

People say the Internet is the Great Leveler. It's Communication for the Common Man. Certainly its the haven for everyone who ever wanted his or her 15 minutes of fame. The online world is positively awash with MySpacing Facebookers who twitter and tweet and text each other incessantly, as they await their moment on YouTube. Talent is not required. This week, however, the Internet proved its worth, again, as a stage for real talent that isn't packaged in pubescent perfection or bought-with-Botox beauty.

Susan Boyle is a 47-year old woman from Scotland. She looks .... well, like most of us. Not Angelina Jolie. Not Brad Pitt. Since she was 15, she says, she's wanted to be a professional singer. Instead, she cared for her ailing mother until she died. Now she lives alone with her cat and, until this week, sang mostly for the smallish crowd at the local pub, with a karaoke machine as her back-up band. Hasn't made a dime. By her own admission, she's "never been kissed."

After a single, seven-minute appearance on Britain's Got Talent six days ago, during which she presumably used up half of her 15 minutes, spunky Ms. Boyle endured chuckles and rolling eyes and earned cheers and a standing ovation, impressing even the almost impossible to please impressario Simon Cowell. Videos of her turn signing "I Dreamed a Dream" (from the stage musical Les Miserables) streamed onto the Internet. More than 25 million hits and counting. A week later, she's famous not only in Great Britain, but all over the world.

Just today, someone turned up a charity CD on which she sang a single song a decade ago. Google "Susan Boyle Cry Me a River," then picture Lena Horne or almost any other famous voice who's sung a similar song in the last 70 years. Oh, my! What a voice.

No money yet, but that will surely follow. Simon Cowell will no doubt see to that, even if she doesn't win the competition. But for now, she's captured the hearts of every plain old nobody whose talents are wrapped in brown paper but still dreams a dream.

Hope she finds that first kiss, too.

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 3

2009-04-11T08:26:00.004-06:00

I've confessed to and defined contrarianism and suggested a general genesis for this under-appreciated tendency, but so far it's been about contrarians as a group. What about me?

Although I remain (necessarily) open to the idea that I'm contrarian in my DNA (yes, my father was one), I suspect he and I became contrarians largely as a result of our religious upbringing. Dad was the preacher's kid, and had all the unhappy experiences a P.K. could have in a small, conservative Mennonite community in South Central Kansas, where everyone knows who you are you and news of anything you do gets back to the church board.

Like my dad, I grew up in the Christian church. Or so I've often said. But recently, I've come to realize, appallingly late, that that is an inaccurate statement for several reasons:

First, and most importantly, I did little "growing up" in the church. (I'll have more to say about that another time.)
Second, I didn't do this growing up within a fairly narrow, distinctly protestant/rationalist and thorough-goingly American slice of a splintered church that is as variegated, divided and at war with itself as the world it claims to be here to save. We referred to ourselves as evangelical Christians. The rest of the church and the world, especially in the last couple of decades, have suggested other, less complimentary names for us — not entirely without cause.
Third, I became associated for a number of years with an organization that claimed to represent The Church but often obscured the real church from view. We self-proclaimed evangelicals were, of course, right, and the rest were wrong and, therefore, we had little real contact with other brands of Christianity.
Fourth, the theologies of the evangelical churches (yes, plural — there are many, which tends to blunt each sub-brand's truth claims) with which I was associated were unfortunately malignant mixes of what I still believe are timeless, eternal truths with time-bound, temporal, cultural conservatism tainted by racism and class bigotry, marred by misogyny and despoiled by a surprisingly pervasive undercurrent of unaddressed sexual dysfunction and gender confusion.

Evangelical theologies proved to be true Gordian knots that resisted even the most dedicated contrarians' efforts to untie. If you took another tack or pointed out an alternative, you were "stepping out from under authority" — the "umbrella" of which, we were told, was very small, indeed). If you actively opposed one of the more sacred tenets (by this I mean, something truly critical like, say, you didn't think it was absolutely necessary to have a "quiet time" every day or you were in the habit of not showing up to the "optional" campus chapel service), you could very well be in league with ... you know who. Contrarians weren't welcome.

A Gordian knot, of course, cannot be untied. It seems a truism that those who wish, finally, to grow up in such churches must begin that process (as did a legendary Alexander the Great) by cutting the knot — a decision that it takes a reasonably healthy contrarian to make without plunging headlong into an even more dangerous brew of belief and misbelief or losing faith altogether.

It's a decision one can make only when one finally realizes an obvious and, therefore, almost universally overlooked fact: Jesus is, yes ... a contrarian. (More in Part 4.)

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 2

2009-04-10T18:37:00.001-06:00

Last time, I admitted to being a contrarian and celebrated the contrarian's role in a world too full of those who are too sure they're right and everyone else is wrong. But ... what is a contrarian?

As the term suggests, folks thus afflicted tend to be contrary. Yes, they can be a bit Eeyore-ish, seeing the rain cloud when others are focusing only on the silver lining. They can appear, to those who do not know them, to have a negative attitude toward life. And for that reason, they often are mistaken for curmudgeons or misanthropes.

If those accusations were true, however, they could not be contrarians. Contrarians, in fact, are often hopeful and caring people. They are just as likely to point out the silver lining when others are under a cloud. And they are more likely to take issue with a friend than someone they don't know (or who does not know them), precisely because they are anything but misanthropic.

So, how does one become a contrarian? There's no easy answer to that, because it's a chicken-and-the-egg thing: Which came first? Are we contrarian by nature, and just can't help ourselves? Or have we come into a world owned by the overly sure overlords of rightness, and thus been forced to become contrarians in an attempt to find some kind of balance?

I lean toward the latter option because balance is the contrarian's bottom line. Contrarians aren't argumentative for argument's sake. They aren't trying to win. They seek, instead, a middle ground, a level playing field, a fair airing of a subject's undiscovered complexity, a more thoughtful, less doctrinaire dialogue.

And they will take positions that are quite different from the ones they actually hold, to remind the other that there is always another side to a one-sided discussion. They want the other to leave the scene with a broader perspective, a sense that there may be more to it than they had suspected.

As you might suspect, there is more to this contrarian apologetic. Next time.

Confessions of a Contrarian

2009-03-31T18:06:00.006-06:00

A recent article in this past Sunday's New York Times captured my interest and reminded me about something I rarely own up to: I am a contrarian.

The article profiled Freeman Dyson (great first name), the most celebrated of today's small group of scientists who do not accept the current dogma on Global Warming. Dyson is not, as might be imagined, one to pooh-pooh concern for the environment. On the contrary, he is passionately dedicated to responsible use of the environment. Nor is he a crackpot. He is, in fact, one of the most accomplished scientists of his generation. He is, however, inclined to pooh-pooh science used inappropriately, even in support of a good cause.

Global Warming could be all that those who postulate its presence claim it to be. It could be entirely our fault (the result of excessive CO2 in the upper atmosphere, the result, in turn, of our excessive use of hydrocarbon fuels) and the greatest threat yet to our continued existence on this planet.

Alternatively it could be a significant threat that will surely change the way we live and upset the current environmental balance, thus significantly altering things — all things — leaving nothing as we know it now. Disruptive, to be sure, but not catastrophically destructive.

Or it could be a primarily natural occurrence — a continuation of a cycle of warming and cooling that the earth has experienced for far longer than we've had the ability to record history, one which we contribute to by burning hydrocarbons, but one that would happen in any case, no matter what we did.

Or, what we perceive as global warming could be a temporary, and relatively benign, wobble in a much longer warming/cooling cycle, a wobble that poses no serious or imminent threat.

Reasonable cases can be made for each position. Cases that account for the data we possess. (Keep in mind that the scientific claims on which global warming hinges involve a one degree difference in the average annual temperature recorded on Earth.)

Dyson pooh-poohs the idea that we can confidently extrapolate from meteorological evidence recorded over a tiny slice of geological time (one source says since 1847) sufficient evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt any of these theories. He believes that much of the dire claims and warnings Al Gore recorded in his celebrated film are, for all he knows, just so much pooh-pooh. Gore could be right but he could just as easily be wrong. Dyson's basic contention (one I share) is that we just don't know. We simply don't have sufficient data.

Dyson performs the entirely necessary if disruptive service of the contrarian, loudly proclaiming, as a means of pursuing much needed balance, some heresy in the face of the rising tide of scientific certitude.

Personally, I have no problem with people believing that continuing to drive their gas-guzzling cars and denude the world of its forests will kill them. Fear is a pretty strong motivation. So if that's what it takes to motivate people to change, then so be it. We need to stop doing both (and a lot of other foolish things), and the sooner the better, for lots of good reasons (the fact that pollution is demonstrably bad for your health and is, therefore, killing you, for one) that have nothing to do with global warming.

But I don't think people need to believe a lie to do the right thing. And peddling a half-truth or a suspected truth as absolute truth may get things done in the short term, but I think that history testifies loud and clear that a lie, even in support of truth, ultimately tarnishes the truth. Truth that is not entirely true — that is mere supposition or assumption masquerading as truth, is often the worst kind of lie.

More power, then, to contrarians everywhere, who dare to question the received wisdom, sometimes at great cost, when "experts" get so sure of themselves that they no longer ask the questions that got them where they are.

The Absurdity of the "Quality of Life" Debate

2009-03-21T08:46:00.009-06:00

This article from BBC News, in which a medical ethicist weighs in on a U.K "right to life" case under adjudication in the British courts, reminds us of the essential futility of making decisions in such cases based on so-called "quality of life."

The case concerns a small child afflicted with a terminal disease. The doctors were suing for the right to discontinue treatment and withdraw life support because they believed the child is subject to "intolerable suffering." The father, a Muslim, believes that the right to take a life belongs to God, not humankind, and the mother contends that, in any case, the child's life is not without its compensatory pleasures. The court, for the moment, has sided with the parents. But the case, whichever way it ultimately falls out, will further reinforce a legal precedent that is dangerous, misguided and patently immoral.

The crux of the issue is the impossibility of adequately defining life's quality. In an age when the requirements of the simple business contract can be argued in court for decades, the very idea that a satisfactory legal definition for what constitutes "quality of life" could ever be forged is absurd. The medical ethicist in this case admits as much when he says (italics mine):

Intolerable suffering is not an objective criterion. Suffering, like pleasure, is a purely subjective experience and there exists no scientific instrument that shows exactly how much an individual is suffering.

In that case, how is it, then, that we continue to pursue such a definition? In his very next sentence, the ethicist finds what he thinks is a partial answer, noting that the only way to know for sure whether a person's suffering is "intolerable" is to ask him/her, which, in the current case, is not possible.

The problem with that, of course, is that I have experienced what I judged (at the time) to be intolerable suffering. And I know many others who have as well. By this man's definition, people afflicted with chronic depression, for example, could tell us at a point of pain, that we need to help him/her end that painful life, and we'd be bound to do it. (That, of course, is the position of the so-called "Right to Die" lobby.) But of course, the world is full of people who are glad that they didn't drive off that cliff, take those pills, pull the trigger or otherwise initiate the end of their own life but instead were prevented form doing so by caring family and/or friends or, on their own, grasped hold of their will to live and let it pull them out of intolerable suffering.

We are no better judges of what's best for us when we're in pain than anyone else would be. And this line of argument has no bearing anyway on the rights of those, both born and unborn, who cannot yet express themselves.

"Quality of life" is inherently one of the slipperiest of ethical slippery slopes, and one down which a society increasingly divorced from God or absolutes of any kind is doomed to go. The medical ethicist in this article, in fact, recognizes the vast, uncrossable gulf between the doctor/scientist, who only deals with what he can see and the parent, particularly the religious parent, who taps into what cannot be seen. He even admits that no one can fault the parents in question:

For the parents, these pleasures are sufficient to constitute a worthwhile life. Based on these beliefs, their decision to fight for their son's ongoing treatment is understandable. Indeed, we would be deeply concerned if anyone with these beliefs willingly allowed their child to die.

Indeed. But then he goes on to make this astonishing statement:

Although commentators have expressed much sympathy for the parents, they have generally overlooked the moral challenges for the medical team. In the doctor's eyes, by continuing to treat Baby MB with painful and futile measures, they are treating a vulnerable child against his best interests and violating a basic tenet of medical practice: first, do no harm Ironically, in these spacial circumstances, it is keeping the child alive that constitutes the harm.

Really!??! Since the greatest harm they could do (particularly from the point of view of the scientist who holds no belief in an afterlife) is to end its existence, it is arguably the lesser evil to treat him. Sorry, that seems to me to be pretty simple. In fact, it is foundational to every legal system that those who end the life of an innocent, and the act was premeditated, have committed murder. But our ethicist persists:

The child's neurologist, Dr S, said: "I have been feeling that what I have been doing as a doctor has been wrong for many months, which is a very difficult position for me to be in." The wrongness lies not only in acting against his conscience (which is distressing enough), but in being complicit in a child's profound and avoidable suffering. It is no surprise that some of the doctors have expressed a reluctance to carry on treating Baby MB if the ruling goes against them — which it now has.

Well, there you have it: This is a case of the medical community "feeling" like its in a "difficult" position and therefore, insisting on its right to relief from its own suffering. And, he suggests, the doctors are not sure they're willing to comply with the court's judgment, despite the fact that the court has ruled against them in accordance with the "quality of life" criteria they claim to live by.

If today's medical ethicists have their way, the world will eventually be robbed of the greatness, even the genius, that is wrought, in part, by people who fight intolerable suffering and handicap and survive to contribute much to the world's more fortunate and less pain stricken. What would the world be without a Steven Hawking? Or, to turn it around, a Mother Theresa, who believed that loving and comforting and valuing those in pain made more sense than to kill them. Who in fact, gave up what could have been a nice life like yours or mine to devote herself to those in intolerable pain?

The answer is, it would be a world in which the weakest, smallest and most vulnerable would be done away with by the powerful who, as a consequence of their own weakness, smallness and vulnerability, would presume to deteremine another's ultimate value.

Hasn't the world had enough of that already?

Watching Watchmen

2009-03-07T17:48:00.011-07:00

"Who is watching the Watchmen?"

The answer this weekend is lots of people. A much anticipated film adaptation of this now legendary graphic novel premiered in thousands of theaters Friday. Hotly debated in the entertainment press even before the first trailers appeared, the film was declared a sure failure by purists (called fanboys), disowned by its author and doubted by critics who consider the novel's dense, flashback-laden, multilayered story-within-a-story structure and fantastic imagery unfilmable. Indeed, the film's director, Zack Taylor, had been preceded by many who attempted then abandoned Watchmen film projects.

An unashamed fanboy himself, Taylor spent much time during the film's post-production period explaining and defending his vision of the book as film, reassuring fans that he would be faithful to the original. People went to the theater either in fearful anticipation, hoping for the best, or out of morbid curiosity, unwilling to pass up the chance to discuss a good train wreck over a latte.

How I came to be among the legion of Watchmen watchers Friday night and write this review deserves some explanation. Let me first say that I come late to the party. Until this past Christmas, I had never heard of Watchmen and had only the sketchiest notion of what a graphic novel was (a glorified comic book, right?). But I had determined to get my younger son, who requested only video games for gifts this year, at least one book. At the local book store, the yellow cover and its blood-spattered "happy face" badge caught my eye, and I just had to look. I didn't buy it right then, but did do some research. Turns out I had had in my hands what more than one reviewer called "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time," one that no less than Time magazine had named to its list of 100 Greatest Novels written in the past century. Well. So ... I took a chance.

Written by semi-reclusive Alan Moore, a self-described anarchist and comic book industry demi-god, Watchmen is considered his and that industry's masterpiece. In it, Moore, a Briton, creates a parallel universe version of the U.S. in 1985, in which Richard Nixon was not dethroned by Watergate, we won the Vietnam War, the comic book heroes have character flaws of the sort usually reported in supermarket tabloids, the still-raging Cold War is threatening to get nuclear hot, and a government experiment gone wrong has created a neon-blue superhuman who sees the future and could save the world or destroy it.

Moore envisions America gone mad for crime, sex and drugs after the second generation of a vigilante crime-fighting group formed in the 1940s to clean up America is forced to disband in the 1970s. His unmasked and decaped crew includes the Nite Owl (who still visits his underground lair in an abandoned subway tunnel, where his hovercraft and armored hero suit gather dust; Silk Specter (the daughter of the 1940's original); the embittered Comedian, who embarks on a second career doing government dirty work; and the regal, aloof Ozymandias, reputedly the world's smartest man and one of its richest, as well, having written a tell-all book and reaped the rewards of merchandising his former identity. As the story opens, the sinister Rorshach, an outcast, even among his fellow hero has-beens, and a suspected psychotic, investigates the Comedian's murder. From there, Moore's ingeniously conceived dark plot and complex, chilling characterizations coupled with famed illustrator Dave Gibbons' no-pen-stroke-wasted illustrations draw you into a can't-put-it-down encounter with a creative imagination way ahead of its time. Sometimes cynical, other times sympathetic, Moore's enigmatic commentary on the human condition has earned its high place in the pantheon of popular literature. He asks the question with which I began this review, and leaves us to comtemplate its implications.

So far, however, this is a book review. And I am among those who, having read the book first, rarely think the movie version compares well. But director Taylor's effort proved to be an admirable exception, despite some probably inevitable shortcomings. Visually, the film is startling and stunningly faithful to Gibbon's vision. Gibbon, in fact, was on hand to help Taylor and a small army of CG technicians recreate Moore's dark world and his masked characters with the kind of obsessive faithfulness to detail that was simply not available to film makers of previous generations. And the script writers managed to include in their screenplay much of the story's interwoven fabric, by deftly rearranging and carefully abbreviating lengthier flashbacks and dialogue taken from the book. Nevertheless, several of the book's more inventive devices are missing. The saddest omission is that of a parallel terror tale involving a doomed pirate that illuminates Moore's main narrative. (Ironically, its told in a comic book read by a bit character who haunts a local newstand.) Despite a number of missing elements, the movie is long by Hollywood standards (2 hrs, 43 min), but as I told my son on the way home in the car, I'd have sat through four hours to get more of the book on film.

That said, the film is faithful, at least in spirit, to the story original and, fanboy critic protestations notwithstanding, it delivers. It made me laugh, recoil in horror and relate in all the right places, and think about bigger things, as Moore intended. And it moved me to tears twice — something the book did not do. Taylor's excision of the "aliens" element at the end (can't say more without a spoiler alert) is, in my opinion, an improvement not a problem. Whether its a winner at the box office or not (early returns favor the former), it'll certainly collect my $26.95 for the deluxe two-disc boxed set when it comes out on DVD.

Bottomline? I suspect that Watchmen will narrowly miss the cut as great art when my son's son's kids look back. And its dark vision, violence and nudity (the movie is rated "R") will put some people off. Let me also make clear that I do not necessarily agree with Moore's cataclysmic vision of life on earth nor do I subscribe to the remedy the story's unlikely hero/villian ultimately implements for its troubles. (In the ironic final scene, Moore suggests his own ambivalence.) But the book and the film are an important window into the philosophical universe inhabited by this generation — a generation that has confronted, recoiled from and begun to accept its shadow side earlier than most, yet still believes that truth — even dark truth — is worth fighting for and a dying world of broken people is worth saving.

Thinking Big in Small Times, Part 2

2009-02-28T17:28:00.012-07:00

A lot of things are down now. Things we wish were up: Employment figures. Manufacturing production. Profits. Wages. Even bonuses on Wall Street (although only the bankers are likely to miss those). Things that are up — cost of health care, and personal, business and federal debt — we wish were down. There's one thing that is currently down (and most people are pleased that it is) but I wish was up, even though I know no one will like it. That's the price of oil.

Americans have been spoiled by low gasoline prices for most of the automobile's history. Unlike drivers in Great Britain, the European Union and elsewhere in countries that have no petrol reserves to call their own, we've paid a comparatively small price for our automotive freedom. We're spoiled. So we were shocked, shocked to see prices shoot up in 2008. We got a reprieve — one we do not deserve — when the bottom fell out of the world economy, and diminishing demand brought the price of gas back down from its brief peak at about $4 per gallon. While that may have you sighing we relief, it irritates me to no end.

If the climate change folks are right and global warming is the threat they think it is, it makes no sense for our government or us to sit back and watch the price of gas fall.

The Obama Administration has missed a significant opportunity to stimulate the economy, to stimulate development of alternative energy and begin to wean America from its dependence on foreign oil. We could make a truly meaningful investment in and make progress toward those worthy goals with one simple act: Institute an adjustable tax rate on gasoline that raises it's price, again, to $4 a gallon (with an adjustment clause to cover any future inflation).

I'm not joking. Consider: We know from our recent past that $4 per gallon is a pain point for Americans that stimulates real action: Last year, people bought and actually rode bicycles, took mass transit, drove less, negotiated "work at home" days with their bosses and began to talk about electric and hybrid electric cars like they're more than a curiosity.

At $4, demand would stay low, so crude would continue to trade low and the tax raised would remain high. The best part is that the increased tax revenues could be a huge stimulus to the economy and go a long way very quickly toward getting us out of our fossil fuel predicament.

Here's how: I paid $1.75 for gas just the other day. I bought 8 gallons of gas for my subcompact car. If I had paid, instead, $4 a gallon under our new tax, the revenue raised from me at that one stop would have been 8 X $2.25 = $18. Conservatively, let's say everyone drives a subcontract and that we all fill our tiny tanks only twice a month. Again conservatively, let's say there are 50 million cars on the road in the U.S. That number times the $36 in tax per month comes out, per annum, to $21,600,000,000. That's right, $21.6 billion.

Wow. Well, wait. There's more.

We all know that most people spend twice to three times as much as I spend on gas in my thrifty little compact and that there are many move petrol-driven vehicles. There are, in fact (I just looked it up), more than 250 million passenger vehicles on the road in the U.S. today. If they all consume only my meager amount of gas, the tax revenues would add up to $108 billion. Adjusted for filling up four times a month (more realistic) that figure doubles. If we allow for half of the passenger vehicles to be bigger than my subcompact, we could probably almost triple the amount. Just to be safe, let's call it $300 billion. That's more than six times the total amount Mr. Obama has earmarked for alternative energy development in his stimulus bill. And this would be real money, not debt.

If we really believe we have a problem with global warming, and we really accept the fact that saving the planet is an immediate and grave concern, then we've got to have the guts to pony up some real dollars to solve the problem.

I'd be on the hook for $432 per year, because, yes, I only fill my tank twice a month. (Some of you would pay more, but that's your choice. Nobody's holding a gun to your head.) I'd consider that a small price to pay for a meaty, effective investment in technology that will hasten the day we're in possession of affordable clean transportation and no longer dependent on fossil fuels. (There will come a day, if we don't act now, when it will cost far more than that, per person, to slow the destruction of our planet. And someone may have a gun to our heads, at that point. Worth considering, don't you think?) Frankly, most of the people I know spend at least that much on beer, frothy caffeine-laced concoctions, donuts and/or fast food every year, none of which will save the world or their waist lines. And they think nothing of it.

While the largest portion of the tax revenue would go to alternative energy research, development and commercialization programs, some of the funds could be used to give folks incentives to buy electric cars while they're still a bit pricey, to prime the pump (but not the gas pump).

All this, of course would create jobs and put autoworkers back to work, not to mention get money and credit flowing again. And the best thing about this new tax program is the built-in performance incentive. People hate paying taxes. It's just human nature. So it would be mightily painful (at least psychologically), and that's good. They'd be pressuring their Senators and Representatives to bully the car companies (who owe us, big time, for the bail-out funds) to get the job done. The more money we raise in taxes, the faster alternative energy gets mainstreamed. The sooner we all are driving electric cars, the sooner the tax goes away and, hey ... the pain stops! Then we can all get back to our Mochas and Budweiser.

Thinking Big in Small Times, Part 1

2009-02-26T19:55:00.005-07:00

As the world watched, President Barack Obama spoke before the gathered U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Thankfully, he refused former President Clinton's public suggestion to paste on a cheerful attitude, and he did not preen like Clinton at the numerous standing ovations.

Instead, he took pages from a couple of former Republican presidents. Like Reagan, he focused attention past policy to where attention really belongs, which is people: He gathered a number of people together from all walks of life and, while they sat watching with First Lady Michelle, he told some of their stories: Of a bank exec who gave way his bonus of missions to his employees and former employees. Of a high school student who had the audacity to write to the members of the U.S. Congress about the pitiful conditions at her crumbling small-town school in South Carolina. He quoted her words, "We are not quitters." Like the first Roosevelt, he used the "bully pulpit" to hammer home the necessity to confront huge problems with realism — that is, admit that they are big and painful problems — but also recognize that implicit in those problems are opportunities for those willing to embrace monumental tasks with Mr. Obama's brand of audacious hope. He spoke seriously about his determination to act and did not waste words on either pollyanna prognostications or partisan accusations.

Republicans spent the week preceding the speech visiting radio and TV talk show hosts and commentators, sounding the old saw about "too much government," forgetting that the "government" is just us. "Of the people, by the people and for the people." They justified their complaints by claiming they did not want to saddle future generations with an unbearable burden of debt.

It is revealing that, even before the President's speech, when pundits were grumbling about Mr. Obama's glumness, the public's estimation of Obama's grasp of the situation and his job performance so far is astonishingly positive. Miraculously, the 60+ percent approval rating he held on Election day and Inauguration Day is holding.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama followed his speech with a prosposal for a federal budget in which he intends to follow through on his campaign promises (wouldn't that be a change!). Unlike the previous administration, Mr. Obama has included the cost of waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the budget and proposes cuts that a broad group economists has recommended for years. He's rolling back the "trickle-down" tax-incentives program for the wealthy, a relic of the Reagan era, which has, instead, caused most wealth to "trickle up" at quite a fast clip, contributing to a widening gap between rich and poor. And he's called for regulation that would prevent the kind of brazen, profligate piracy that has passed for investment banking and mortgage lending in the last decade.

Audacious? Yes. Hopeful? That's putting it mildly. Yet, history is on Obama's side. At times of crisis, great leaders — who did not flinch from "impossible" tasks — have set in motion changes that enabled economic development and technological expansion. Lincoln (a Republican) build the first transcontinental railroad despite the financial and human price of our most tragically costly war ever, our own Civil War. At the height of WWII, the second Roosevelt, a Democrat, pushed through the G.I. Bill, despite the greatest national debt we'd ever run up, which gave a generation of returning soldiers college educations that put America first in the world, technologically. Mr. Obama has set his course unflinchingly (and God speed) because he must.

It would have been nice had the terrorists who run Wall Street and the mortgage industry not strapped the monetary equivalent of C4 explosive to the world economy. But Mr. Obama is right: If we the people do not risk acting now to secure renewable energy technologies, rein in health care costs, and make better and higher education available for the youth whose future we have mortgaged, than that generation will have precious little to thank us for when it inherit a debt that will be there anyway in the form of runaway social security and medicare entitlement burdens that, because of a still faltering economy and resulting low GDP. And he was right, therefore, also to call upon Congress to end a quarter century of "ignoring the elephant in the room" and begin to deal with those entitlements now.

More power to you Mr. Obama. Do not flinch or shrink from the task. Stay the course. Do not be intimidated by naysayers among Republicans or distracted by the pettiness of those within your own party who would waste your time and our money extracting a pound of flesh from your predecessor. If either camp has its way, we will sow wind and reap whirlwind.

Keep speaking directly to the folks who put you where you are. Continue to respect the electorate, speak straight with them, don't lie to them, don't coddle them, and don't underestimate them.

Don't give them the government they deserve. They got that with Clinton and Bush. Give them better. That would be a change. With any luck at all, they'll live up to it.

Holding Hope Hostage

2009-02-15T01:10:00.007-07:00

Just when we've heard enough disturbing news to last all week, what with all the educated second-guessing going on about President Obama's stimulus bill, we read a report in the Chicago Tribune today that Ronald Burris didn't quite finish saying all that needed to be said to those who were vetting his appointment to Mr. Obama's vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Seems he "didn't have the opportunity" to tell them that he had spoken to the brother of recently removed and now former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on several occasions about a "donation" he might want to give in consideration of that appointment. Burris' announcement raised howls of protest from pundits of all stripes ("He didn't have the opportunity???" they asked, in mock shock) and there was much bemused speculation about what if anything might happen now. Some cried for his removal while others sardonically suspected the thing might get swept under the rug, somehow, because Burris is black.

Saddest thing about it all, for me, was not the reports or the pundits prattle, but the "comments" posted by ordinary people in response to the news. Most assume Burris is just trying to head off what might have been an even more painful third-party revelation. Some are angry or just plain disgusted, but an even greater number are neither surprised nor particularly concerned. It is, after all, politics as usual. One writer summed up what many others suggested:

"Everybody lies, what's new here people?" wrote one Chicagoan. "Do you people even think that it's ever going to change? It's going to happen until the end of time. We're just the pawns and there's nothing we can do about it."

Mr. Burris has joined Mr. Blagojevich, Mr. Bernard Madoff and spouse, the entire cadre of Wall Street bankers and sub-prime mortgage brokers, President Bush and friends, the Big Three automakers and by implication, just about everybody else who has access to money, power and privilege on the "These people are why I don't give a shit" list kept by every cynic.

I must admit, I can hardly blame them. Disappointing news is difficult to bear. Cynicism is a balm of sorts: Point to the long list of crooks that you are personally powerless to do anything about and say," What a crock! What can I do? And what difference would it make, anyway?" Smother your disappointment under a protective blanket of "Who cares?" Then go on with your life and look out for number one.

Of course, to act on that plan, you've first got to forget that the folks on your "shit" list got there because their hopes, like yours, gave way inevitably to disappointment. And in their pain, they gave way to cynicism.

Here's what I think. And I've said it before. We get the world we deserve. The rich, powerful and politically connected who feed like pigs on financial folly do so because they can count on just enough cynicism in the public's mind to deflect serious consequences. They know that we, who might be doing something to combat the greed and corruption are hoping, instead, only to greedily take a turn at the trough.

It's a sad irony that the apostle of "audacious hope" has arrived in Washington at a time when too many Americans seem ready to forget Inauguration day, because the "morning after" is turning out to be as bad as he warned it would be.

Mr. Obama had the courage to say it wouldn't be easy and that it would get worse before it got better. Mr. Biden had the good sense to admit that there's a chance that no matter what this administration does, its efforts could fail. The cynics had a field day with that one, of course. But they'd have been just as put out with pollyanna platitudes, so there's no pleasing them, it seems.

My prayer is that Mr. Obama himself can resist the cynical tide and maintain his hold on the hope that got him, against all odds, into the White House. My hope is that he can withstand the partisan pride on both sides of the aisle and continue to call all to bipartisan action. If he can't, then no one else will. I think he can. But he can't turn hope into history alone.

Hope that caves at the first blow is no hope at all. When you trade it in for cynicism, you add you own name to your "shit" list. You meet the enemy in the mirror each morning. You hold hope hostage.

We can dwell on Burris and Blago and Bush and bankers. We can waste a lot of time blaming (that is not to say that responsible parties shouldn't be brought to justice for wrongdoing). But right now, we would do well to simply to stand with the guy who we elected because he preached hope precisely when we needed to hear it.

An American people that can choose hope when things look hopeless will be a far greater balm than any stimulus bill.

Back Taxes, Big Bonuses, Bye-Bye Bipartisanship

2009-02-04T18:52:00.009-07:00

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the honeymoon is already over.

Contributing to the end-of-honeymoon chill were revelations about Obama appointees' lax tax performance. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services and the man tapped to take the lead in the president's promised health care initiative, withdrew his name on Tuesday this week. He was the third of four Obama Administration appointees to face uncovered tax shortfalls and the second to bow out. Republicans questioned whether those who don't pay their own taxes can be trusted to handle the tax money paid by others. You can't blame them for that.

Mr. Daschle's unpaid tax bill amounted to $128,000. I don't want to sound like I'm complaining but that's more than twice what I gross in a year. How does one "inadvertently" overlook that much money? (I wouldn't want to be Mr. Daschle's accountant this week.)

It would be understandable (not excusable, let me add) if someone in a lower-middle tax bracket, who has six kids, one of whom spent the year in a hospital, happened to "inadvertently" underpay a tax bill. But someone in Mr. Daschle's tax bracket ought to be paying his accountant to ensure he pays all he owes, and maybe some extra, particularly if he or she aspires to public service.

Then there was the bonus backlash. Mr. Obama mirrored public outrage at reports that financial institutions passed out huge pay packages and perks to those who helped perpetrate the catastrophic losses in world stock markets. In response to Obama's call to curtail compensation, Wall Street insiders — good Republican supply siders, no doubt — complained that if compensation is capped, then banks wouldn't be able to attract the best talent — conveniently ignoring the fact that the best talent got us into the mess in the first place. Administration efforts here seem doomed to failure. Wall Street has seen attempts to curtail excess pay in the past. These folks are nothing if not expert at designing pay packages that get around statutory limitations. Next to Mr. Daschle's tax lawyers, Wall Street execs are second to none at the art of the loophole.

Finally, there was the embattled stimulus bill. Faced with economic conditions that, some economists now speculate, may not respond to a stimulus bill of any kind, Mr. Obama has managed to float a bill in the House, but with no Republican help whatsoever. A Senate version was eked out with the votes of only three on the other side of the aisle.

Republicans complain loudly, now, that the stimulus plan won't work, without bigger tax cuts and less government spending (sound familiar?). They've accused Democrats of mortgaging our children's future, forgetting somehow that a Republican administration took out the first half of that mortgage, this past November, to bail out broke investment bankers and then mismanaged the bailout distribution, to boot.

Mr. Obama's pleas for bipartisan cooperation are mere formalities, now. House and Senate Democrats will soon conference in hopes of delivering a single bill to the Oval Office for signature by Mr. Obama's mid-February deadline. Mr. McCain, as echoes of his concession-speech promise of cooperation quickly fade, has taken up his new role of opposition leader as his troops battle to gut the bill of provisions that make them look "liberal" to the conservative base back home. In the end, they'll cast their nay votes.

Why? Because Mr. McCain and company, having placed their bets on a stimulus-plan failure, are settling back to callously watch the carnage as Main Street goes down with Wall Street. They fully expect to blame Obama for the failure they didn't vote for and then put one of their own in the White House in 2012.

Inside the Beltway, it's back to business as usual.

With Respect to Respectablity

2009-01-31T07:43:00.014-07:00

Mr. Patrick Quinn, the Illinois lieutenant governor, was sworn in as interim Illinois governor this week. For those who have been living under rocks, Mr. Quinn replaced Rod Blagojevich, whose impeachment trial ended with his removal from office by unanimous vote of the Illinois Senate.

Pat Quinn, by all accounts, is a rarity in politics. Quinn stays in Super 8 motels (he can show you his Super 8 Discount card) and eats at no-frills restaurants when he travels. He first achieved political notice as what one commentator called "a champion of the little guy," leading a successful petition drive to amend Illinois law by expanding the people's right to referendum and recall of Illinois officeholders (only to see it disallowed in court). He once walked 150 miles through Illinois to promote a health care initiative, and he has fought successfully to fund greater benefits for veterans of the armed forces and current military families. Definitely Main Street. He also has headed for years a group called the "Coalition for Political Honesty" (!) It should come as no surprise, then, that the Illinois political establishment, embarrassed by the arrest of Mr. Blagojevich and subsequent revelations of his expletive-peppered pay-to-play scheming and bizarre talk-show swan song, has seized with relief on the respectable Mr. Quinn. His quiet, humble resemblance to Gerald Ford (Quinn's own comparison), who stepped in to replace Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, is playing well in Springfield. Quinn declared, after reciting the oath of office, that he would set himself to the task of "fumigating" public life, to rid his state of corruption.

In the respectability sweepstakes, even the Republicans tried to get into the act this week, electing, after six ballots, Michael Steele, an African-American, to head the Republican National Committee. The field of contenders had narrowed, in the final ballot, to a race between Steele and a gentlemen who had recently resigned his "whites-only" club membership. Steele was one of two black men in the filed of five male candidates for the job. The man who had led the party during the Bush years dropped out after the third ballot.

Although Republicans are noisily proclaiming a "new day" for their party, one has to wonder if the election of Mr. Steele has a bit more in common with Mr. McCain's impulsive selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. But it's also possible that younger Republicans are as dismayed with the direction their party has gone in the last decade as young Democrats were with theirs. Just as Mr. Obama was not the first choice of the Democratic Old Guard, Mr. McCain was not the Grand Old Party's favorite son, either. The electorate sent both parties a message this time around. While the message may not be clear, but in fact is clearly mixed, the Old Guard — that group in each party that sees racism, misogyny, sexual exploitation and/or pay-to-play deals as forgivable sins in those who meet their political ends — has been given a vote of no confidence.

I'm all for an attempt at respectability. I'm frankly thrilled that Mr. Obama appears to be married not only in name, but in fact, and appears to be genuinely interested in maintaining a real rather than a sham family life. I applaud his call for the same kind of responsible behavior in others. I'm hopeful that the Obama presidency, on this subject at least, will stand in stark contrast to previous and (among Democrats, anyway) still-revered Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter aside). I'd like to think we won't be treated to the spectacle of Mr. Obama lying under oath to the Senate and the nation about a sexual tryst after the example of Mr. Clinton or find that the press turned a blind eye to dalliance with the current "Marilyn Monroe" in Hollywood or a mobster's moll, as they did with the compulsive womanizer, John Kennedy.

As encouraging as these developments have been, I must admit to deep, deep skepticism about what goes on when the cameras aren't rolling. After all, for sake of its public respectability, the Roman Catholic church covered up priestly pedophilia for decades. Prominent evangelical pastors resign in disgrace after engaging in the very behavior against which they preach. Even those people who actively identify with movements devoted to right thinking and right living tend, it seems, to want respect without actually having to be respectable.

Certainly, the day when Americans willingly turn a blind eye to the character flaws of its cultural icons is far from over. On NPR, the day of the Blagojevich removal, callers to a talk show repeatedly defended Blagojevich, excusing his crimes because he had given them something they wanted.

Americans are quite hypocritical on the subject. We heard a lot, this week, about how Wall Street brokers shouldn't be taking those big bonuses when all around are losing their shirts. Mr. Obama, who staked himself out in opposition to rampant greed in his Inaugural Address, pointedly condemned the reported $18 million bonus Wall Street rewarded itself during the market's recent freefall. (When was the last time you heard an American president call anything a fellow American had done shameful?) Predictably, the NY Times reported that Obama's stock on Wall Street went way down, as irate stockbroker's attempted to justify the bonuses that they had "worked hard for." But few Americans would refuse that bonus if it came their way and they were pretty sure some talking head wouldn't announce it on the 5:00 o'clock news.

Americans — in Washington, on Wall Street and on Main Street — are obsessed with money, power, fame and sex. When being respectable means having to give up unrestricted access to any of those things, too many of us, from Bernard Madoff to Joe the Plumber, will gladly accept the appearance of respectability in place of the genuine article.

Unlike Mr. Quinn, Mr. Blagojevich is not a rarity. The latter said as much in his impassioned plea, delivered as his trial drew to a close. In a parting shot, he predicted that if most politicians lives were examined under the same microscope used on his, impeachment might be a commonplace.

Indeed.

Until we citizens are willing to frequent life's Super 8 motels, unaccompanied by people not our spouse, eschewing our entitlements to 15 minutes of fame and a winning lottery ticket, the Quinn's of the world will remain as rare in the electorate as they are among the elected, and the Blagojevich's of this world will continue to rule.

As they say: People get the leaders they deserve.

A Modest Proposal

2009-01-27T18:40:00.013-07:00

Pundits are pawing over the details of the Obama Administration's economic stimulus plan as they are unearthed, looking for newsy tidbits.

Yesterday, for instance, Republicans dug up a small handful of what, to them, smelled like pork — money for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), for example. Apparently, for Republican lawmakers, art has its rewards as an investment that helps them preserve the bacon they bring home, but the artists themselves, it appears, aren't high on the list of those they want to keep off the unemployment rolls.

The pig sty aside, the Obama plan as a whole sounds OK to me. It's got short-term and long-term stimuli. I'd like it better if there were even more dollars for alternative energy in the mix, but it's a start. Certainly better than alt energy got the last few years.

But ... there is something missing. Something so obvious, I'm just baffled at the fact that no-one is talking about it. It would provide a significant economic stimulus, it would take a fairly big bite out of our global-warming and dependence-on-foreign-oil problems and, the best part, this program could be started tomorrow, and needn't add one cent to the real porker, our National Debt.

I have no idea, really, how many people spend their days working a computer and/or a telephone for a living, but I bet it's in the double-digit millions. A sizable majority of them work on PCs rather than mainframe computers, and most of those, these days, have, or could be issued, laptop computers. So, my proposal is simple: Mr. Obama should issue an executive order to employers: Send all of these laptop-users home and tell them to stay there.

I figure there are many millions of folks in this category, all capable of doing their jobs less than 50 ft from their bedrooms. What employee wouldn't spring for a high-speed Internet connection to reap that kind of windfall? And the smart employer could pick up the tab for it, because he/she is off the hook for a whole raft of expenses associated with such issues as long-term maternity leave, in-office child care and nursing rooms, and other accommodations they have to make (or soon will have to make) to maintain an office workforce. I bet there are thousands of employers who, for a well-dangled tax break, would be happy to comply. Eventually, companies with high percentages of stay-home workers could find smaller office spaces, as leases run out — downsizing the building rather than the workforce.

Yes, some people would take advantage of being at home, goofing off, etc. But hey, if the work falls off, employers could simply get someone else, selecting from the pool of 51 million job seekers experts say will be added to the unemployment rolls worldwide this year. There will soon be a large number of people, many of them grossly overqualified and desperate for work of any kind, standing in line for just about every job opening imaginable. I don't see goofing off as a serious problem for the foreseeable future, do you? It's much more likely that those stay-at-homers will be happy to work the extra hour they once devoted to the commute, increasing productivity without losing a second of their personal time, in order to ensure that they keep their jobs!

Imagine 20 million or more people NOT driving to work every day, NOT spending money on gas, NOT having accidents, NOT having to be late home to dinner. Imagine 20 million or more cars NOT on the road in rush hour. Figure the average commute is a half-hour, twice a day. Let's call it 25 miles, to be conservative. Let's figure 25 mpg as the average, between the gas guzzling pickups and SUVs, and the sedans and compacts, that sounds about right. So let's figure it's just one gallon of gas per day (very conservative). If 20 million people save just 1 gallon a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that's more than 5 billion gallons a year. That's a lot of greenhouse gas NOT screwing up the ozone layer.

And at today's prices, (conservatively, $1.50 per gallon), that's $7.5 billion straight back into the pockets of taxpayers, (compensating them for the pay reductions and lack of bonuses this year, if they're lucky enough to stay employed) and it doesn't add one cent to the National Debt. And at $4.00 a gallon, a rate we'll no doubt be paying again very soon, the money put directly back into those taxpayers pockets balloons to $20 billion.

That's $20 billion going to the mortgage (to preclude foreclosures) the credit card (to buy down their debt), tuition (so their kids get those math/science degrees we say we need) and to help pay for hybrid or electric car they cannot, right now, afford to buy.

I think my figures are actually far too conservative. There is probably a much larger number of people who could work from home. And many of them use a whole lot more than one gallon of gas getting to work and back each day.

I suspect some Republicans won't like this idea, either. They'd think it was a worker's union plot or something. But in a day when you can reach the world, talk to anybody, face-to-face, and teleconference with a group of any size simply by logging in to a laptop, the fact that so many of us are compelled to drive to another location to do so is not only unnecessary but unproductive, disruptive, wasteful and bad for the environment, not to mention self-destructive and just plain stupid.

Tunneling Toward Peace in the Middle East

2009-01-19T17:37:00.013-07:00

As the smoke and rhetoric clears from yet another armed conflict in the Middle East, Gazans weep for their lost and face a $1 billion humanitarian crisis as Israelis question their political leaders, in shock, about undeniably widespread civilian casualties. Thoughtful people, regardless of their allegiance, are asking what has been accomplished, and what can be learned.

From this conflict — one that has raged, in one form or another, over what three faiths consider their Holy Land — no lasting good has ever come. This latest bloodletting — months of rocket attacks by Hamas on civilian neighborhoods in southern Israel followed by a short, inevitable and bloody Israeli backlash, with the equally inevitable "collateral damage" — is no exception.

For Israel, whose right to defend itself is recognized by international law and not disputed here, the move has been costly on two fronts. Inside Gaza, Hamas has hardly accepted defeat. Instead, it has declared victory. Although that claim is ludicrous, it is, nonetheless, very unlikely that Hamas has been weakened sufficiently to prevent future rocket attacks. Rockets continued to enter Israeli airspace and randomly strike civilian settlements throughout the offensive and only stopped when Hamas joined the cease-fire. If Hamas rescinds the order, rockets will almost certainly fly again. Hamas will redig the tunnels through which it smuggles arms and aid. Outside Gaza, Israel forfeited the "public relations" battle on all fronts, losing face with foe and friend alike. Nothing works against one more than to be a bigger fellow with a bigger stick, going after an smaller offender — even when the latter deserves all he's about to get.

Make no mistake: Hamas had it coming. Even friends of Hamas, at least privately, have wondered why the democratically elected Hamas leadership authorized (or at least permitted) the rocket attacks. To the rational mind, they accomplished nothing but a seemingly useless provocation, literally forcing a centrist Israeli administration, during an election year when it is being challenged by right-wing hardliner, Benjamin Netanyahu, to put on a show of force in order to remain in power. But Hamas — powered by the bone-chilling, cold-bloodedly insane logic of the fanatical — appears to have wagered that lots of civilian casualties would somehow help its cause.

There is little doubt in my mind that Hamas used Gazan civilians, especially women and children, as shields. I have no doubt that rockets were fired from the courtyards of U.N. facilities, schools, and mosques. I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas itself was responsible for some of the civilian casualties, knowing that, in all the chaos, Israel would be blamed.

As I watched and listened to the news coverage, I recalled a day 40 years ago when I sat with a Palestinian student in a bistro near the inner city college we both attended. I'll never forget his face as he told me, quite calmly, that he would kill women and children to get what he wanted: His was a countenance that confidently enjoyed — was deeply satisfied by — the look of shock he had carved into mine. Nor did he specify whose children. No, I do not doubt for a moment that Hamas is capable of killing its own.

Unfortunately, this cold-blooded Hamas strategy has been brilliantly successful. Hoping to score campaign points with its populace by way of an election-year show of force, Israel's current governing coalition instead got branded with the "bully" label by the gathering crowd of international onlookers, most of whom rarely look below the surface drama. Israel's denial of press access and frustration of relief work for Gazan civilians — not to mention firing on U.N. facilities — not only aroused the predictable condemnations from Syria and Iran but also enraged the few Middle Easterners who try to maintain a middle ground. Egyptians turned on what they saw as their "do nothing" government and mourned for brothers and sisters in Gaza as Egypt's Mubarak refused to open its borders to displaced Gazans. Secular Arab regimes friendly to the West sometimes brutally interrupted dissent in their streets, further weakening their holds on power and playing into the hands of Muslim extremists. The Gazan suffering even prompted a stunning public denunciation from a high-ranking, always westward-leaning Saudi prince.

The press, now allowed in the Gaza Strip, has filled the air waves with the anguish of Gazans who once disdained Hamas but now have been radicalized. Israel's European allies publicly question the enormity of the response. Israel's own press finds it difficult to plead the party line. And that, surely, was Hamas' intention.

In its single-minded defense of the homeland granted to it in 1948 by the international body whose educational compounds Israeli tanks demolished two weeks ago, Israel has forgotten the lessons of its history: Israel's people and culture were nearly destroyed by another power with a big stick. The Palestinian people were displaced to make room for Israel and now live as refugees, some in Lebanese camps for 60 years, with accommodations little more inviting than those Jews died in during the Holocaust. Israel cannot afford the comparison.

Nor can Palestinians any longer sit idly by while their leaders, elected or otherwise, continue to smuggle weapons and permit missiles to be lobbed into Israeli neighborhoods. Can a Gazan actually be surprised that Israel would finally retaliate? Those who dream of a Palestinian state must come to realize that a terrorist state is one Israel would never permit. And the U.N. could not, and would not condone it. Worse, states built on terror survive on terror. Palestinians willing to trade the hope of statehood for government by terrorists will see a change only in the ethnic background of the oppressor who carries the nightstick and gun. Freedom cannot be won by compromising freedom.

The new Obama administration has appointed George Mitchell, a former U.S. Senator and veteran U.S. diplomat, to be the special envoy responsible for daily peace efforts in the Holy Land. Mitchell has credentials. He helped bring to a end the decades of bloodshed in Ireland. His selection has been praised from all quarters. Opinion is that if the job can be done, Mitchell can do it.

Although Mitchell has eloquently spoken of the possibilities for peace, based on his experience with nominally sectarian Irish unrest of a few hundred years duration, he faces the challenge of heading off a conflict the potential horror of which has roots in millennia of hate, the proportions of which are Biblical in every sense of the word.

Mitchell cannot do it alone. He cannot do it even with the aid of the U.N. and allies in international community. Not as long as the fires of hate are fanned by Middle Eastern hardliners on both sides.

Someone has to stop hating. Someone has to say, enough. Governments on both sides of the Gazan border have callously gambled with the future posterity of their citizens, in large part to prop up their questionable regimes and maintain a tenuous hold over the passions of their people. Those people would do well to cultivate a deep distrust of their leaders. The wise among them have got to seek tertium quid — only a radical third option can promise any fulfillment to the hopes held for peace on both sides of the Gazan border.

Peace does not, as too many have for so long mistakenly believed, involve the protection and security of borders, thinking that by doing so, they protect the inhabitants within those borders. Just the opposite is true. Those borders must be breached. Tunnels must again be dug ... but this time, between Gaza and Israel.

What might happen if ordinary Israelis clandestinely guided relief workers under the border to supply the needs of Gazans? What if Israeli doctors sneaked into Gaza to help Gazan physicians heal their wounded? What if Israel Defense Force reservists shed their uniforms to help rebuild the homes and U.N. compounds they so recently destroyed? What if ordinary Gazans stopped looking the other way when the neighborhood militia fired rockets or recruited "martyrs," and refused them entry to mosque, home and U.N. compound? What if both the Israeli and Gaza populace thought better of the votes they have cast in the past, and replaced hardliners with those raised up from among their own number who would rather give their own lives to wage peace than sacrifice a voter's life to wage war?

Against those who carry a stick too big to oppose, the only effective weapon is no weapon at all. It is, in fact, to act in accord with tenets of compassion and kindness that both Torah and Qu'ran command. It is to recognize that one's enemy is, all too often, little more than a political prisoner — a victim of subtle secular or sectarian oppression just like yourself, in need of a truer homeland.

Too Big to Fail

2009-01-16T17:45:00.015-07:00

It's the byword for bail-out economics.

It's the tag that separates the truly indispensable cornerstones of the American money-making machine from those mere bricks (Circuit City, for example) for which bankruptcy or outright closure is acceptable collateral damage.

It's the magic incantation Washington pols and other Wall Street watchers intone when describing a company that, while it might not deserve a rescue from its current financial woes, is nonetheless sure to get bail-out cash because of its sheer size and the potential havoc its demise could wreck on the larger financial system.

If the pols are right, and these companies — automakers and banks, so far (inexplicably, pleas from within the pornography industry have gone unheeded) — cannot be sacrificed, no matter how ineptly they've been managed or how unlikely is there eventual recovery, then a solution is needed that goes far beyond the mere infusion of billions.

Clearly, these companies need to be smaller. They need to be broken up, like the government did with Standard Oil back in the trust-busting days and with Ma Bell in the 1980s. (This actually would be relatively easy for GM, which is simply a collection of previously separate car companies. Chevrolet, Oldmobile, Buick all were once independent and, at least theoretically, could be again.) And if troubled banks and car companies earned their bail-out funds not only by refusing big bonuses to inept execs but also by breaking up into leaner, meaner organizations, what might happen?

First off, of course, they'd once again be small enough to prevent their holding the world hostage. But they also would be small enough to change course, innovate and to hire entrepreneurs instead of executives. You know, those folks who are less interested in corporate jets than they are in the process of creating something new, better and of greater value. Those who do not work for the bonus and carefully calculated sale of corporate stock but instead live to delight customers with a better-than-expected product.

I believe this would work because it almost did, back in the early 1990s. GM, desperate even then to compete with the Japanese in the subcompact car category, authorized what was for them a radical experiment: They plunked down $5 billion (a drop in the bucket compared to the sums we're talking about today for rescues) and created a completely new division, hiring forward-thinking managers, designers, engineers and marketeers, sending them far away from Detroit to Tennessee, and giving them the go ahead to take a "clean sheet" approach to small car design. There, Saturn was born. And the cars it created were, for their time, both revolutionary and revelatory: gas-thrifty overhead cam engines (31 mpg on the highway, then among the best), sleek styling, great handling, mid-size interiors on subcompact frames, and high-tech engineered plastic fenders and door panels that would not dent.

I know because I bought one. I still drive it. My 1992 Saturn SL has 262,000 miles on it. Last time it was in for engine service, the mechanics told me I still had 30,000-40,000 miles of life in the powerplant. I have no dings in my doors. The seats are still in one piece. The paint is still good and still shines even though I've never waxed it — not even once. And I see dozens of SLs, SL1s and SL2s still on the road, still looking good and still running well, while many models from other makers are few and far between, dented on both sides, paint flaking off and faded, blowing smoke and collecting pollution tickets for their hapless owners.

Sadly, Saturn today is, just 17 years after it built my car, a ghost of its former self. GM never permitted Saturn to continuously improve the design. Last time I was in a Saturn showroom, in 2008, a tinier, less roomy hatchback stood in the SL's old spot on the showroom floor. I tapped on the car's door panel. Not that reassuring thunk of an undingable engineered plastic but the thin tink of metal. What? I said. The hovering salesman's face went red. Saturn had, he admitted, quietly abandoned its plastic side panels for thin, easily dented aluminum panels on a body made not in Tennessee but outsourced from an outfit in Europe.

One thing went wrong with Saturn: It remained part of GM. It was there for GM to cannibalize, it's coffers were still available for GM corporate execs to raid when they needed to quote better quarterly figures to greedy stockholders who cared not one fig whether GM made cars or canned canapes and couldn't care less about the people who paid the light bill, Saturn's customers.

Had Saturn been able to step out of GM's shadow, operate independently and continue to innovate and experiment, what might have happened? We'll never know. And it's not likely I'll ever want to buy another Saturn.

That's OK. GM, Ford and Chrysler can have their bail outs. I've got my eyes on a Toyota Prius unless Toyota comes out with something better. And it no doubt will. Toyota invented continuous improvement. Like GM, Chrysler and Ford, they got big, but they didn't forget, in the process, how to think like a small company.

Too Big to Fail? That phrase needs to go out the window with another favorite of mine, Buy American.

I'll buy a car from and deposit my money with any outfit I please, thank you very much. And in either case, it won't be a company that can't think beyond it's next quarterly report.

Whatever Happened to Doing the Job? (Revisited)

2009-01-15T19:44:00.009-07:00

In the last two years, we've been awash in political campaigns as hundreds of hopefuls ran for state and national offices. The speeches, debates and daily news reports about the ups and downs of the various campaigns — the incredible numbers of which was underscored by the quiet we've experienced since it all stopped — prompted my previous post. There, I suggested that we require campaigning politicians to continue to do the jobs we elected them to do, and to confine their re-election efforts to off hours.

When the campaigning stopped, however, the appointing began. Newly elected officials vacated old posts, and governors and other constitutionally responsible folk had to replace them. What's more, many of the newly elected also made appointments. Mr. Obama made dozens of them, to his transition team, his Cabinet and various sub-departments and agencies. As a result, hundreds of people are leaving jobs in government for other, more prestigious jobs in government, leaving hundreds of openings in lower-level positions to which even more people must be appointed. That's a lot of turnover, and it ought to concern us.

Case in point. President-elect Obama, who needed a new Secretary of the Interior, tapped our junior U.S. Senator here in Colorado, Ken Salazar, for the job. Mr. Salazar's departure left his seat open, and Colorado Governor Bill Ritter appointed current Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennett to fill it. By all accounts, Mr. Bennett is the best superintendent the Denver Schools have had in some time. My 17-year-old son is a student at one of the charter/magnet schools nurtured under Mr. Bennett's tenure. The school is not perfect, by any means, but it's a long cut above the schools my son has been subjected to in previous stages of his life, and it's not taking praise too far to say that this school is my son's first truly positive educational experience. I don't think he's alone, and I don't think I'm the only parent who believes DPS is making a change for the better.

Unfortunately, Mr Bennett, arguably the single most important catalyst in the positive tide of change, is now off to the U.S. Senate. Cheers went up at his appointment. Legions of people praised Mr. Bennett's abilities as an educational administrator. But no one talked much about how that will translate to great performance as our next junior Senator. While everyone else is praising Gov. Ritter for making such a fine selection, I'm wondering, What's so great about it? We're taking the best super DPS has had in ages out of the school system that still needs his able guidance in the midst of a long-term transition, and putting him into a job that, prior to the last couple of weeks, he's probably never given too much thought. Worse, there already has been a chorus of complaints about the gentlemen that is being considered as his replacement.

Will someone tell me why that's a good thing?

What we have, on the national level, is literally hundreds of Michael Bennetts being plucked from critical jobs in education, health care and other key services where they've been performing missions for which they have a passion, accomplishing important goals that must be met, and we're replacing them with people whose greatest distinction is that they are at best, the second best person for the job.

I've found myself imagining what the world might be like if some of these folks who are making a real difference in their current jobs just said "no" to governors and even to presidents who come knocking. "Sorry Mr. President. It would be a great honor to work with you. I'd love to, really. But I have this important task to complete. You see, I promised these people I'd do this job. I'd like to keep that promise."

Keeping promises. Seeing things through. Finishing what you start. There's a concept for you.

Whatever Happened to Doing the Job?

2009-01-13T18:40:00.015-07:00

A large plurality of senators and representatives, not only at the federal level but within each state, and thousands of mayors, aldermen, attorneys general and other officeholders spent the last year or two trying to get re-elected, or elected to a higher office than that they currently held. Thousands of folks employed already in other government jobs and not facing an election, spent much of their time actively campaigning for the folks that were running for their political lives. And every minute these folks were jobseekers, they were not doing the jobs for which we pay them.

Let's try to put this into a framework with which we can more easily relate: I work at a busy publishing company. If one-third of the people in our company spent, say, 25 (this is a conservative figure, trust me, politicians on the campaign trail aren't this responsible) of their 40 hours each week this year looking for another job, what might happen? I can tell you that the work would not get done, deadlines would not be met, magazines would not be printed and mailed and advertisers (the folks that provide our income) would cancel contracts and our company, which is still profitable despite the current economic times, would go deeply in debt and reach insolvency within the year.

Ah, but Mike, you say, knowing where I'm going with this, it's not exactly the same in government. Each of the senators and representatives and most of the other public servants [I assume you use that term loosely] employ staff to do the actual work. You then remind me that the work does, indeed, get done, and that these elected folks try, at least, to show up for votes.

Yes, yes, Right you are. Point taken. So let me rephrase the question: What if, then, one third of the folks I work with (or you work with) employed just one other person (part-time, mind you) to perform the the work they don't get done during the 25 hours they are looking for a better job? Well, of course, the work would get done, after a fashion, but the company payroll would skyrocket and we'd still end up insolvent. It would just take a little longer. And that's my point: Looking for work when you're supposed to be working ... doesn't work.

It just so happens that the federal government and many of the state governments have this problem, they're insolvent. While their problems paying the bills can't be blamed entirely on the fact that large numbers of elected officials and their friends haven't actually been earning their keep lately, I suspect that the following proposal might help take the edge off of what economists are predicting will be a more than $1 trillion federal national debt for 2009, and an incalculable additional pile of money for all the state and local deficits. How about we pass a law that says all elected and appointed government officials will spend the entirety of the time between 7:30 in the morning and 5:00 in the evening, Monday through Friday, actually doing their jobs? All campaigning, speech writing, fund raising, stumping, etc. (for themselves or for others) must be done only after hours or on weekends.

That's it? you ask.

Yep, I say.

Well, gee, Mike, that sounds like an interesting idea — certainly nobody's going to have a problems with putting elected officials back to work, but ... how does that solve our money problems? you ask. Well, you got me there. They might be able to let go a staffer or two. But, that and eliminating "earmarks" wouldn't even put a dent in the debt, even in good economic times.

You're right again. But let's come at this a different way. What might happen if campaigning pols and their pals all went back to governing? First off, they'd actually get things done. For example, instead of being caught flatfooted by the current credit crisis, government officials might actually have seen it coming and, well, done something about it, rather than "suspending their campaigns for the good of the country" and rushing back to the Capitol to deal with it after its become an unmanageable crisis. They might also have noticed that something was seriously wrong with the mortgage industry. They might have outlawed subprime mortgages (anybody with a calculator, a brain and a conscience could have foreseen, long-term, that that idea was a loser). They might have stopped to wondered why the Bernard Madoffs of the world manage to make 10 percent for their clients, year in and year out, when everyone else can't. They could have looked into investment banking and asked what the hell those new types of "no lose" securities everyone was so excited over were all about. They could have inquired into why the SEC and other regulators weren't doing their jobs. They might have passed laws that ensured that loans were made ethically and that low-income people were not lured by their own greed and the avarice of others into long-term adjustable-rate mortgages that claimed half their gross income. Those folks, unencumbered by ballooning debt, could have saved some of that money, giving banks the large pool of ready cash they need to make loans to businesses for responsible, sensible investments in new equipment, research and development on new technologies like clean, renewable energy and electric cars, and creating new jobs. Slowly, those growing businesses would get healthier and with them the economy would grow. Health care programs would improve as businesses competed for talent to realize their bolder technology mandates.

Sooner or later, not all, but many of the folks who otherwise would have desperately gambled on homes they couldn't afford might eventually get one that they could pay for. These happy people would be better able to afford to pay their taxes, and wouldn't be quite as susceptible to electing any fool who promised a tax cut. The national debt would decline. People could afford the new electric cars. Not distracted every minute by the effort to make ends meet every two weeks, Main Street folks might get interested in things like improving schools, building better transit systems, repairing dangerous bridges, curing AIDS, serving their country and saving the planet. These more prosperous people would have little need to find an ethnic group to blame their troubles on. America would become a more welcoming place again ("Give me your tired your poor, your huddled masses ...."). The world might once again marvel at and envy the American Dream. They might want to imitate it. They might ask for help doing it. Terrorists might then have little success riling people up about the Great Satan. Peace might break out.

It could happen.

Senate Seat Roulette

2009-01-11T20:19:00.011-07:00

The once unlikely pairing of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together in the Executive Branch has been the occasion for a bit of post-election drama surrounding two equally unlikely appointments to their now open seats in the U.S. Senate.

Despite a five-year investigation into his conduct that he apparently knew about, Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was recorded by investigators on a number of occasions as he planned to peddle to the highest bidder Mr. Obama's empty Senate seat. A Who's Who of aspiring appointees ran from the prospect like it was the plague -- all, that is, except Mr. Roland Burris. The former Illinois attorney general and three-time losing candidate for the job Mr. Blagojevich now holds got the call and, without hesitation, accepted the appointment, dropping his own doubtful talk about the governor of a week earlier and insisting that his appointment was lawful and untainted. The Senate Democrats, in a rare show of unanimity, rose with one voice to condemn the move. Mr. Blagojevich had defied their warning not to make any appointment from his now undeserved office. They would not, they had said, seat any appointee he could name. The press, predictably, crowed about Mr. Blagojevich's clever meaness in naming an African-American, noting that it would be difficult for Democrats to refuse to seat someone who would be, with Mr. Obama's exit, the only black Senator in this U.S. Congress. Op/Ed writers enjoyed the political gamesmanship involved as the Governor, presumably on his way out, left the Senate an IED (improvised explosive device) to remember him by.

Indeed, last week, it looked like Blagojevich's "give-'em-a-no-win-choice" strategy was working. Senator Diane Feinstein, former Mayor of San Francisco, who can't afford to be viewed (even inaccurately) as anything but supportive of the disenfranchised, was the first to cave in. She was soon followed by Ms. Pelosi and the Majority Leader himself, who are now going about the business of defusing the stand off.

No doubt Mr. Burris will, sooner or later, gain his seat. The current Illinois attorney general will be persuaded to sign off on Mr. Burris' credentials after the affair becomes a little less "front page." But the pundits will have missed the point, as they often do. The issue here, as former attorney general Burris well knows, is due process. Mr. Blagojevich has been accused of, arrested for and, since the Burris appointment, impeached for alleged crimes. He has not yet been convicted, either in the Illinois Senate or any court. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The appointment, barring evidence of some kind of "pay-to-play deal, is perfectly legal, all the potential quid pro quo A-listers have disappeared, leaving only Mr. Burris, who until Mr. Bladojevich's arrest, was not on anybody's list.

While the Senate certainly has the right to request that Mr. Blagojevich, for the good of the nation and his office, not taint the empty seat by making an appointment at this time, he still, at the moment has the legal right and, as he noted in his defiant talk to reporters, may indeed have "a duty" to make the appointment. Mr. Burris could have refused, again for the good of the nation, to accept the appointment (and I frankly wish he had), but he has no legal obligation to do so. Of course, Mr. Blagojevich could have saved us all a lot of trouble (and the taxpayer's money it'll cost to remove him) and simply resigned. But he did not, and it is his right to demand a fair trial.

One of the downsides of a democracy, in which we pledge allegiance to a system of government by law rather than men is that some men (and women) always find ways to exploit those laws to their personal benefit or to the detriment of those they don't like — or just for spite — in blatant disregard for the public good.

So Mr. Blagoyevich has had his 15 minutes of defiance and no doubt enjoyed it, but he will also have his day (no doubt stretching into months or even years) in court. And Mr. Burris has seized the day, counting on legal precedent and not minding at all that his appointment will owe something to the governor's callous willingness to play the handy race card. Burris, too, will have his day in the court of public opinion. He will, no doubt, be one of the most watched new senators in history. A minor mistake for Mr. Burris will be a media event. In all the furor, no evidence has surfaced that Mr. Burris has ever sunk to the normal low of Illinois politics. He's handled the negative attention with reasonable grace. Yes, he wanted to be a U.S. Senator badly enough to risk this way of getting the seat. But that just makes him graspingly ambitious. What politician couldn't be accused of that? Under intense scrutiny, he'll have to be a model junior senator. And if that happens, it could be evidence that our political system, by revering rule by law and valuing a free press, could ultimately protect the public good.

On a very different note, New York Governor David Paterson will soon discharge his duty to fill the Senate seat vacated by Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama's choice for Secretary of State. ("Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.") No-one's running from this appointment. But one candidate among the slew of aspirants has eclipsed all others: Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John, niece of Bobby and Ted, and a practicing lawyer, has the pundits calling to mind Camelot, that mythic (and largely illusory) moniker for the tragically shortened JFK presidency.

After consciously avoiding the public eye for decades, Ms. Kennedy now seeks it in an unabashedly public campaign to win the seat, despite the fact that there will be no vote. To its credit, the allegedly left-leaning press has not shied away from asking important questions about Ms. Kennedy's qualifications, albeit with less glee than that with which they went after recent vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Early on, Ms. Kennedy has proved equally unable to respond with substantive answers. She was, she says, inspired by Mr. Obama to enter public service. She is, she says, up to the job, you know, because, well, you know, she really wants to help people, you know? Although she conspicuously lacks the charisma (and the Basten accent) of her forebearers, liberals can't be blamed for getting misty-eyed about her, now that Ted's bout with brain cancer ensures that the long political legacy of the Kennedy men is soon to end.

If he appoints Ms. Kennedy, Gov. Paterson might merit the criticism that will surely come. There are seasoned pols far more qualified to handle the Senate machinery than she. No doubt, she wouldn't be in the hunt at all, had she not so famous a name. Unlike Mr. Obama and Ms. Palin, who were pointedly criticized for their relative lack of national government experience, Ms. Kennedy has never won or lost an election nor has she logged a single day of service in any government office. She even admits to having neglected to vote in several elections.

One thing in her favor is that she is a woman. Paterson is under some pressure to fill Ms. Clinton's seat with another woman, and the Kennedy name has the gravitas, at least in the Democratic Party, to fill the bill. More importantly, she is a Kennedy woman. Kennedy women, history will testify, have always been better people than Kennedy men. While Papa Joe made most of his fortune running rum during prohibition and, like some Mario Puzo Godfather, grooming his namesake for public office, his wife, Rose, quietly and with little fanfare, spent a part of his ill-gotten gain championing such ventures as the Special Olympics. Although young Joe died in the war, John came back a wounded PT boat commander and, as President, proved to be an inspiring figurehead. But JFK also oversaw the infamous Bay of Pigs affair, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took us to the brink of nuclear war and ensured the Cold War would smolder for decades. Then he got us into Vietnam. Meanwhile, Jacqueline gave the title First Lady a luster it had never had before and has not had since. She bore her grief at his death and endured the public revelations of her husband's compulsive womanizing and Mafia connections, as the fabric of Camelot finally unraveled, with equal dignity.

Like the women who preceded her, and quite unlike the men, Caroline Kennedy has no affairs in her dossier. She has no Chappaquiddick to live down. There are no Mafia connections (the dons her father's father first befriended are long dead, and those JFK secretly employed are either incarcerated, living under assumed names in the desert Southwest, or too old to care).

After avoiding for so long the political arena that killed both her father and Uncle Bobby, she has stepped up to the plate. Whatever else one might say, that takes courage. By all accounts, she has quietly earned some respect (in New York!) for her activities in education reform.

If Gov. Paterson appoints her, those who expect the imminent return of a Camelot that never was will ultimately be disappointed. But the rest of us might be surprised. She owes no special interest group. She's made no promises she can't keep. She does not seem driven by personal ambition or lust for money (that, she already has) or power. It might well be the case that an ordinary do-gooder, after a period of neglect, has indeed been inspired to public service by a sense of duty and an honest desire to help out. That alone would be a pleasant change.

She did not choose her name. And she did not ask to bear the weight of dynastic expectations. But it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the oft-tarnished Kennedy name, in the person of Caroline, might finally merit the respect it has for so long commanded.

Ignoring the Alarm

2009-01-04T08:29:00.006-07:00

With Wall Street in shambles and Main Street feeling wave after wave of aftershocks from the mortgage industry's self-induced earthquake, I've wondered why so few saw it coming. Turns out, a lot of people did or could have, but, in most cases, elected to ignore it. The few who didn't ignore it, but actually tried to raise the alarm were themselves ignored.

See this laudable Op/Ed piece by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn in the New York Times. It tells the story of one such alarmist, and in the process gives the best assessment I've seen yet of 2008's seismic activity on Wall Street. The authors also give relatively low grades to current Congressional and Federal Reserve efforts to correct the ills, and they propose, instead, some interesting alternatives for fixing what they identify as deep systemic flaws.

In short, they make a good case for what I've believed for years: that our financial system rewards short-term results (specifically, quarterly profits) and deeply, profoundly discourages long-term thinking of any kind. Further, they reveal that, in moral terms, the system is not just amoral, but expressly immoral because its workings, including those of its its regulatory bodies, encourage and reward greed and punish honesty.

One of the miserable effects of such immoral focus on short-term profit is the stultifying effect it has on manufacturing innovation. Here's just one of many examples: In the automotive world, we saw the Big Three desperately feeding their quarterly profits by building SUVs on truck frames that did not have to conform to passenger-car safety regulations. SUVs, as a result, could be more cheaply built but because they were in demand, could be sold at a greater profit than could less roomy passenger cars that cost more to build but sell for less. The result, of course, was that the Big Three — unlike Toyota, for instance, or upstart automakers like California-based Tesla Motors — spent precious little on developing cars powered by alternative energy systems. The Big Three were, thus, unprepared to launch hybrid electrics when fuel prices soared, and now they need bailouts. Toyota, which has never been guilty of short-term thinking, can get you a hybrid and isn't asking anyone for a bail out.

The result of all of that is that the incoming U.S. president has announced, and the taxpayers will pay for, a government program for development of alternative forms of energy that could have been developed (and much more efficiently, I'll wager) by private enterprise, if our system didn't discourage it.

One of the long-term effects of the financial collapse is that a number of key banking institutions have been nationalized (that's Lewis' and Einhorn's term, not mine). I think it's high time someone actually admitted that's what's happening. Those who fear various forms of socialism — a group that includes all those Wall Street investors and those who profited from Wall Street's recent drunken orgy — are now getting exactly what they hoped to avoid by deregulating markets. They had better hope nationalization is a temporary stop gap. But those who know their American History should know better. Temporary fixes in America have a terrible habit of becoming institutionalized. When a gambler puts the title to his car in the pot and loses, someone else is in the driver's seat.

There is a bittersweet irony in the fact that the "haves," in their clamber for instant wealth unfettered by market controls, have unwittingly surrendered the keys to an incoming President who I think it's fair to say genuinely represents the interests of the "have nots" and is quite willing tot see the government have a fairly large say in how the markets go in the future.

Lewis and Einhorn entitle their piece, "The End of the Financial World as We Know it," (almost certainly a bit of word play on the similarly titled youth anthem by rock group REM).

I think they're right. And I feel fine about that.

It's All Gone

2009-01-01T08:48:00.021-07:00

Good-bye 2008. Hello 2009. Looking ahead to the New Year, it's instructive to look back at the old one.

In 2008, Americans gambled and lost in the stock market in a way unmatched since the dismal end of the last century's so-called "Roaring Twenties." The loss estimates are in, and according to the New York Times today, they are colossal (italics mine):

In a mere 12 months, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 4,488.43 points, or 33.8 percent, its most punishing loss since 1931. ... All told, about $7 trillion of shareholders’ wealth — the gains of the last six years — was wiped out .... Almost no industry was spared as the crisis that first emerged in the subprime mortgage market metastasized and the economy sank into what could be a long recession.

It's all gone. And although it may sound like American investors might have done little worse than "break even" (Whew, we've only fallen back to where we were six years ago), the truth is that it ain't nearly over. In fact, it's hardly begun. We've only seen the initial wave of requests for bailouts and declarations of bankruptcies. More will certainly follow. Jobs will continue to be lost. The shock waves of what happened on Wall Street will continue to reverberate around the globe, wave after wave. Those who understand such things — those who read their history — know that the 1930s Great Depression didn't end until World War II. The causal links between financial depression, poverty, unrest and inevitable conflict are simply too easy to trace. Things could get unimaginably worse before they get better. That reality is what triggered such quick and surprisingly nonpartisan efforts to devise "bailouts" that the U.S. Congress would have deemed unthinkable in any other time. Their willingness to go to such lengths is a accurate gauge of the primal fear that has motivated them.

The root of it all is a quintessentially American phenomenon, home ownership. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But historically, owning a home has not been the norm. Economists now tell us that home owners, in a healthy economy once averaged slightly more than 43 percent of the populace, while the balance were renters. The figure has risen to higher than 60 percent. While that might be a happy statistic, on the face of it, it's actually symtomatic of great ill: The increase has come in a time when earning power has steadily declined. In the last two decades it's become, very gradually, harder to make ends meet. People work longer hours for less pay. In consequence, Main Street folks have become increasingly desperate to get into a home.

Little wonder, then, that they conspired (there's no more accurate word for it) with greedy mortgage lenders to circumvent already too-loose loan qualification standards. In the 1950s, prospective homeowners were permitted to spend only one-quarter of their gross income on PITI (principal, interest, taxes and insurance). By 1980, however, this prudent standard had been relaxed to one third. In the last several years, even that precarious threshold has gone by the wayside. Scratch below the surface of today's foreclosures, you'll often find homeowners who pay one-half or more of their gross income out in PITI. Meanwhile, the banks looked the other way on loan qualifications, preferring to find ways to profit from such desperation. The fixed rate mortgage, which protected the homeowner from fluctuations in the credit market went by the board as lenders steeped in the new dogma of "creative financing" crafted ARMs (adjustable-rate mortgages); interest-only instruments that culminated, at some point in the future, in large "balloon" payments; and various combinations. Then there were the subprime mortgages, those on which (as recent events clearly demonstrate) a mortgage holder's investment could only be protected if housing prices continued to go up — despite the fact that economists have documented a long history of the inherently cyclical nature of housing prices.

What is hard to understand is that millions of people actually believed such extremely high-stakes gambles had any chance of bringing a lasting return. What's becoming increasingly clear is that many, specifically the folks who packaged the securities in which these inherently bad loans were cleverly disguised, knew full well that these loans had no chance, but callously passed them on (taking larger profits) to unwitting investors who in turn, to their chagrin, were willing to believe, often without question, outlandish promises about the securities' "safety."

Why would they do that?

For what it's worth here's my opinion: The problem really started decades ago, when the "home" began to be redefined. Once upon a time, a young couple bought their first house on Main Street, often after years of saving, and raised their kids in it, retired in it and died in it. It was once common for several generations of a family to maintain ownership of the family "homestead." The home was a physical center for a family's emotional center. An ideal, to be sure. Not everyone who aspired to it achieved it. But a home represented permanence, stability, and a repository for a family's history.

Once a place to raise a family, and the anchorage to which generations of younger family members perennially returned even after establishing their own homes, the home now is seen by many primarily as a financial investment instrument. One big reason for the current high percentage of home ownership is, in fact, the rise of the "financial advisor," who moved from Wall Street to Main Street, telling Main Street clients that their home was their best bet for retirement — their "nest egg."

The result has been a cultural shift with far-reaching effects: The average U.S. citizen moves every five years, often motivated by what real estate agents call "trading up." Buying low and waiting for housing prices to go up is the stuff of smart economic discussion around the watercooler at work. Buying a fixer-upper, giving it a facelift (often only that) and reselling it for a profit has become one of the "smart" strategies for the American middle class. Hopping long distances to cash in on the difference between markets where housing prices are artificially high and markets where they are artificially low is a common "upper-middle" strategy.

Trading up as income goes down has taken its toll. A house is no longer where we live. It's a merely place to sleep, while both parents run frantically to jobs, dumping kids in day care, spending long hours chasing the cash they need to fund the "investment." Once, the home was where the members of most families met for most if not all meals. Now it's just the place where we do the laundry. We eat out, often separately. Many kids have more fun at the McDonald's PlayPlace than they do at home. For too many of us, the only people who spend significant time in our backyards are the lawncare crewmembers who mow the lawn each week.

Meanwhile, these nomadic Main Street climbers are sleep deprived, alternately anesthetized with drink and pepped up on "energy" concoctions laced with legal drugs. They drive longer distances to work, from suburbs further out from crumbling inner cities.

What keeps them in the game are the stories about the successful gamblers. These are the folks who hit the jackpot and now sequester their belongings in ever-larger houses in gated communities, but spend a growing portion of their gains on alarm systems, gardeners, au pairs, maids and homeowner's association fees. They give their teenagers piles of cash to keep them happy while they fly to distant cities to maintain the increasingly complex businesses that keep the mortgage payments coming. (Police in affluent communities say that arrests of home-alone teens is epidemic. Stranger yet, a kid busted for shoplifting is likely to have a $100 bill in her pocket!) Parents and kids who hardly know each other escape from the craziness by buying bigger, more expensive and more distracting toys. They take second and third mortgages to finance their students' college educations, so they can get jobs that permit them, too, access to the gated lifestyle.

The unsuccessful gamblers (the vast majority, who only see the gated communities from the outside and don't see what goes on inside) wring their hands as their credit card balances escalate and hope. They endure the frequent moves, despite the painful toll the endless shuttling between schools, daycare centers, fast-food restaurants and bedrooms takes on their kids. They refuse to see the connection between the way they live and their increasingly poor educational performance, cultural alienation and deep skepticism. They await foreclosure.

Increasingly relationship poor, because they spend the greatest portion of their waking hours not with family or friends but with coworkers, lonely adults are uniquely susceptible to the career and marriage destroying workplace love affair. Those who can't find love at work find it in all the other wrong places: the local watering hole, the business trip, even the church. Or they seek a poor substitute in "escort" services, phone sex, chat rooms and Internet porn. Half of first marriages and one-quarter to one-third of the rest end in divorce. (As foreclosures mount and home values tumble, divorce lawyers who once helped their clients fight over who would get to keep the home now fight over who gets stuck with it.)

In 2008. We traded in the American Dream for a nightmare. In the scramble to get and keep a house of our own, many of us surrendered the possibility of making it a home. Main Street wanted to be like Wall Street, and everybody lost.

New Year's resolutions, anyone?

Credit Crisis: A Proper Penance

2008-12-30T12:28:00.010-07:00

The New York Times published on Monday a lengthy look into the innerworkings of Washington Mutual (WaMu), one the the banking institutions at the epicenter of the recent financial earthquake. See
"Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans". It's the most revealing peek I've yet seen into how our current credit crisis came to pass. In it, a number of (mostly former) WaMu employees tell the story, and (assuming the stories and this report are reasonably accurate) it's clear that the excesses at WaMu, anyway, were the result of policy. Wholesale giveaways of loan money to those who could not possibly repay it, and the subsequent sales of those bad loans as "securities" to unsuspecting investors was dictated by those at the top eschelons of the company's management structure. Board Chairman Kerry K. Killinger is credited as the chief culprit, and he alone reportedly took home millions of dollars while his bank careened toward insolvency. The evidence is that management teams at similar banks took a similar path, and pocketed billions.

No doubt there are those who think Killinger and other banking institution top kicks who encouraged (and in the WaMu case, at least, demanded) that underlings flout ethical propriety for pernicious profit should be arrested, tried and jailed. That they certainly might deserve such an end will not be debated here. But I'd like to suggest that there are a couple of things wrong with that scenario from a Christian perspective. First, while their cases are adjudicated, many these execs and ex-execs will almost certainly spend large portions of their ill-gotten fortunes on costly legal defenses (one need only remember that former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio's case is still in the court system, after years of legal wrangling, while he apparently enjoys life relatively free on bond). Second, Killinger and his ilk could not have plundered the housing market without the aid of the thousands of employees who processed the loans and looked the other way, many collecting bonuses and other albeit lesser financial rewards. Keep in mind, there was not a single whistleblower among them. This debacle is not the fault of a few, but of many — including the house hunters who willing went along with real estate agents and mortgage lenders who fed WaMu and other banks loan applications that were preposterous fabrications. If Killinger is to be tried for a crime, should they not be tried as accomplices?

The Pharisee in me would no doubt be pleased to see all get the penalty for their greed. I can feel that rising tide of self-righteousness every time I think about it. As one of my friends recently remarked, America is getting a spanking which it deserves. And that's quite true.

That said, nothing — least of all, justice — will be served simply by jailing anyone. That returns no money to investors. And it does nothing to remedy the ills the perpetrators have brought on themselves and others throughout the world. No less disconcerting is the fact that imprisoning credit-crisis offenders will swell the ranks of a prison population that already strains impossibly overlarge local, state and federal budgets. Justice, it seems to me, would be better served by something a bit more pragmatic.

The Biblical remedy for theft (and theft is most surely what this is, if we're honest) is restitution. Killinger and his lending institution comrades, should put what remains of their millions in escrow, and that money should be made available to investors who have a claim that is affirmed in a court of law. Why would he want to do that? Maybe he'll need to be offered a choice: restitution or the inevitable loss of your freedom and fortune after a long bout in court. Mr. Killinger and other ex-execs have one thing we need: management acumen. They built illegal edifices, maybe, but they built them, nonetheless. Why should we not reemploy them as carefully supervised advisors, at a reasonable wage (with a large portion garnished to pay what they owe) of the army of people it will take to sort out, reclaim and repay money that belongs to investors, giving priority to those who are least able to recover on their own? And helping to reconfigure bad loans, in hopes of preventing further foreclosures. There's a public works project Mr. Obama could create. They also could provide extremely detailed testimony about how and why the excesses occurred, giving regulators background information as they propose new rules and more potent safeguards to prevent further banking-system breakdowns. (One caveat, however: Congress should pass a law immediately to limit the fees lawyers can collect on such claims. Surely what we've learned about the absolute bankruptcy of greed should now constrain us from encouraging a feeding frenzy by lawyers.)

This idea may seem like a stretch, but it is, instead, a time-honored and very successful strategy for dealing with solcalled "white-collar" crime. The popular movie "Catch Me If You Can" chronicled the criminal exploits of a master forger who later lent his considerable expertise (rather than languish in prison) to the FBI in its efforts to combat check and document forgery. And that company you buy your virus software from to protect your PC? Many of the people who supervise those who write the code that now protects you once wrote the code that crashed your hard drive. (In fact, the police have been known to employ, as "snitches," low-level criminals who aren't in the white-color class, allowing them to continue their relatively modest criminal activities, in order to maintain and information pipeline to the bigger fish who far more seriously threaten society.)

The bank managers (high and low) who got loan applicants, lending institutions and investors into this fix should be offered (and strongly encouraged to take, as noted above) the opportunity to help them get out.

Public policy less concerned about punishment and more concerned about prevention and preservation of proper economic practice could go a long way toward repairing the damage done. And for those who willingly turned their talents from plundering the system to rescuing it, it could be a fitting penance.

Studies Show Greater Self-Control in "Religious" People

2008-12-30T11:12:00.004-07:00

There is apparently a large and growing body of social scientific evidence, in the form of numerous studies conducted over several decades, that indicates that "religious" people tend to have more self-control than those who aren't religious. This New York Times article dated today,
"For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It", goes on to say that the greater self control is exhibited not by those who belong to religious organizations for social or cultural reasons, but only by those who truly believe in the tenets of the religion. (To read the article, you might have to sign up for the free online subscription to get it if you don't already have one. I did; not sorry I did.)

Definitely an interesting read.

Inaugural Controversy

2008-12-26T12:52:00.007-07:00

I've watched with great interest and growing respect as President-elect Barack Obama and Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren have entered into a conversation, risking much by doing so. Obama, clearly supportive of gay and lesbian political aims, nevertheless went to Warren's church, to answer cordial but not untough questions in a very public forum. Warren's place in the Inauguration festivities, as a result, has enraged gay and lesbian rights groups. Obama has, thus far, withstood intense heat from those committed to inclusion, who insist that Warren should be excluded. Meanwhile, Warren's support of civil union, but not marriage, between gay and lesbian couples has dismayed both friend and foe, going much too far for the one and not nearly far enough for the other.

This surprises us. It's unprecedented. But the fact that we find it so odd is a measure of how far we have strayed from the Gospel. Both of these men claim to be Christian. Both claim allegiance to the same God and both have confessed allegiance to the same Jesus. We analyze the statements each make, applying litmus tests, looking for the right buzz words, shaking our heads if each does not say our "holy words" just exactly the way we like to hear them. (On that note, I confess to some doubts about Mr. Obama's confession of faith. I also confess to doubts about Warren's megachurch empire — I've never been a fan of religious empires and tend to distrust organized religion in general). But regardless of my (our) personal misgivings, these men — two men of like and unlike faith — have each refused before the world to disown the other. And in this, do they not embrace Christ's command?

How can we miss that? To engage with rather than to retreat from the "unclean" was Jesus' mission. A mission for which he was roundly criticized by the self-righteous of his day. And, we can't afford to forget, its a mission he handed off to us and commanded us to continue.

Skeptics dismiss Obama's and Warren's attempt to reach across the abyss of human alienation to those with whom they significantly disagree as publicity stunts. But its hard to believe it's merely that. Both are under fire from all quarters. Neither will see any political profit from Warren's prayer of invocation on Jan 20. Worse, each will be judged by many for what appears to be lack of commitment to the truth. But I would suggest that it is their mutual commitment to truth that has brought them together.

I have to put my hope in such audacious, fragile acts as these, for in them any hope we have as a nation is embodied. Those who rage at it, from right or left, attempt to hold hope hostage. Love, however flawed, must carry the day or, ultimately, the hate-mongers win and the Truth has died in vain.

Incarnation Day

2008-12-25T19:33:00.007-07:00

The descendant of a shepherd king,
To shepherds on the hills did sing
The host of angels, near the little town

To lowly Bethlehem they ran
and through a stable door
and in to see the Savior's clan —
a family but poor!

The child abed on straw and fed
amid the foals and fodder
would he slow tread the hills and spread
good news of living water?

The master of the stars that ring
The heavens did each magi/king
haste to follow as the Eastern Star came down

To lowly Bethlehem they rode
and through a stable door
in what was not a King's abode,
An infant to adore.

The child abed on straw and fed
amid the cold and cattle,
stirred wild hatred — King Herod's dread —
and here began the battle!

"What child is this?" the choirs since sing
Why born so low, to us to bring
the message that he came to claim the Crown?

In lowly Bethlehem, God came
behind that stable door
Perfection took a human name
became what we deplore

The child abed on straw and fed
amid the farms of Ephratha
Gold crown he shed for thorns instead
on a trail that would end at Golgotha

When we to Nativity do cling
We miss or lose the "Lamb of God" thing:
True God, true man he turns all upside down

In lowly Bethlehem, he's born
of heavenly power and glory, shorn
our thoughts, our pain, our skin, he's worn
behind that stable door

The child abed on straw and fed
like His sheep all gone astray
is the Man we've fled, Shepherd King we dread
When we sheep continue to stray
When we wander from The Way
When we forget the dreadful Day
when we'll stand face-to-face before Him.

When the creator
who became the created
who identified with our lost cause
Asks: Have you loved as I've loved?

Will we have embraced our own stable
or strode out the door
seeking glory and greatness
and become truly poor?

Or will we have followed Him meekly
From Ephratha to Golgotha
Seeking sheep that continue to stray:
Answering kindly to harsh words they may say
Touching "lepers" — not, in fear, run away —
Not insisting on black/white for every grey
Loving e'en those who reject the Way
serving all, friend or foe, till that Day
When we all come weakly before Him
With no plea but "mercy," before Him
With no hope but His favor, before Him
who in our Manger once lay?

Called Out of Darkness

2008-12-24T08:28:00.010-07:00

This book, by former vampire-series author Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire and a number of others, several of which became hit Hollywood movies) chronicles Rice's journey from faithful Catholic in New Orleans' dense and ultra-conservative 1950s Catholic enclave to radical Berkeley-educated atheist intellectual to a devout, albeit socio-politically-at-odds return to faith. It should be an illuminating read for disaffected evangelicals who struggle with faith even as they take refuge in the mysteries of the liturgical church.

On the surface, Rice has little in common with evangelicals. When she was a child, she wanted first to be a nun, then a priest (and was mystified by the prohibition against women priests). Unlike the average evangelical, she never bought the party line on gender. In fact, she was and still is absolutely committed to a genderless priesthood and sits at the very far left on gender-related social issues. Off to college in the 1960s (Berkeley, no less), she found an intellectual community that more clearly reflected her social views, and she walked away from the church without looking back.

The book describes her return to faith, after 35 years as an atheist, which she terms "an act of the will." She felt drawn, she says, by the story of Jesus. The audacity of it. She read the Bible for the first time in her life (pre-Vatican II, Catholics typically kept the family Bible, if they had one, laid out carefully on the coffee table — it wasn't read so much as admired, an icon rather than a resource). She read the scholars (and wondered at how liberal scholars could question the story of redemption she saw so clearly). She read widely, everything from Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life to N.T. Wright and C.S. Keener, crossing denominational and socio-political lines freely.

She describes herself as a "Christmas Christian" — wholly, unreservedly certain of God's Incarnation in Christ and its central importance, if we are to believe he also was crucified bodily in our place, for our sins, and then resurrected to the life that we will share with Him. She also is unreservedly devoted to the Catholic Church, its worship and the iconography that gives it shape. Unlike many cradle Catholics, she was not put off by the changes she saw, despite the fact that she was (pre-Berkeley) raised with the Latin Mass. Surprised by the post-Vatican II Church, she nevertheless embraces the English Mass and accepts all the attendant transformations.

Upon her return, she discovered the Nicene Creed, and marveled at its succinct encapsulation of what she had come to believe. (For the litmus-test crowd, yes, she can say "Jesus is Lord.") She also "prayed, studied, cried" and asked Him for guidance. And what she got was a simple mandate, which she says was a significant turning point in her life, straight from the Sermon on the Mount: That she must love both her friends and her enemies. (How she came to this realization, the subject of Chapter 13, says much about the value of coming to the scriptures wihtout preconceptions.)

What she did not get was a command to abandon her commitment of love when faced with those who live outside the church's declarations on gender roles and sexuality. Her views affirmed at Berkeley remain unchanged. A lifelong Democrat, politically, she says she finds nothing in the Scriptures that has moved her to change her party affiliation or her social views, including her affirmation of gay and lesbian aspirations to marriage and family. But she also allows that, even in the secular world, the jury is still out on what effects such social changes may have. And she allows for the possibility that she is wrong. Further — and this is the salient point — she has purposed to set aside her vast differences with the Church hierarchy on issues of gender and human sexuality. Her return to Christ and to His Church, she insists, is permanent:

Too many make the mistake I made. They leave the loving figure of Jesus Christ because they feel they must leave His churches. I will never leave Him again, no matter what the scandals or the quarrels of His church on earth, and I will not leave his church either.

Noting that it is often more difficult to love one's friends than one's enemies, she says:

I'm convinced it takes immense courage to remain in a church where one is surrounded by hostile voices, and yet we must remain in our churches and answer hostility with meekness, with gentleness, or not at all!

Setting aside what divides us for the sake of love and unity? Allow for the possibility that we might be wrong? Could be an important word for evangelicals. Can we hear an admonition from across the aisle? Of all the things that Jesus could have named in John 13:34 as the way the world would know that we are His disciples, he chose "if you love one another." Radical stuff.

[Note: I suggest reading this post in context. The preceding post sets up a discussion that begins in this post and will continue through the next several. - Mike]

A Radical Re-embracing

2008-12-23T08:18:00.008-07:00

When you haven't blogged for more than a year, the first thing you do (after you try to remember your log in) is read your last post. You come to it with a mixture of anticipation and fear, asking: Is that still me? Am I still in that space? Will I look back with chagrin, wondering what I could possibly have been thinking?

This time (I've been away, before), I breathed a sigh of relief. Yes, I still can embrace the me that was then. In fact, I feel a measure of peace and encouragement. The me that is me now has not been moved. I still stand where I stood. And I'm grateful to God.

In the last 17 months, "the world, the flesh and the devil" (I must add, both inside and outside the Church) have mounted a most merciless attack on my position. I've been wounded, but these forces have not prevailed. I'm still here.

That's not to say I'm unchanged. In some ways, I hardly recognize me. A good portion of my internal landscape has been scraped off and is in a rebuilding process ... but the key is that it still rests on the same foundation.

While the world has experienced its financial meltdown, I've watched something similar happen to the internal, eternal economy that keeps me going in the spiritual realm. As those who put their hope in money confront, rather dramatically, the inevitable bankruptcy of such a hope, I've had to confront my own bankruptcy. That's been a good thing.

It has not been fun, however. One must confront one's demons at times like these ... and its not pretty. And I'm not sure I can talk about them all. I'm not sure, either, whether that's what is necessary. What I can say is that I hope to join the ranks of those who quietly love their neighbors and their enemies alike and persist in love, doing what they see Jesus doing. Offering the thousands of little ministrations that make them, mostly unheralded, the Light of the World. And my mission here, if there is only one, is to cast a bit of light on what I think (but do not know) that kind of love might look like. Anyway ... that's the plan.

We'll see.

One thing I won't be doing is redesigning my blog, or shopping around for a new blog host site. I see people doing that a lot — they have an upheavel in their life, or it enters another stage, and they retitle their blog, change the colors, post new pictures, etc. Having been away for a while, it would be a natural thing to do. But not doing that, for me, is important. Although a lot has changed, my mission is still the same: Embracing the Shadow.

As I embrace that in me that is not light, and enlighten it with the love of Christ, I find that I can, at last, begin to embrace that which is not light in others. We are all sinners in need of a savior. I revisited, recently, that powerful thesis statement from the Gospel of John, the one you memorize in Sunday School but never quite get your spiritual arms around:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

What does he love? Not just the Church. Not just Christians. Not just "good people." But the world. Who has life? Whosever believes. Radical stuff.

I Don't Know, But God Does

2007-03-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

In Brian McLaren's book, The Secret Message of Jesus, in an appendix rather presumptuously entitled, "Why Didn't We Get It Sooner?" McLaren attempts to explain why, after 2,000 years, the church is suddenly discovering the real meaning of what Jesus taught (described in McLaren's book). There is a quote, there, from Soren Kierkegaard with which I resonated:

"The Bible is easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly. Take any words in th New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that, my whole life will be ruined. How would I get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scolarship. Christian scholarship is the church's prodigious attempt to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament."

The big issue today is, what is worship? How is it properly done? What is its focus?

Unfortunately, I have difficulty believing that the new, postmodern examinations of things (of which McLaren's is just a sample) will improve things much. The Emergent fascination with things "catholic" is an understandable reaction to the pace of change and innovation and the individualism that have infused our culture and our church institutions under the sway of modernity. But shall we retreat into liturgical formalism — essentially a more ancient, much more institutionalized, less entrepreneurial swindle — just because our current swindle no longer pleases?

I wonder if the church has always been, and will continue to be, hidden from those who analyze, theorize, philosophize, rationalize, criiticize and ultimately obliterate the Gospel's endless creative power. Maybe the church has always been those whose hearts and eyes lift heavenward and see the face of Christ and then, individually and collectively (as the Temple in which the Father and Son, by the Holy Spirit, are please to dwell), simply go out to serve others out of love for Him. They're there, in "free" churches, liturgical churches, pentecostal churches, quietly, humbly, obediently loving, serving, giving — passed over in all the current tumult, ignored because they don't toot their own horns, unheard because they don't write books or get invited to talk shows, ignored because they're not out in the marketplace making their marks, but instead frequent the hospice and the homeless shelter, take meals to the Muslim family next door down with the flu, provide a home for their neglected niece or nephew, help an elderly neighbor repair his porch and spend most of their time listening to how it used to be, and a thousand, thousand other acts of true spiritual worship.

I suspect these folks won't be leaving their current church institutions any time soon, nor will they abandon the forms of worship handed down to them. For one thing, they don't have the time for much critical reflection. They're too busy worshipping in thought, word and deed. In Spirit and in Truth. I think they know, in their heart of hearts, that the mere human forms aren't "it." They sense, but often cannot articulate, that these will always come and go like the tides.

I imagine millions of them, all over the earth — maybe many not "Christian" by many institional definitons — who nevertheless imbibe from the True Vine, not just once a week (with wine, bells and smells) or once a month (with grape juice) at a Sunday service, but continually, inauspiciously, gratefully as they live out His command to love your enemy, do good to those who despitefully use you, comfort the comfortless, relieve the oppressed, feed the hungry.

I don't know that this is true. These folks, after all, are hidden. They aren't "getting on in the world." They walk right by opportunities to make a Splash, do something Big, get Noticed and have Influence. Only God knows. But I hope they're there. In fact, I have faith that they are out there. And I love them for their perserverance in the face of the impediments that we thinkers and insitutionalizers set in their way. They know and live the truth of I Cor. 13. They are the secret message of Jesus. They are His Body. They are the True Worshipers. Their faith, hope and love abide.

What they do in secret, God will surely reward openly on The Day. And there may indeed be gnashing of teeth among those of us who are now so sure we've discovered the One Right Way.

Emergent, Submergent, Convergent ... Avergent

2007-02-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

We've heard a lot, in the last couple of years about the "Emergent church," what many who are unhappy with the current state of the evangelical "free" church have proposed as an antidote to its ills. A friend of mine recently coined the term Submergent, for those folks who still (most of the time) adhere (more or less) to the Christian faith, but aren't particularly interested (not at all, in fact) in organizing it. (According to Christian pollster George Barna, that's one of the faster-growing groups.) But recently, I heard about another group, who see themselves as the Convergent church, as opposed to the divergent church (catholic, protestant, pentecostal) that dominated the 20th century.

Convergers are a collection of folks who once were exclusively committed to either evangelical, charismatic or liturgical forms of worship (some of them, to more than one, one at a time) who have, evidently, found they each need the other. The convergers' quarrel with church as it is, is this: The church's evangelical, liturgical and sacramental threads have become separated, and they need to be reunited, as they were in the Ist Century. Convergers say they're not opposed to the sense of mission that has enlivened evangelical faith and pratice, but they have subsumed the "saving of souls" under a larger concern for creating a "community of worship." As I understand it, they hope to bring together the best of what each brings to the party, and become the church that touches all the 20th Century bases, but doesn't get stuck at any of them. It remains to be seen if they've hit a homerun with that one (sorry, I got stuck in the baseball analogy and there was just no way out but through the middle.)

The Convergent idea has a lot of appeal. A few years ago, I went to an Episcopal Church in Ambridge, Pa. that lived out convergence, combining the liturgical worship from the Book of Common Prayer with contemporary worship music (we had a great band) and charismatic ministry. It was wonderful. But I don't recall ever hearing the word "Convergence." According to this, the Convergence "movement" isn't exactly new, either. I'm just living a pretty provincial existence, I guess.

Although Emergers have gravitated to convergent thought, too, it appears that capital "C"-type Convergers tend not to be young, enthusiastic and start-from-scratch types. Rather, those prominent in this group tend to be older, greyer and self-described "wounded warriors" most of whom are currently entrenched in well-established institutions. Recognizable names include:

Robert Webber, who wrote extensively about worship in the 1980s. His book Evangelicals on the Canterbury Way described and then helped encourage an exodus of protestant evangelicals to what is now the deeply divided U.S. Episcopal Church.

Thomas Howard (brother of Elizabeth Elliot, whose first husband was Jim Eliot, one of the five martyred missionaries whose story was recalled in the recent movie End of the Spear. Once an influential thinker and writer in evangelical circles, Howard's much publicized conversion to Roman Catholicism in the last century briefly stood the evangelical world on its ear.

Mike Warnke. Yes, he's the former Satanist (a disputed claim) turned charismatic Christian comedian, circa. 1970s. One of the more wounded of the warriors (most self-inflicted, according to this), Warnke became interested in Easterm Orthodoxy in the 1990s and actually started his own independent denomination, the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church in Kentucky.

Prominent among those at the meeting was Simon Chan, a professor of systematic theology at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. Don't be fooled by his Asian origins. Dr. Chan is thorough-goingly Western in his tendency to go to scripture and find in its complex web of song, law, history, prophecy, parable and epistle a systematic and, in fact, ontological argument for liturgical worship. For a taste of his argument, check out this interview on the Christianity Today Web site.

Convergers are — so far — an unofficial group, but I say "so far" because, unlike Emergers and, especially, Submergers, Convergers have a high view of apostolic authority. Their attempt to reunite the divergent strains of the faith is wrapped up in a larger desire to reunite the church not only as one faith, with one practice, but under one government. Convergers seem unashamedly hierarchical and simply assume that the church needs an institutional structure in order to accomplish its mission. So, while Emergers tend toward the catholic, with a small "c," Convergers show all the signs of a movement that would inevitably lead to something more Catholic, with a very large capital "C". Full circle, anyone?

To be fair, the investigation I've done so far (by no means thorough) indicates that their commitment to this concept is not necessarily to be confused with a commitment to such things as an all-male priesthood or a return to the deep division between clergy and laity that once kept the scriptures out of the hands of the laity — one of the many ills the protestant movement sought to remedy. But they've still got to ignore a lot of history. One of the reasons Eastern Orthodoxy has so much appeal to both Emergers and Convergers, I think, is that the Orthodox strains have a slightly less bloody history than does the Western liturgical strain, what with the latter's inquisitions, crusades and the other negative fallout from its political hegemony in Europe. If you're advocating a return to the idea of a single church institution, its best not to appeal to the Roman model.

I dunno. I suppose all of this is just part of the deal. We just keep searching for the One Right Way to "do church." I'd like to propose a new group (NOT a movement): The Avergent church. We are those who are simply averse to all this dissecting, theorizing, systematizing, codifying and pontificating about what the church is (or isn't), what it's supposed to do (or not do), and the endless writing and reading and discussing of books on the subject. It is this sort of endless discourse and the inevitable wrangling and nitpicking that attends it that first divided us. How is it, then, that we think it will, now, this late in the game — against the evidence of all this history — unite us?

Avergent churchers believe that if there was One Right Way to do church, there would be a book in the Bible entitled, "The One Right Way." There isn't. It's just not clear.

Jesus did say, "The world will know that you are my disciples if you love one another." Pretty clear.

We'd have to stop arguing with one another to do that. So in the meantime, we Avergers figure we do the best we can to do what is clear, and leave the wrangling to the academes.

Linguistic Tweaking

2007-02-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

So ... could we retire the "F" word?

Back in the day (wa-a-a-y back, if you're my age), even the tough guys in my neighborhood didn't use the word. It was the most well known of several you just didn't use, especially in front of your mom or a girl you liked. Of course, I didn't come from a very rough neighborhood, so there may have been places where it was already impacting daily speech patterns, but if so, we didn't know about it.

Not so today. With plenty of encouragement from the entertainment industry (movies, rappers, punk rockers, etc.) it now peppers the speech of grade schoolers. Trash talk has become small talk. And, courtesy the feminist movement, it's also no longer the preserve of the guys. Follow a pack of teenage girls around the mall for 15 minutes some Saturday and listen to the conversation. "Swear like a sailor" comes to mind.

Once a word that made a big, if negative impact, it's become as common as "and uh" and "like." In fact, for the generation now in high school, it is, like the once sacred act it purports to denote, nothing more or less than punctuation. The act itself — devalued through careless, thoughtless repetition with little connection to the intimacy of committed love it was intended to express — has lost all meaning and purpose. Neither the act nor the accompanying four-letter word carries much punch anymore. Spoken in the wrong company, it once might have earned you a punch in the jaw. Today it rarely raises an eyebrow. In fact, it's a badge of coolness in certain circles, along with baggy, fallin' down britches, black fingernail polish, multiple tattoos and piercings in sensitive areas.

Even Christians don't want to be left out. They do the best they can, albeit obliquely, using sound-alike terms in an attempt to get with the cool without breaking the rule, as it were. I've heard otherwise orthodox, Bible-believin', church goin' folk substitute forkin', freakin', frickin,' friggin' and just plain f'n — with no thought to what Paul might have meant in his discussion of the letter vs. the spirit of the law.

Linguists will tell you (if they haven't already given up and retired to monasteries in the desert) that the way we use our words says a lot about our culture. In this case, our society has managed, despite its best attempts to do otherwise, to make the subject of sex commonplace and ... well, downright boring. About as fun as chain-smoking cigars. The whole thing leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I'd like to suggest that it-s time for a thorough-going change. We've worn this one out. So how 'bout we all agree on a new word?

My vote goes to tweak.

I know. It's an irritating word, but ... not quite the same. But say it over and over. Kind of obnoxious, right? Now use it three or four times in the same sentence. What have you got? An expletive that, unlike its well-worn predecessor, actually gets more distasteful with use!

And use it we do. Our project at work doesn't need a rewrite or another edit anymore, it just needs a tweak. We don't adjust things anymore. We tweak them. We don't get out ducks in a row, we tweak things into line.

Tweak is already in common use and, in my estimation, has already crossed the border into overuse, so it's an excellent candidate. Imagine it as punctuation — truly breathtaking, and certain to be every bit as aggressive, irritating, offensive and off-putting as the word we're retiring.

3Gs vs. TXT TLK

2007-02-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

We're living in the dawn of a new age, which is spawning a new culture, right before our eyes.

If you've got any doubts about that, you don't have teenagers.

It's a technology-driven change, to be sure, and I suspect it will have effects as far reaching as the Industrial Revolution, which has rated initial caps in all the history books for decades. I'm predicting that the Electronics Revolution will get equal billing in high school textbooks of the future. Assuming there is such a thing as high school.

The explosion of intant text messaging, e-mail, and chat/billboard/blog/RPG (role-playing game) sites, such as MySpace, Invisionfree and Gaia, has almost assured that this generation will alter the English language forever. In fact, practitioners of instant texting already have a new name for the language they are inventing. It's txt tlk (in English: Text Talk).

As you've probably already noticed, two of the distinctives of this new language are the dropping of vowels and lack of capitalization (exception: ALL CAPS are used for emphasis). A third is the pervasive use of single characters in place of sound-alike words. Examples: u = you; 4 = for. This technique also is used to shorten multi-syllable words. For instance, educ8 is used, (rather ironically, I'd say) in place of educate. Then there are the three-letter combinations that stand in for common phrases: omg (oh, my god), btw (by the way), lol (laugh out loud) ... oh yeah, and the already well-worn wtf (what the f---?). Some forms are simply the instituionalization of common typos: teh or te, for the. Then there's pwn3d, which translates to "owned" which has acquired the new meaning of "the state of having had crap kicked out of." Punctuation, predictably, is unnecessary, the exception being the ubiquitous "smiley-faces" which dot txt tlk communications and represent, iconically, the writer's current emotional state. There's at least one Web site from which you can download a face, many with animation, for every imaginable emotional state.

This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that these new rules are not followed with any real consistency and, depending on the practioners, there are a number of other modifications employed that often render the message indeciperable, even to those fluent in txt tlk. For example, educ8 sometimes ends up as eduk8, eguc8 — or even edu* for those who, for reasons known only to themselves, suddenly lapse back into use of the shift key. R u bgn-n 2c hw crzy it cud gt?

In part, text tlk is motivated by necessity. It's tough to fit a message in the tiny space available on a mobile phone screen. It's also a pain in the neck to use that tiny keypad as if it were a typewriter. And it shortens the hunt-and-peck time for those who can't type in the first place. But txt tlk has spilled over into e-mail, chat rooms, billboards and blogs.

Adults, predictably, are scratching their heads at this plundering of the mother tongue's rich heritage. But what you may not know is that a growing number of young folks otherwise hip to everything electronic have mounted a counter-assault on txt tlk. At the Gaia site (www.gaiaonline.com), an RPG site where members can join "guilds," based on their current interest, the most popular guild is (I'm not making this up!) the Gaia Grammar Guild. It recently surpassed in popularity the previously most visited guild, which attracted those wishing to learn how to draw Anime figures.

Members of 3G find and expose particularly egregious (and often hilarious) examples of txt tlk and offer correction. (The rule is, ridicule the practice, but not the person.) To join 3G, one must submit a written request, using proper capitalization, grammar, spelling and word forms accepted by Webster. They aren't snobs. They're prepared to forgive the occasional typo. But they're passionately for communication and, therefore, preserving enough of the language we already have to make it possible. They're after the intentional desecration. And there's plenty to be found.

They may be fighting a losing battle. Languages change, whether we like it or not. English, for instance, is a polyglot mixture of German, French, Latin and the remnants of Celtic and Gallic tongues used back when the Irish, Scots and Brits were loose-knit collections of warring clans. But the pace of change, for most of human history, had been slow enough to give most folks the impression of stability. What's different today is that the pace has accelerated to near light-speed. By the time these kid's kids hit grade school, it'll be a rare kid for whom the English we adults now speak isn't a second language.

No way, you say? Consider this: One Gaia member recently entered into evidence a student survey, composed by school faculty members in txt tlk. Worse, I read, years ago now (long before text messaging was even a possiblity), an article by a linguist who made the case for intentionally creating a new language eerily similar to txt tlk, as a means of keeping our communication up to the increasing speed of modern life. One could hope that, now that they (linguists and teachers) are doing it, many kids will decide it's no fun anymore. But don't be surprised if, in 10 years time, your local school board is debating, with straight faces, the wisdom of permitting students to turn in written assignments in txt tlk. Teachers, of course, will be compelled to spend their continuing education credits boning up on this new verbal phenom in order to "relate" to their students.

Future history books will have chapters entitled "d lektrnk rvlushn." No caps, of course. lhm (Lord, have mercy!).

Signs of the Time

2007-01-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Time was when Time magazine was a bastion of editorial conservatism, by which I mean nothing like conservatism of the political or religious sort. I mean, instead, that Time maintained a commitment to editorial objectivity — or at least an attempt at it — when most other "news" outlets in the late 20th Century were gleefully abandoning theirs.

Alas, no more. I picked up the November 13, 2006 issue today while at the dentist's office. The cover copy indicated that inside, I'd find "a spirited debate between atheist biologist Richard Dawkins and Christian geneticist Francis Collins" in the cover story entitledGod vs. Science(click the title to read the archived article online at the Time Web site). Curious, I bit, and dived into the article. Done in interview format, the piece is billed as the transcript of a 90-minute debate moderated by a Time correspondent. The exchange however, is something short of spirited (I suspect the editors thought that was a clever play on words) and it delivered nothing like the sort of discussion implied by the title.

From its inception the article assumes that intelligent design, an alternative to evolution that actually predates Darwin's work, is simply the religious wolf clad in new scientific wool. "In recent years," writes article author David Van Biema, "creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of 'intelligent design' (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality." Scientifically worded? Very convincing totality? So much for editorial objectivity. So the creationists are mentioned, then dismissed, before the debate begins.

What does take place is a conversation between two scientists — one a Christian and one who, though billed as the athiest in the group, actually attempts late in the game to confess to agnosticism — who despite their differences about the existence of a deity of the sort currently worship by Christian, Jew or Moslem, both accept the prevailing theory of evolution as substantially sound. This is not God vs. Science. Rather its a discussion about whether or not an evolutionist can be a theist without surrendering his key to the lab.

Mr. Dawkins does his best to make it the promised spirited exchange. He twice refers to Collins' position as a "cop-out," the second time, "the mother and father of all cop-outs." He refers to those who believe the Genesis account of creation to be literally true as "clowns" whom theist Collins should ignore. He even trashes one of his own, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (who did more in the last Century than any other living scientist to rescue evolution from its critics by postulating changes to Darwin's classic theory that explained away glaring flaws) by saying that Gould's belief that evolutionary theory and religious belief could co-exist was a politically motivated sham. Collins, to his eternal credit, does not respond in kind. But he certainly is not a representative of those who oppose evolution on biblical grounds.

Van Biema notes that Dawkins is an outspoken member of a much published group of scientific types who are currently on the offensive against religion. The growing list includes Sam Harris, the much publicized and verbally pugnacious author of The End of Faith as well as a posthumous collection of astrophysicist Carl Sagan's skeptical lectures about God.

Personally, I welcome the assault. The rising atheist tide comes at a time when evangelical Christianity, the presumed progenitor of I.D., is in the throes of a much needed self-examination. But Christians are never more like their true selves than when persecuted. Historically, efforts to stamp out their faith have inevitably failed. Christians outlasted Russia's Secret Police and China's Red Guards in the last Century. And they will outlast America's 21st Century Materialists, too. Especially if they're no longer invited to the debate. That'll give them more time to do what Jesus told them to do. Arguing with atheist scientists really isn't on the to-do list.

Church Growth Dressed up as Emergent?

2007-01-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

Found this post at the Apprising Ministries blog, concerning Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids — not to be confused with the Mars Hill in Seattle, pastored by complimentarian Mark Driscoll who, last International Women's Day, took some serious heat for statements allegedly not in support of women in church leadership.

Rob Bell, who by all accounts is egalitarian, is pastor of what various observers say is the "the fastest growing church in America." He's certainly got a unique way of expressing the timeless message of the Gospel. And he's got a church of 10,000 that he started in 1999 in a gymnasium.

What many don't know is that gymnasium was pretty full the first Sunday. Somewhere between 700 to 1,000 people were there from the get-go. That's more people than a lot of pastors ever see come through a church in its entire existence (the great majority of U.S. churches number 100 or less).

Many of those attending that first Sunday apparently knew him well. He had helped oversee their spiritual development for four to five years as a pastor on staff at Ed Dobson's nearby megachurch — something Bell neglected to mention in his account of his church plant in his new book Velvet Elvis. Hmmmmmm.

Wouldn't want to take anything away from what he's done or doing, but ... you've got a better shot at 10,000 when you start with 1,000 than the emergent folks meeting in someone's living room.

What's troubling about his story is that it sounds more amazing than it is. You get the image of this guy just kinda falling into ministry (his first formal ministry is a patched-together talk he gives at a retreat when the billed speaker didn't show), and then after he gets some encouragement and completes his seminary education, he goes to Grand Rapids and just wants to preach the Gospel and sort of watches this church spring up around him. He's as surprised by it as you are! "We had no idea how many people would show up that first Sunday." Yeah, but Rob, you probably had a fair idea. I mean, you had a very successful teaching ministry at one of the largest churches in the country for five years. Since everyone at Dobson's church knew for quite some time that you and "several other people" were going to go set up shop in that gym, how likely was it that you'd preach to a room full of empty chairs?

Don't get me wrong. I've seen some of his work, and he has a way of making the Gospel come alive. And truth is, there are a lot of pastors who could start with that 700-1,000 and walk away empty in five years. If you're into church growth, it's an amazing story even without the mythic implication of 0-10,000 in six years. I don't intend here to take anything away from what he's managed to do. It is remarkable. And I believe with all my heart that God's in it, too. But it does rob it of some of its mythic shock and awe when you find that Bell got to bypass, rather than find a way to overcome, those tough-to-get-past church growth plateaus (90, 125, 225 and 350) everyone used to write so much about.

Bell says he's not into church growth. The story that he refused to let his leadership team put up a sign outside the gym is, no doubt, true. Didn't have to. He says the church grew by word of mouth. Probably did. Several thousand mouths, apparently, assuming most adults at Dobson's church knew about the plans.

Bell's not into church growth, but his church plant is an almost by-the-book demonstration of classic church growth principles, developed and first taught, by the way, at Fuller Seminary, his spiritual alma mater.

Bell's not into marketing, either. Really? I happened to pick up his book off the rack at our church book room this morning and found it intriguing. I actually read his abbreviated account of his church's beginnings, which was why I Googled him this afternoon and came to find the above. There are, oh, 70-80 books, maybe, on the racks at church, and dozens of music tapes and other stuff. I'd just stepped in to sorta hide out, because it was that noisy period between services from which we ultra-introverts occasionally need a break. Why did that book catch my eye? Easy: It was smaller than the rest. Had a plain white cover and, in tiny type, running top-to-bottom near the upper right-hand corner, it said, simply Velvet Elvis. In a room full of flash, with authors names emblazoned bigger than book titles, it stood out like a beacon. "What's this about, I wonder?" I said as picked it up. I just hadta pick it up. That, my friends, is textbook good marketing. "In a crowded marketplace, differentiate your product." I'm not criticizing. You write a book, why? Presumably, because you want people to read it. It was good packaging. It did exactly what it was intended to do.

I have nothing against those who feel it is time to update or reinvent or rediscover the gospel. I guess I'll even live with the idea that Jesus had a "secret" message that we're just now unveiling. But this reinvention process is not new. Every generation has repackaged the faith to fit its present realities, complete with revised prayer books, "modern" bible tranlations (can't wait to see the "postmodern" bibles) and all the rest. But, unlike some, I don't pretend for one minute that this repackaging effort somehow escapes being marketing. When you repackage an old product to appeal to a new audience, that's Marketing 101.

The important question is, when you do your marketing, are you telling the truth about your product or trying to make it look like something it isn't?

Fortress People & River People

2007-01-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

It often seems like there are only two kinds of people: I call them fortress people and river people.

Fortress people, at their best, are conservative: They seek to preserve values, honor traditions, uphold their end of the Social Contract. They seek (and seek to preserve) formal education, and study a thing carefully in order to do it well. They set standards and think it's important to live up to them. They find peace and are most productive in times of stability. When something new is built, their prime concern is that it is built on a strong foundation, so it will last. They avoid error, respect authority, make long-range plans, keep their word. They like the idea that you can build a strong fortress in life (and not just materially), within which they, their families and their friends can be safe and productive. They want to bequeath that fortress to their children.

River people, by contrast, are (again, at their best) progressive: They value freedom, honor creativity, examine and critique the current social contract. They seek experince (the Great Teacher) and learn by doing, believing that even their mistakes have within them the seeds of wisdom. They know that rules sometimes must be broken if one is to do the right thing. They find purpose and are most effective in times of change. And when something new is built, their desire is that it meet a present need. They avoid rigidity, respect originality, adjust their plans as they go, keep their options open. They like that life is an adventure, that you can go witht he flow of it as if it were a great River (hence the name) and they believe that if they, their families and their friends just get out there in the water, they won't drown. Instead, experiments with a variety of swimming strokes will bring their own rewards and the River itself, somehow, will get them where they need to go. They want to teach their children how to swim ... even if it means swimming against the tide.

Question: Are you a fortress person or a river person?

Blessings & Cursings, Part II

2007-01-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

OK, now I know the computer gods hate me.

Since last post, the computer gremlins followed me to work, and immediately went to work on my brand new Microsoft Word program on my beautiful, almost brand new MacBookPro. Yesterday afternoon and most of this morning, I couldn't key in Greek letter characters.

Who cares, you say?

As it happened, I was editing a magazine article submission written by a math brainiac in our industry who had peppered his written piece with equations. Greek letters all over the place — or at least there shoulda been. But when I opened the document, everywhere there should have been a beta or theta or epsilon, there was, instead, a little square.

Our IT guys, our art director and I spent about five man-hours yesterday and again this morning, searching "Help," restarting, rebooting, installing new fonts, re-installing old fonts, setting and re-setting preferences, re-installing software ... and scratching our heads. Late this morning, we finally came up with a work-around, but the mystery remains: Where the "Symbol" drop down says I should be able to insert a Greek character, I simply can't.

Turns out our art director can't do it on his Word program, either. Everyone else in our office — none of whom have any need whatsoever to insert Greek characters — can insert alphas, gammas and deltas in Word 'til the cows come home. But not us.

Our art director and I are looking for arcane charms and rituals with which to appease the capricious virtual deities. Suggestions welcome.

DSL Modems: Blessings & Cursings

2007-01-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

I have a great deal of sympathy for customer service people, because they have to deal with people like me.

Especially the folks who sell and maintain Internet-related services. They are patient, enlessly kind, and willing ot explain things but ... too often, I just don't get it.

I do okay if they can tell me something practical to do ("Okay, Mike, now click on "Preferences" — its up in the upper left hand corner ... that's it. Good. You're doing great!"), I can handle that. But when they try to explain to me how things work (or lately, why things aren't working) I'm clueless. My friend Ted tried to explain to me how the Internet works yesterday, and I nodded along with him, because I understood the words he was saying, but the words did not conjure up an image that I could import into my knowledge file. After all these years, the whole deal is still a mystery to me. And no amount of experience with it nor the many conversations I've had with techies talking about it has improved my lot.

Today was no exception. This afternoon, I was trying to find out why I could receive e-mail, but couldn't send it. I installed my new DSL Modem Friday night and was initiated into the world of high-speed access with the help of a very nice fellow from Qwest who talked me through it like a pro (he was the pro, not me). We got everything all hooked up and — WOW — everything seemed to work. And gloriosky, was it fast! While he was on the line with me, I opened my browser and quickly found a couple of my favorite spots. I opened my e-mail program and right away, several e-mails dowloaded. Ah, that works, too! Delighted, I thanked the tech guy, hung up and whiled away a couple of hours traveling the world on Google Earth.

Woke up yesterday, nothing worked. I ended up having to restart my computer and then unplug and then replug the DSL Modem to get things going again. Once it was up, everything seemed to work. I decided to post on my blog again after a long absense, in part because I wouldn't have to wait so #$%&@ long for the old dial-up access to work. So I happily composed a post, put it up and composed an e-mail to everyone I know saying "I"m back" and ... I couldn't send the e-mail. It wouldn't go. It tried, then told me it couldn't do it.

After a long talk with the a techie at Qwest and then a techie at my ISP (a weekender, who couldn't figure it out and will have to have one of the regular 9-to-5 techies call me Monday) I was told I could send e-mail from ny ISP's WebMail feature. I, of course, did not know my ISP had a WebMail feature. So she graciously introduced me to it, and I was finally able to get off an announcement that you could find me here again.

I do feel a little better: Today, neither of the techies I talked to could figure out why it wasn't working. It shoulda. It coulda. I just didn't. And they can't tell me why. So I don't feel quite so dumb.

But I am getting a little niggling bit of paranoia. So far, the only things me and my techie phone pals could figure out to do about my DSL problems has been restart or unplug/replug. In fact, when you call in to talk to a techie on the DSL service line, they even have a recorded announcment suggesting that you unplug your modem and the plug it back in before you talk to the techie, with the assurance that "many times, this takes care of the problem." They don't even know what your problem is yet. Just unplug, replug. It all starts to sound like some strange ritual, performed to appease a capricious virtual god.

Maybe I don't want to know how the thing works, yo?

Emerging from the Monastery

2007-01-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

That's a metaphor. I haven't been wearing a robe and shaving a bald spot on the back of my head.

But I have emerged from a somewhat monastic sabbatical from "public" life. My retreat was imposed, in part, by several circumstances of my private life. But I found the exile useful and continued in it for a time by choice when life circumstances no longer required it.

Why the retreat?

First, blogging had become a burden. Too much "look at me" had crept in. I don't for one minute think I've escaped that. But now I think I let it scare me away from something I was meant to do: write. The looky-me serpent is always going to be there, looking to derail and sidetrack me. But now I'm thinking: Better to stare it down, and get on.

Second, I worried that I had nothing to add, really, to the conversation (in the blogosphere or anywhere else, for that matter). And when that wasn't niggling in my brain, I worried that I would add my two cents only to find myself suddenly out of step with people who I'd very much like to walk alongside. Both of these worries persist, but neither justifies silence. Again, better to stare it down, and get on.

Third, despite the insupportable motivations for escaping, I found leave-taking a refreshing experience. I not only stopped blogging, I backed away from several other activities (church-related and otherwise), declined to accept several invitations to participate in several others, and those few in which I continued, I cut back, so they occupied less of my time.

For the first time in years, I spent many hours at a stretch in solitary activities: One was mourning. Old losses and new. An important task I had been putting off. Another was learning to truly enjoy my own company. I walked. I read. I indulged my for movies, I even began experimental cooking again (something I've rarely time and inclination for). I also spent time thinking without feeling the need the need to talk about it or explain it or blog it and worry whether or not I was making an idiot of myself. I really needed that. And I got to where I really liked the quiet and solitude.

As a result, my stress level (which I hadn't thought was so high) abated significantly, and in the calm, I realized it had been quite high indeed.

It wasn't all peace and contentment, however. Since my last post, I have been hospitalized (Thanksgiving Day!) with blood clots on the lungs, a condition from which I am recovering. That was a shocker. On the other hand the three days I spent in the hospital after the inital shock were among the most freeing — and healing — of my sabbatical period. I had no computer, no responsibilities, nowhere to go and had the best excuse in the world to opt out altogether for a long weekend and let others take care of the world! I think it was a God thing.

Sometimes we just need to stop, if only to figure out where we are, where we've been and where God might be leading. So I did.

In the last couple of weeks, I've found myself writing post-like comments in e-mails to others and on other's blogs. I realized that it was time to emerge from exile and start again.

Isms, Ologies & Tertium Quid

2006-05-27T18:47:00.000-06:00

Until this afternoon, I had no idea what tertium quid means. A friend of mine who is a philosophy student at the local seminary used the term in a blog post the other day, and it's been knocking around in my brain ever since. (I have two friends in seminary, and a lot of words get thrown around these days that sail right over my head. I spend a lot of time saying, "Huh?")

So I looked it up. According to my beat-up copy of Webster's from my college days (oh, so long ago), it's a late Latin phrase that translates literally as "third something." It has two definitions: (1) something that escapes a division into two groups supposed to be exhaustive; (2) a third party of ambiguous status.

Definition #2 is a pretty good description of me these days. In most of the discussions going on in the little corner of the blogosphere I frequent, I'm a third party of ambiguous status. Definition #1 decribes my view of the sometimes not-so-cordial conversation between Christian egalitarians and complimentarians.

Hardcore complimentarians like to portray egalitarianism as a radical stance that blurs or worse, denies, the distinctions based on gender, under the influence of "radical feminists." On the other side, I've heard hardcore Egalitarians portray complimentarianism as a mask for patriarchy, a pose of those who wish to preserve their hierarchical hegemony and flat-out misogyny. While I'm certain that there is, in some extreme cases, some truth to both of these extreme portrayals, neither is particularly fair or insightful about the majority of people who subscribe to either position. When it comes to these and other opposed sets of "isms," much of the public dialogue tends to be dominated by the loudest and most radical adherents, while more thoughtful voices (they're out there) tend to get out-shouted or ignored.

Tangent: (Sorry, this is the way I think. Stuff just bubbles up. It takes me hours to sort out all the weird stuff that pops up in my mind and arrange it into nice, neat essays — one reason I haven't been blogging much lately. I'm not a linear thinker. So you'll just have to wade through it. Sorry.) In the blogging economy, the number of posts one attracts — and therefore, the level of potential influence one has — is often proportional to the author's willingness to make a statement that will elicit an emotional response. This is the systemic downside of blogging: the medium can, just like other forms of media, be ill-used and manipulated. Unlike some, however, I don't propose that we abandon the medium because some give in, unconsciously or consciously, to the temptation to become blog celebrities and/or indulge in insulting, demeaning or outright picking fights with those with whom they disagree.

Tangent II: Such has been suggested about the medium of television. Some insist that Christians should avoid watching it altogether. But I wonder if the fact that Christians by and large have avoided involvement in television production is at least partly to blame for why it's gotten so far out of hand?

Back to E vs. C: Both sides claim their positions on theological grounds, with some appeals to philosophy, sociology, psychology. That brings me to -ologies. People involved in these disciplines, people far more well-read and more intellectually disciplined in their thinking than I am, disagree. That's all I have to say about that.

Tangent III: For some, that will label me as an anti-intellectual. For the record, I'm not (not that my denial will make any difference). But I also don't believe that being an intellectual (whatever that really means) has any intrinsic value. Intellectualism all-too-easily can become (has become?) just another banner over another stall in the already overcrowded religious marketplace.

Back to E vs. C: What all this has to do with egalitarianism vs. complimentarianism is this: I think the issue is tertium quid. It's become an either/or, the opposite sides of which both subscribe to the notion that they, together, constitute the only possible options, yet the issue really cannot be contained by these positions. I've pored over the biblical record (and literature writen about it) myself and I don't see where that record clearly and unequivocally defines the roles of men and women in the home, church or society. If it did, we wouldn't be arguing about what it said (though I dare say there would still be conflict). But what that says to me, anyway, is that a position that adequately addresses the issue must address the ambiguity of the record. For some time now I've thought that I'd like there to be a third option. I'm not sure what it would be. The truly Christian stance must acknowledge the ambiguity, give up its right to define and know (which is motivated as much by our desire for control and the comfort and security that would give us) and live with the paradox, the irritatingly irresolvable tension.

I think its important to do so on this issue not only because it has assumed great importance in the church and in our society as a whole, but also because doing so might shed light on so many other issues which similarly distract us from our mission. The Bible does not clearly define where we ought to stand on a number of either/or questions. Big church vs. small church, seeker-sensitive vs. well, everybody else, liturgical vs. extempore worship. Hymnody vs. worship to popular music (and all its permutations: loud vs. soft, contemplative vs. dancing in the aisles, organs vs. guitars & drums) ... oh and let's not forget creationism vs. evolutionism ... and on and on.

Lest you think I've fallen into tertium quid-ism let me assure you there are many things I think are unequivocally clear in scripture. That Jesus is fully God and fully human. That he came to rescue us from our sorry sin-sick history, which — as the Eden story illustrates, began with our attempts to trust in our own understanding. That Jesus died to set us from from the effects of sin and death. That we are to deliver the message of this great salvation to the ends of the earth. That we are to forgive and not judge.

I suspect that our pre-occupation with either/or issues tends to distract us from that mission. While we're arguing among ourselves, the world watches us bicker and wonders why it should listen to us. Who can blame them?

The world really is watching. When do we show them that love Jesus talked about in John 14? "The world will know that you are my disciples, because you love one another."

I don't know what the third option is, the one that can contain all the E vs. C ambiguity. But that option must be shot full of agape love. Love that seeks the other's best must be its foundation, its motivation and its outcome. On that I think we can — no, if we're Christians, we must — agree. Inserting a bit of love — and the respect, consideration and humility that accompany that kind of love — into the either/or debates might be a good start toward finding third options.

But where to from there? Why not prayer? Personally, I wish I had prayed about this subject for as many hours as I've studied and thought about it over the last 30 years. I'd also suggest a mantra (horrors!). How about "I could be wrong." Repeat thrice daily, and after every strong statement.

If I was one of those well-read bloggers, I'd suggest we all take a month to pray, suspending talk, study and writing. What might happen? I'd like to think that we'd reconvene, in tears and anguish of soul, to begin a real conversation. My guess is we'd end up with a third option full of ambiguity. But if we could do so and love each other, would that not be ... better?

And then we might be able to take that love that spills over for each other and give it away to the world — which I think was the whole idea in the first place.

But I could be wrong.

Odd Thomas

2006-04-18T19:33:00.000-06:00

Story — especially in the form of the novel and the motion picture — is a fixture in my life. I savor it like several of my friends savor their favorite concoctions at Starbuck's.

Story mirrors my life back to me, in the most unusual and arresting ways. On the pages of a well-conceived novel and in the sounds and images of a well-directed film, I often see my lights and shadows play across a canvas not my own, and as a result, find it easier to look at them, and then, as the title of this blog suggests, embrace them. I see in a particular character, and sometimes in several who populate the same artistic work, aspects of me, my personality traits, my foibles, my hidden desires, my oddities.

It was the latter that had me weeping as I read the last 50 or so pages of Odd Thomas, a book written by Dean Koontz. He writes in the Stephen King vein, but manages to do so at the cost of about half as many trees. To call this book a horror story, or even a mystery/thriller, however, is to put it in a box that can't hold it.

Odd Thomas is named for its main character, a 20-year-old man who lives in a smallish town in the Mojave Desert. Odd Thomas (that's the name on his birth certificate: someone apparently left off the "T") has a gift.

He can see the dead.

As the book opens, you learn that he also can communicate with them (though they cannot speak) and they have learned to come to him to seek justice. In fact, the book opens with Odd Thomas confronting a child molester and murderer whose crime had been hidden for years. As the man is borne away to jail, the young girl he had killed stands (unseen by others, of course) at Odd Thomas's side. Finally at peace, she waves goodbye and walks away, fading into Rest.

Odd Thomas has an unusual relationship with the town's chief-of-police, who has come to believe not only that Thomas can communicate with the spirit world, but that Thomas' vision, though not complete, is always reliable. Together, he and Odd Thomas have solved a number of crimes, and prevented an even greater number. The Chief, in fact, has become the father figure Odd Thomas never had.

Odd Thomas' gift however, is also an affliction. It is not an easy thing to see the dead. It is no comfort to know — and this, only in part — the horrors the future holds if something isn't done. He has, at best, only hints about the future, and he is not, for that reason, always able to parlay his sight into action soon enough. He suffers the pain of "if only ..." If only I had said something sooner. If only I had paid more attention to that feeling, that sense that something wasn't right.

Because of the enormity of the gift's burden, Odd Thomas has unburdened his life in most other areas, so as not to clutter up his mental and emotional landscape: He works as a fry cook, lives in a one-room apartment, does not own a car, and has never set foot outside the provincial confines of his small town life. At one pivotal point in the story, when a disaster of unprecedented proportions — one that only Odd Thomas can see coming — threatens to destroy them both, his girlfriend — the only girl he's ever had and the only other person who knows everything about his gift — suggests that they run off to Vegas and get married. He says "No." She doesn't understand this from the young man who has proposed to her regularly for several years. In Vegas, he explains — that much larger desert burg where the dark underside of life is painted with bright colors — he would be mobbed by the dead, who live tormented, caught between two worlds, in the aftermath of lives steeped in greed, lust, loss and corruption. He knows it would be too big to handle alone. He has all he can handle.

In the end, Odd Thomas acts. But not soon enough. He foils, almost single-handedly, a sinister plot by members of a secret coven of satan worshippers (including, ironically, several members of the police department) who want to make the world forget all about Charles Manson and other home-grown American terrorists. An enormous killing spree in a shopping mail is cut short, but not until the Chief has been shot and lies near dead, and 19 others die, including the girl he loved Â— the girl who said yes when his gift demanded that he say no.

I cried because I saw in this darkly imaginative tale a parable of the "how much more" sort that Jesus often told. Odd Thomas acted. He risked all — alone — to save many. But it wasn't quite enough. And he lost everything in doing so. But — and this is the kicker — at least he made the sacrifice.

How much more, then, should we who claim The Christ be willing to act? How much more should we be willing to make sacrifices? We also see the dead. They are all around us. Though they cannot speak, millions of unborn children cry for justice, right here in our burg. Infanticide in China is epidemic. Do you not know? Have you not heard? Millions more, born but bereft of love, warmth, light, are dying as they walk through our increasingly Godless culture, as mom and dad (if they happen to have one of each) pursue demanding careers and seek recognition, position, influence, power, money. The drop-out rate in our schools is at an all-time high. Drug use, violence, casual — in fact, almost meaningless — sex are the hellish hallmarks of a youth culture that is burdened by -- no, that worships — darkness, hopelessness and death. Outside our burg, women and children in Africa are bought and sold daily (sorry, the report of the slave trade's demise was a bit premature). Slavery flourishes. And it takes more subtle forms. Sweat shops in Asia clothe us cheap and make the rich richer. The list could go on for pages.

Unlike Odd Thomas, we are not alone. We are legion. And we have — or so we claim — the promise of help from the very God of the Universe himself. So ... when do we divest ourselves of the things that clutter our mental and emotional landscapes and truly step into the breach? Why do we need so many toys? Do we really need a bigger house, a newer car, another pair of shoes? The next cruise? And what is it about American Idol anyway? Satan no longer needs to tempt Christians to sin. In America, all the devil needs is distractions. the list here, too, could go on for pages. He only needs to blind us to the hurting people all around us. Simply create a distraction for each breach of justice that stares us right in the face.

As it is, a lot of us don't even do church anymore, we mostly just talk about it. Argue about it. Define it and redefine it. Write books about it. More distractions.

When do we be the church?

American in Paris

2006-04-15T08:49:00.000-06:00

I've been away from the blog for a while.

No, I haven't been in Paris for a month. But I did spend a week there at the beginning of April. April in Paris is supposed to be beautiful, but based on my time there, I wouldn't know. It was a work-related trip.

There's a big trade show that happens in Paris each year, and I was there representing my publishing firm. I worked 17 hour days, walking the show floor all day, then sitting in the hotel lobby with my Powerbook (the only spot the Wi-Fi worked) until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, connected to my office back in Colorado, trying feverishly to meet the drop-dead deadline for our magazine's May issue. Aside from a very brief dinner with our staff at a cafe a few steps down the street my first night there (from which I excused myself early because I had to get back to the hotel to work), I thereafter saw the inside of my hotel room, the inside of the hotel lobby, the inside of the subway station (steps down to it were right outside the hotel front door), the inside of the subway train, and the inside of the Paris Expo exhibit hall.

While there, I received e-mails from friends back home, asking me about the Paris riots and strikes. Apparently the U.S. press was showing riot scenes in full color on the evening news. I neither saw nor heard a single word from anyone about the riots from any Parisians while in Paris. If it hadn't been for the e-mails, I might have passed the week without ever knowing that just a mile or so away, Parisians and the Paris police were doing battle. (Sorta says something about the way the media tend to shape our view of reality.)

I did get a glimpse of something else, however. The run up to the Paris trip, the trip itself, and its aftermath has provided a sort of squeaky-hinge turning point for my life. "Squeaky hinge" in the old black-and-white "B" movie sense of scary foreboding.

In the two weeks prior to the trip, I was the object of several prophecies, the substance of which was that I have for some time lived a sort of hermetic life, a life apart, a sort of monkish existence, but that time has drawn to a close. Paris was a sort of pinnacle point of that life — a sign — isolated and preoccupied by my work, unaware of either the delights or the riots in the fabled City of Lights. The last night I was there, I had the latest in a string of tornado dreams, which for me have always prophetically preceded periods of significant personal change that always involve what I guess you could call profound deconstruction. Last time around, six years ago, I had a series of six or seven dreams, during each of which I observed a single tornado. I lost my home, my job and my family. The recent dreams involved two and, in the Paris dream, six or seven tornados. Naturally, I'm a little nervous. I'm still waiting to see where all of this goes, which explains, at least in part, my prolonged absence from the blog.

But as I entered Holy Week, at least one thing of significance crystallized. Yesterday, is the day we now call Good Friday, the day that at the time seemed like the End, but actually proved to be the Beginning. The day that we — oh yes, I think most of us eventually must admit that we'd have been in that crowd shouting "Crucify him!" or at least slinking away in fear while it was done — condemned him to the cross. Tomorrow, we celebrate the day that Jesus walked away — alive forever — from Joseph of Arimethea's tomb, having defeated both sin and death.

I think The Church often misses the ultimate significance of that act, and gets lost in the details. For many years, I certainly have. But in that two-part act, Jesus became the Hinge of History. Prior to the cross, Jesus proclaimed the last days of God's dealing with a "special" group. His sayings, parables, teachings and healings progressively dismantled the idea of "ins" and "outs." Anyone willing to read the Gospel accounts guilelessly, in humility, can't miss it. The folks he was speaking to certainly didn't miss it: Jesus rebukes were not for "sinners" but primarily for those who presumed to draw the lines that separate sinners from God — always placing themselves safely on the God side of the line. Jesus crossed the line, and took a stance squarely on the other side, with the sinners — those whom he explicitly stated he was there to save. That's why they crucified him.

On Easter, Jesus greeted first Mary of Magdala — he didn't greet a man and certainly not one of the religious elite of the time, but a woman of questionable reputation, one the religious folks of the time would have placed far over on the wrong side of the line. Why Mary? I think the answer is simple. First, he loved her and she had returned his love. But second, how better to underscore his point?

During that three-day period, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, Jesus became the Door to the Eternal and proclaimed the Eternal Yes of God. And woe upon woe to us, the naysayers, the blind judges, the self-appointed dividers of sheep and goats — a group among whom I still, to my great dismay, so often find myself numbered.

As long as we attempt to be our own yes, by saying no to others, by continuing to insist that lines be drawn, we remain whitewashed tombs.

But Jesus left the tomb. If we chose to remain there, examining the empty grave clothes, then we cannot partake of His resurrection life. What possible hope is there for us?

Only to admit that we belong, with Mary of Magdala, on the wrong side of the line, stuck fast in the kingdom of darkness. We must admit it, because — hallelujah! Glory!! — Jesus is there with us, able to turn even our deepest darkness to incomparable Light.