The Featherblog

Some Things Simply Never Change

2009-08-17T18:07:00.005-05:00

I am reading Sinclair Lewis' novel Elmer Gantry (in fits and starts, and inbetween chapters of Before Philosophy by Henry Frankfort et all, tearing up floorboards in student housing, building bicycle wheels, and recording songs I wrote 20 years ago). I'm about a third the way through, Elmer is still in seminary (Mizpah Theological Seminary, a conservative Baptist school), and so far nothing that happened so far in the novel happened yet in the film, save the first scene.

Anyway, Lewis' description of seminarians in their off hours, well, frighteningly accurate:

"Rats!" grumbled Harry. "Of all the fool Baptist egotisms, close communion is the worst! Nobody but people we consider saved to be allowed to take communion with us! Nobody can meet God unless we introduce 'em! Self-appointed guardians of the blood and body of Jesus Christ! Whew!"

"Absolutely," from Horace Carp. "And there is absolutely no Scriptural basis for close communion."

"There certainly is!" shrieked Eddie. "Frank, where's your Bible?"

"Gee, I left it in O.T.E. Where's yours, Don?"

"Well, I'll be switched! I had the darn things here just this evening," lamented Don Pickens, after a search.

"Oh, I remember. I was killing a cockroach with it. It's on top of your wardrobe," said Elmer. (p. 91-92)

It's all too true. Just trust me.

I cannot, however, vouch for the complete veracity of Lewis on seminary courses and seminary professors, as accurate as it sometimes seems:

The course in Hymnology Elmer found tolerable; the courses in New Testament Interpretation, Church History, Theology, Missions, and Comparative Religions he stolidly endured and warmly cursed. Who the dickens cared whether Adoniram Judson became a Baptist by reading his Greek New Testament? Why all this fuss about a lot of prophesies in Revelation--he wasn't going to preach that highbrow stuff! And expecting them to make something out of this filioque argument in theology! Foolish!

The teachers of New Testament and Church History were ministers whom admiring but bored metropolitan congregations had kicked up-stairs. To both of them polite deacons had said, "We consider you essentially scholarly, Brother, rather than pastoral. Very scholarly. We're pulling wires to get you the high honor that's your due--election to a chair at one of the Baptist seminaries. While they may pay a little less, you'll have lots more of the honor you so richly deserve, and lots easier work, as you might say."

The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness they called learning.

But the worst of Elmer's annoyances were the courses given by Dr. Bruno Zechlin, Professor of Greek, Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis.

Bruno Zechlin was a Ph. D. of Bonn, an S.T.D. of Edinburgh. He was one of a dozen authentic scholars in all the theological institutions of America, and incidentally he was a thorough failure. He lectured haltingly, he wrote obscurely, he could not talk to God as though he knew him personally, and he could not be friendly with numbskulls.

Mizpah Seminary belonged to the right-wing of the Baptists; it represented what was twenty years later to be known as "fundamentalism"; and in Mizpah Dr. Zechlin had been suspected of heresy.

He also had a heathenish tawny German beard, and he had been born not in Kansas or Ohio but in a city ridiculously named Frankfort.

Elmer despised him, because of his beard, because he was enthusiastic about Hebrew syntax, because he had no useful tips for ambitious young professional prophets, and because he had seemed singularly to enjoy flunking Elmer in Greek, which Elmer was making up with a flinching courage piteous to behold. (p. 118-119)

Joe Friday, Call Your Office

2009-07-26T09:02:00.003-05:00

I have to admit, Jennifer and I are fans of police procedurals, radio and teevee shows which "show" how cops and prosecutors "do things." Stuff doesn't really work this way, these shows are fantasies full of over-competent cops, shiny technology in which mistakes are rarely made and always fessed up to. The guilty always confess, and those who confess are always guilty.

They make for neat little morality tales. I admit -- it would be nice if the world really worked the way it does is Dragnet or Law & Order. But it doesn't. The world is probably more like DaVinci's Inquest, the first season of which was absolutely incredible. Jennifer and I just enjoy the entertainment.

The police procedural began with the Dragnet radio show in the very late 1940s. After playing a string of overly hard boiled private detectives, Jack Webb hit his stride as LAPD "Detective Sergeant" Joe Friday. The original radio show had an interesting edge: Friday had a home life (he lived with his mom, showed an interest in girls), but that and the early 1950s teevee show (Joe actually had a girlfriend, her name was, I think, Ann) were done in the era before the Miranda Warning. (Quick quiz: how many of you know the Miranda Warning by heart because you watched the late 1960s Dragnet or Adam-12?) Friday and his partner could, and often did, enhance their interrogation techniques. One radio episode had Friday and his partner frog-march a suspect (played by Harry Morgan, Webb's future teevee partner) around downtown Los Angeles in 100-degree heat for four days looking for an apartment, for example. The bad guys are bad, the good guys follow the rules, and everything works out for justice in the end. Again, nice fantasy.

Law & Order is just Dragnet with lawyers attached on the back end. Jennifer and I watch for the characters, mainly, though the various L&O franchises (SVU is Dragnet: Sex Police, a role I could never see Joe Friday doing, and CI is Dragnet+Columbo, which again is a role I could never see Webb filling on his own) help assure both of us that the world is a rotten place full of rotten people who do rotten things. And there's the morality tale. I claim not to like happy endings, but I'm sort-of lying when I say that. But only sort-of.

While the shows are very much the same, there's an intriguing difference. Joe Friday has to carry around a pocketful of dimes for pay phones, and he frequently asks to use someone's phone to call his office. (In the radio show, several minutes of one episode are taken up when Friday calls "long distance" from LA to somewhere in Idaho, as operators connect to exchanges and hook the call up.) There are times, when he's not in the car at his radio, or not near a payphone, when Joe Friday is incommunicado. All of the L&O cops have cell phones, and can always be reached (unless the writers contrive a situation to put them out of reach). Calling Idaho is no problem.

It's interesting, this change in telephone affairs, and is more noticeable than any other difference in the two shows.

Now in the First World

2009-07-18T06:18:00.003-05:00

Pipelines are the most vulnerable part of the extensive and complex systems the produce, transport, refine and distribute oil and natural gas. They are long, tough to patrol and secure, and easy to attack. It doesn't take much to put a pipeline out of action, even temporarily, and pipeline attacks have become the way to disrupt oil and gas production in Nigeria, Iraq and Mexico. (I believe there have also been significant pipeline attacks in Ecuador and Colombia as well.) It is a relatively cost effective way for a non-state group to challenge the state and disrupt the local and national (and in the case of Nigeria, global) economy.

This tactic has apparently spread to Canada. If whoever does this is able to maintain the pace, and other groups (for whatever reason) with grievances adopt the practice, it will have very troubling implications:

VANCOUVER -- For the sixth time in nine months, and the second time in three days, a bomb has exploded near EnCana's natural gas pipeline in northeastern British Columbia.
The blast early Saturday morning took place less than a kilometre from where EnCana workers were trying to cap a gas well damaged in an explosion Thursday.
"Our crews were at the wellhead site, where they were working to stop the gas leak," EnCana spokeswoman Rhona DelFrari said from Calgary.
"Around 2:30 in the morning they heard a loud bang, so they immediately went to the spot where they thought it was and that's where they discovered the explosion at the pipeline."
The Mounties are labelling the bombings as domestic terrorism and have flown in a unit of its Integrated National Security Enforcement Team to investigate.
...
The bombings have all taken place along a 15-to-20-kilometre stretch of the pipeline near Pouce Coupe, just south of Dawson Creek on the B.C.-Alberta border about 1,050 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

The piece does not speculate as to who might be doing this or why.

I Want My $5,000!

2009-07-17T16:53:00.004-05:00

The WSJ's Thomas Frank (also the author of What's Matter With Kansas) notes in a column today that Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy, and everything about her since then, has showed just how thoroughly the GOP has embraced the "culture of victimization":

Indeed, if political figures stand for ideas, victimization is what Ms. Palin is all about. It is her brand, her myth. Ronald Reagan stood tall. John McCain was about service. Barack Obama has hope. Sarah Palin is a collector of grievances. She runs for high office by griping.
This is no small thing, mind you. The piling-up of petty complaints is an important aspect of conservative movement culture. For those who believe that American life consists of the trampling of Middle America by the "elites" -- that our culture is one big insult to the pious and the patriotic and the traditional -- Sarah Palin's long list of unfair and disrespectful treatment is one of her most attractive features. Like Oliver North, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, she is known not for her ideas but as a martyr, a symbol of the culture-war crimes of the left.
To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman's voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger's sneer, every celebrity's slight, every crazy Internet rumor.
This has been Ms. Palin's assigned role ever since she stepped on the national stage last summer. Indeed, she has stuck to it so unswervingly that one suspects it was settled on even before she was picked for the VP slot, that it was imposed on her by a roomful of GOP image consultants: Ms. Palin was to be the candidate on a cross.

The GOP, as long as I can remember, has ridiculed and rejected victimhood claims, especially those of non-whites, women and homosexuals. (However, long ago, Republicans accepted victimhood claims for Jews.) The whole point was an emphasis on individual, self-defined, autonomous human beings, people whose identities were not ascribed by race, class or gender (though religion was a separate matter). At least I thought that was the point. Maybe I wasn't listening.

But Frank is right. While Palin represents the GOP's final evolution into an angry and very stupid peasants party, the Republicans were well on their way long before that. I do not know if Sarah Palin has a political future or not, but it would probably not be wise to count her out. That Obama won handily last November is meaningless, especially if he cannot govern effectively (and I'm betting he won't do much better than the man he replaced). It may be the national GOP is headed for the same perpetual wilderness as the California GOP, and for the same reasons, but it is much too early to tell yet.

Palin's aggrieved and enraged GOP reminds me a lot of Bernelius "Buzz" Windrip's campaign and presidency in Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. And that didn't end well.

UPDATE: Something Awful gets it just right.

Who Gets to be a Person

2009-07-16T11:35:00.003-05:00

I must confess to being almost militantly ambivalent about the matter of abortion as discussed in the United States. I cannot passionately take a side one way or another, being suspicious of both sides' arguments. Pro-lifers strike me as all too invested in the kind of collective morality/sanctifcation that Jakob Kaplan described as being the essence of the confessional polity -- the community that fails to see a distinction between church and state -- that seeks to avoid God's wrath on the community by punishing or forbidding sinfulness. (This, I believe, is the motive for most of the Protestant pro-life movement.) I also understand that, law or not, people have limited family size by killing or abandoning unborns and newborns (abandoned babies were one of the major sources of slaves in the Greco-Roman world). It is one of the horrible realities of human existence that will not change this side of Eden or the eschaton, no matter how much we want it to. God's love is infinite. Human love is significantly more finite.

That said, the choice argument doesn't work well for me either, since pro-abortion activists seem to want to make a sacrament out of the act, though I will almost always opt for for individual against the will/desire of the state or the society to make choices for the individual. I am not happy with this, and would rather the whole matter disappeared into the shadows where it belongs.

The always brilliant Will Grigg, however, puts an anti-abortion argument in a way that tends to work for me. I am no fan of eugenics or population control, seeing concerns about overpopulation as always the concerns of spoiled, wealthy white Americans/Europeans. Eugenics was just about everyone's politics in the latter half of the 19th and first few decades of the 20th century -- Planned Parenthood ought to simply come clean about involved Margaret Sanger was is making sure certain folks -- poor brown ones and immigrants -- didn't have children. But progressive social reform politics were especially wrapped up in "improving humanity" by making sure the poor and other undesirables did not have children. (SOURCE: In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity by Daniel J. Kelves, University of California Press 1985; I own the book and have read it through twice.) Sanger was hardly alone.

At any rate, Grigg writes at length about population control efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s and the link to the Roe v. Wade decision. At least in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's mind. He ends the piece by noting about Roe:

Every argument on behalf of state-imposed population control rejects the concept of individual self-ownership and assumes that human lives – individually and in the aggregate – are a resource to be managed by society’s supervisors on behalf of the “common good.” And, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly intuited in 1973, the Roe vs. Wade decision was a triumph, albeit an incomplete one, for the cause of eugenicist population control.
Although it was swaddled in the language of individual empowerment, the Roe decision was a dramatic victory for collectivism: It enshrined, in what our rulers are pleased to call the “law,” the assumption that a human individual is a “person” only when that status is conferred by the government.
While Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe pointedly avoided the question of when “personhood” begins, it emphatically made it clear that, for purposes of “law,” that the term doesn’t apply to any human individual in his or her pre-natal stage of development. This, not the liberty to procure an abortion, is the real gravamen, or central legal finding, in the Roedecision: It put the government in charge of defining who is, and isn’t a person.

On some level, the state will always have the final word about who is a "person" and who isn't. But Grigg's point here really resonates with me.

On Empire and Immigration

2009-07-16T05:09:00.005-05:00

Bought the latest (I hate to call it new) Madness album, the two-CD version of "The Liberty of Norton Folgate." There was a time in my life when I would not have waited three months to buy a new Madness disc, but those days have long passed. It's a good collection of songs, probably the most interesting collection of the band's career. Musically, "Norton Folgate" sounds like a cross between "7" and "Wonderful." In fact, the disc sounds vaguely like a "best-of disc" (not that Madness needs another one of those), revisiting nearly every one of the musical styles the band has recorded in over the last 30 years. Scott Miller did this (not sure if it was on purpose) on The Loud Family's "Attractive Nuisance," which had the feeling of a retrospective of his musical career. Which is was.

Madness has always been something of a guilty pleasure for me. I can't really explain why I like this band (it's not the words, which aren't terribly sophisticated), but I love the way their recorded music is put together. "Norton Folgate" does not disappoint in this regard. David Quintack wrote in Uncut:

But none of these stylistic revisits are retreads. “Everything” is infused with some of the best melodies of the band’s career, and everything is enthused, too. The tiredness of Keep Moving and Mad Not Mad has been replaced with an older, but fresher, sound. Songs like “Forever Young” and “Sugar And Spice” sound like singles, and should be. Everything seems to gel – the arrangements are the best ever, the production is thoughtful and smart, and the influences melded perfectly (we all know that Madness were more than the sum of Ian Dury and The Kinks, but we all chose to ignore the huge, conspicuous chunks of Motown and The Beatles also in there).

Based on everything I've read, "Norton Folgate" tells the story of the Norton Folgate neighborhood (or area, or whatever it can be called) of London. The title track, something of a 10-minute long mini-symphony, supposedly tells the story of Norton Folgate, especially as a neighborhood of immigrants. Madness has never been afraid to use the musical motifs of the east (as imagined by Westerners) in their music -- "Night Boat to Cairo" and "New Delhi" being the two examples which come to mind. The song "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" squishes these eastern motifs together with what I'm guessing is late 19th and early 20th century English "vaudeville" (I had the word I wanted to use stuck in my head until the very moment I needed to use it), telling, in effect, the story of the British Empire.

As the song was winding around me last night (I'd listened to the moodboard version several time, by the actual CD release version is fuller, being three minutes longer and fully mixed), and heard this:

In the beginning I’d the fear of the immigrant
In the beginning was the fear of the immigrant
He’s made his way down to the dark riverside

In the beginning was the fear of the immigrant
In the beginning was the fear of the immigrant
He made his home there by the dark riverside

He made his home there down by the riverside
They made their homes there down by the riverside
The city sprang from the dark river Thames

They made their home there down by the riverside
They made their homes there down by the riverside
The city sprang up from the dark mud of the Thames

Which, for some reason, crystallized a thought the song had already stuck in my head: you cannot conquer and colonize the world and expect to remain unaffected by it. If you are going to have an empire, you must be open to the world. It will come to you, settle in you, and change you. It will colonize you too.

Or, you cannot want an empire -- or a "strong defense" forward deployed in more than 100 nations -- and then demand the borders stay closed, the immigrants stay away and the culture remain unchanged. Empire means open borders. You cannot have one without the other.

The strongest defenders of American nationalism, the Scots-Irish and their physical and ideological descendants who cannot imagine an United States that doesn't beat up on foreigners, want empire but they don't want the immigration. They don't want to the openness to the world, because empire -- for them -- is solely the legitimate defense of family, community and culture, a supposed superior way of life, against those inferior foreigners who want to take those things away. It's all about subjugating those foreigners, even as it claims to better their lives.

You can, I think, have openness without empire, but that requires smallness and a kind-of cosmopolitan outlook that only small and relatively powerless societies that are sometimes (too often?) crossroads for outsiders and invaders. But you cannot have empire without openness. I would rather not have empire, but since I rather like the world outside the United States, I appreciate that one of the consequences of empire is that kind of openness, especially in big cities. I don't think most supporters of American empire, especially those who want the borders closed, understand that.

Resting Quietly... As Much as Possible for Me

2009-07-15T08:20:00.001-05:00

I'm recovering from a bike accident, got hit by a taxi cab on Saturday. I'm fairly lucky -- nothing broken, no serious injuries, just very, very sore. So, I'm sitting as still and as quietly as I can. I don't do still and quiet well.

Right now, I'm watching the original "The Taking of Pelham 123." Great movie. "How can you run a goddam railroad without swearing?!" Great quote.

Seek Ye First...

2009-07-11T13:18:00.002-05:00

William Miller writes the following of Dorothy Day in the 1940s:

It was in the course of the retreats that [Dorothy Day] came to see Christ not primarily as social reformer but as the exemplar of all-sufficient love. In the January, 1944, issue of the Worker, she pondered certain questions about Christ. “When St. John [the Baptist] was put in prison by Herod, did our Lord protest? Did He form a defense committee? Did He collect funds, stir up public opinion? Did He try to get him out?” No, she said. He had done none of these things. His mission was not primarily concerned with the world and its forms but with the Kingdom of God. (p. 190)

Jesus was not a social worker and he was not a community organizer. Now, there are those called to follow Christ who are also called to be social workers, and called to be community organizers, just as some are also called to be soldiers and some others to govern. But these things in and of themselves -- especially social work, reform, community organizing, making and enforcing the law -- these things are not the Kingdom of God. They may, tangentially, touch the kingdom, they may obliquely reflect that Kingdom, but they are not the kingdom.

The Irony of "The Law"

2009-07-11T07:32:00.008-05:00

I have recently finished Dutch academic Benjamin Kaplan's Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, and it gives me a way to introduce a subject I've wanted to write about since sometime in late March.

In describing how tolerance as an ideal evolved in Europe, Kaplan writes a length about how Christian Europeans, particularly in Germany (where the Reformation hit first, though not quite hardest), lived, both before and after the events of the first half of the 16th century. Something essential to Christian European life was the mixing of polity and confessional community:

The uses of church bells [to mark civic events] reveal something else of prime importance too, the lack of separation between the secular and sacred. In towns and villages across Europe, “the body social, the body politic, and the body of Christ were so closely intertwined as to be inseparable.” A heritage of the Middle Ages, the equation of civic and sacral community survived the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as an ideal, even where it was no longer a reality. (p. 50)

While the church and the state were, mostly, separate entities, the congregation and the polity were not. Church and civil community, even before the Protestant Reformation, were contiguous; membership in one assumed membership in another. This is important because as Christians struggled with what it meant to live godly lives, they expressed those lives not just individually, but communally as well.

For Europeans, every town and village had a spiritual dimension: more than a convenient, worldly arrangement for human cohabitation, it was a religious body—a “corpus Christianum.” Viewed through the prism of Christian piety, its unity was an expression of Christian love, its peace godly, and its provision of mutual aid an exercise in charity. The communal welfare it existed to promote was spiritual as well as material. Indeed, the word welfare and its cognates, like the Latin salus and German heil, meant both, for no one dreamed the spiritual and material could be kept separate. God rewarded those who deserved it, and the blessings he bestowed included peace and prosperity in life as well as salvation after death. The fate of entire communities, not just individuals, depend on divine favor. Gaining it was therefore a collective responsibility. Protestants and Catholics did not differ on this point, except where Protestants focused their prayers and hopes on the divine will, Catholics directed their supplication also to the Virgin and saints. (p. 60)

Sanctification, a word important to Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics, became the aim of community life. With the Law of God, as given in the Torah and most manifest in the Ten Commandments, as the guide for sanctified behavior (both individually and communally), laws were written, imposed and enforced. Violence was done. To this day, many Christians (many American Christians) assume that these laws should be the laws of the community, and that the failure of the community to uphold these laws is the cause of misfortune (such as hurricanes and terror attacks).

But is that the way to read the law -- the Torah תורה, literally "the teaching?" Because I don't think so.

Let's consider the marriage laws of Leviticus 18, which specify who may not marry whom, so that Israel "shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I [the Lord] am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws." (Lev. 18:3, JPS Tanakh) In verse 12, יהוה tell Moses the following:

Do not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister; she is your father's flesh.

עֶרְוַת אֲחֹות־אָבִיךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה שְׁאֵר אָבִיךָ הִֽוא׃

Okay, so who'd want to marry their aunt anyway? Yet, in Exodus 6, as the genealogy of Moses is outlined, we read:

Amram [a grandson of Levi] took to wife his father's sister Jochabed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses. (Ex. 6:20, JPS Tanakh)

Moses' father married his aunt (who was probably younger than he was).

Getting back Leviticus, a few verses later, יהוה tells Moses:

Do not marry a woman as a rival to her sister and uncover her nakedness in the other's lifetime.
וְאִשָּׁה אֶל־אֲחֹתָהּ לֹא תִקָּח לִצְרֹר לְגַלֹּות עֶרְוָתָהּ עָלֶיהָ בְּחַיֶּֽיהָ׃

To find an example of this, we need to go back to Genesis 29, where we find Jacob sojourning in "the land of the Easterners" (v. 1). He meets Rachel at the well, is clearly smitten with her (she is the daughter of his mother's brother Laban), and agrees to work for Laban for seven years in order to marry Rachel. On the night the marriage is consummated, Laban gives Jacob the older sister Leah instead, claiming "[i]t is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older. Wait until the bridal week of this one is over and we will give you that one too, provided you serve me another seven years" (v. 26-27). Eventually, Jacob gets both sisters as wives, and they become the mothers of the 12 sons who will give their names to the tribes of Israel.

Okay, a point can be made here -- these relationships were made before יהוה gives the teaching to Israel in the wilderness, and thus they were not really against the law. I suppose that argument will work -- I don't buy it, and I will explain later why I don't -- but then consider David and Bathsheba.

The commandment has been given and written -- twice, in Exodus and Deuteronomy -- "You shall not covet your neighbor's house: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's" along with "you shall not commit adultery." In 2 Samuel 16, we read the story of Kind David, spying a beautiful woman taking a bath. He "sent messengers to fetch her; she came to him and he lay with her," (v. 4) which sounds like a rape to me. She becomes pregnant, and David then tries to trick her husband, the loyal soldier Uriah, into sleeping with her so that everyone would think the child is his. No dice, it doesn't work. So David then orders to put Uriah in the front of the formation and during the battle to withdraw so that Uriah can get killed. This happens, and Bathsheba comes to live in the palace with David. Rumors must have flown, because Nathan the prophet condemns David for what he did:

David said to Nathan, "I stand guilty before the Lord!" And Nathan replied to David, "The Lord has remitted your sin; you shall not die. However, since you have spurned the enemies of the Lord by this deed, even the child about to be born shall die." (v. 13-14)

A harsh consequence, the innocent paying the price. David later "consoled his wife Bathsheba; he went into her and lay with her. She bore a son and she named him Solomon." (v. 24)

David should have known the law. And yet the eventual result of his coveting and adultery is Solomon, the greatest and wisest king Israel would know, the one who built the temple and extended its frontiers out as far as they would go.

Yes, a case can be made that the characters in the story, especially Jacob and Moses' father, did not know the law, because it had not yet been revealed in the narrative, but the readers would know the law. Hearing that Jacob married sisters, that Moses and aaron were the fruits of a Levitically forbidden marriage, that David coveted and arranged to have killed and from that came Solomon, this says something about the relationship God's people Israel have with God's teaching. They would have been taught the law, reminded of who could not be married, but also reminded in the stories that the best of us violated that teaching. Or were the results of the violation. Without Jacob marrying Leah and Rachel, there would have been no tribes of Israel. Without Amram taking his aunt as wife, Moses and Aaron could not have responded to God's call to lead Israel out of Egypt. Without David spying (and likely raping) Bathsheba, and getting her husband killed, there would have been no Solomon, and no temple in Jerusalem.

Israel owes its very existence, its covenant with God, to the violation of the teaching.

There are very few examples of human beings deliberately and purposefully punishing other human beings for violations of the teaching. In Exodus 32, after the episode with the golden calf, Moses commissions some Levites to take up their swords and "go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin." (v. 27) In Numbers 25, God commands Moses to "publicly impale" (v. 4) Israelites cavorting with Moabite women (and worshiping their god). Phinehas the priest follows the command with vigor, stabbing an Israelite man and a Moabite woman in the belly after following them into their tent.

But the example that comes to mind is Numbers 15:32-36 (Numbers is something of a gruesome, no-holds barred book, almost as violent as Judges). Israelite come upon a man gathering wood in the wilderness on the sabbath.

Those who found him as he was gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron and the whole community. He was placed in custody, for it had not been specified what should be done with him. Then the Lord said to Moses, "The man shall be put to death: the whole community shall pelt him with stones outside the camp." So the whole community took him outside the camp and stoned him to death--as the Lord had commanded Moses. (v. 33-36)

What strikes me about this passage, and the punishment it mandates for violating the sabbath, is that Jesus spends a lot of time deliberately breaking the sabbath. He violates the law, as it is understood, and tempts readers and listeners who might know that the punishment for sabbath breaking is death to appreciate the situation.

(Jesus doesn't cavort with non-Israelite women, but he does encounter them, and he is present for them as he is for Israelites.)

This is why I find the law ironic. It is a guide to sanctified behavior, promising salvation if followed and exile, slavery and death if not. But God doesn't abandon God's people merely because they have abandoned God and God's teaching (though God does come close in Judges 10). God continues to reach out, to forgive, to redeem, to make real God's promises as God's people struggle with the teaching we cannot follow and the law we cannot obey. It must be remembered that the history of God's people is salvation in the midst of exile, slavery and death, God present with us in our suffering and amidst the consequences of our inability to follow God's teaching. In the end, it isn't the law that saves us, not our keeping ourselves sanctified as individuals or a community, but rather God's unremitting faithfulness to us.

The Common Good

2009-07-07T21:33:00.003-05:00

I've now listened to two of the four lectures in the BBC World Service series of Reith Lectures this year, given by U.S. political philosopher Michael Sandel. He spoke at length on his call for a "new politics" geared toward the "common good."

I'm not a fan of the notion "common good," and Sandel's lectures clearly outline some of my major problems with the concept. But first, I'll try to do some justice to Sandel's views. First, his single biggest problem with the last 20-30 years of politics in the West -- especially in Anglo-America -- was a surrender of morality to the cost-benefit analysis of the market. And that governments, especially the Blair-Clinton governments (following in the wake of the Thatcher-Reagan regimes) were too willing to let markets "work" or to have governments pretend to be markets as ways of attempting to provide state services for all (or as many as need) without actually making the hard political -- and moral -- choices to provide those services. In this, politicians have handed over actual policy making to technocratic elites, who have too much say in means and ends.

In the end, there are some goods markets (and economists) cannot price, and so some things cannot simply be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Politics is all about moral choices -- will all citizens of an allegedly democratic polity have access to health care is a moral, not an economic choice. Sandel apparently believes that electorates would -- no, better, should -- choose the social democratic welfare state if given the chance.

Missing entirely from Sandel's calculus on the subject is the reality of force -- violence -- as a tool of government. (Any question of government policy or law must always begin with "who are willing to shoot in order to get your way?" It is the only question to ask.) Who is he willing to shoot in order to get his idea of the "common good" enacted? Assuming that an electorate has the "conversation" he wants, the reality of electoral politics is that 50%+1 win the vote. That means that minorities, say people who don't believe that access to health care is a moral issue or a civic and social right, can be compelled to participate, to support, policies and programs that they otherwise do not wish to support. Sandel assumes consensus, but how does that consensus come about, aside from propaganda -- ahem, excuse me, education -- coercion and all that goes with it? There is little room for dissent, and that's the problem with assuming the moral validity of the nation-state as "communities" in this instance. Can there be consensus on anything in a polity of 300 million people and more than 100 million voters? And what happens if that consensus happens to be something other than Sandel's happy liberal democratic social welfare state? Do we have to discuss and vote -- like certain European electorates in dealing with the EU constitution -- until we get it "right?" Is that what consensus is? Then why bother with the voting? Why not just send in the soldiers first and create "consensus" at gunpoint? Because it all amounts to the same thing.

In this regard, I do not understand Sandel's disdain for technocrats. (Maybe he's using that term solely to disparage Chicago-school economists, investment bankers and central bankers -- all well worth disparaging -- I don't know.) Ever since the American welfare state was born (more or less at the University of Wisconsin, with help from the University of Chicago), it was an elite and technocratic exercise, America's version of Britain's Fabian Socialism. It was heavily dependent on planners, on data, on the social sciences to measure, regulate and control human existence. Laws were passed, such as compulsory public education, with no popular demand and almost no popular support. Indeed, politics was not about determining the direction of government, but ratifying decisions already made. And linking the people "mystically" to those who ruled them.

Sandel's politics is an endless committee meeting in which no real choices can be made and no real dissent can be accepted. This is, of course, always how the "common good" is presented to us, which is why there is absolutely no such thing as the "common good."

* * *

As an aside, Sandel was at his best when responding to a young George Washington University Republican. Not that he answered well, but when the foolish young GOPer said that America is the only country in the world where people can live out their dream, Sandel rather bravely took on such nonsense, noting that there are plenty of countries where people can pursue dreams.

The attitude by the young Republican is, of course, not only a Republican attitude -- it is most reflected in Wilsonianism, a monstrous worldview invented and embraced by Democrats. But it is the kind of attitude that effectively says: human flourishing can only truly happen in the United States. (Sandel and his ilk are little better, since they believe that human beings can only truly flourish in the social democratic welfare state.) It is the kind of attitude that says: America must be open to all so that they may realize their dreams, and that the world must become America so that all may realize their dreams. The realizing of human dreams in the context of being American is the end (the conclusion and the purpose) of human existence. Which makes Republicanism a false religion that worships a very false god, the United States of America. Again, Democrats are no better, since they worship that same damn false god with a dollop of health care atop.

Hyperbole? Maybe? Ya Think?

2009-07-05T19:49:00.002-05:00

A commercial attached to a short online interview with Edward James Olmos about the upcoming Battlestar Galactica film The Plan described the animated Transformers TV series from the 1980s (?) as "defining a generation." Oh, please.

But maybe that explains all the 20-somethings around me.

The Resemblance is Creepy

2009-07-05T19:30:00.007-05:00

Fugitive Saudi al Qaeda leader Usama bin laden ...

... and French lawyer and Reformation leader John Calvin.

Again, bin Laden, who is the aspiring leader of a theocratic state (but so far has not managed to put one together outside wherever it is he is hiding)...

... and Calvin, who was the actual leader of a theocratic state, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Just interesting. That's all.

UPDATE: I'm certain if I posted a photo of bin Laden in one of those wonderful, multi-cornered Afghan hats, they'd look even more alike.

Liberalism Defined

2009-07-04T12:09:00.002-05:00

The most compact and brilliant definition of liberalism (which includes what passes itself off as "conservatism" in the Anglo-American world) I have ever come across was written by William Miller in the first chapter of his Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. In 1973 (or sometime before), Miller wrote:

In this era the acceptable humanism of progress was located in the dogmas of liberalism. Fervor was in the faith that by keeping abreast of the sweep of time, especially in the institutional forms that order its sweep, the essential goodness of men would blood and life would be made rich. The method of liberalism was that of knowing the phenomenal world and then in a continued rearrangement of its forms keeping time’s flow harmonious. In the midst of this change and flow men, as always, required a basis for community, something to be together in. The national state became the primary source of community; never was its cohesive power stronger than when war invested it with all those marks of power in the form of military might that bore testimony to its progress.

For the age of technological enlightenment the liberal outlook was a harmonious vision. Time moved with a regular cadence, governed by a moral order. Now all of this has gone. Time has accelerated, and progress has become flight. It is not change that is anticipated but shock, and the formulas of radical adjustment devised to meet this change never fit, but before they can operate are discarded in the wake of hurtling time. -- p. 3-4

I'm not sure I agree with Miller that "all this has gone." The idea that human beings are innately good, and can must fully realize that goodness if the institutions and structures within which they live are improved, reformed, made better, more efficient, kinder, less "self-interested". In short, a society where it would be easier for people to be good, as Ellis noted of Peter Maurin in his memoir of life in a Catholic Worker community in New York. The faith that these things are achievable, doable, possible, even certain -- the most certain outcome of hard, faithful, well-intentioned work done by the hands and hearts of honest, decent, good people motivated to make the world a better place -- this idea dies hard. It is the central tenet of Enlightenment faith, it has oddly been reconciled with the Christian faith from which it sprung (but which it stands in opposition).

Liberalism requires the state, the state to measure the natural world, to measure and restrain and educate human beings. It requires the state touch, taste, smell, and manipulate all things. There can be nothing that is not subject to the state if the natural, innate goodness of human beings is to be brought out. Even at its worst, waging war, the state does so for the bettering of mankind and humanity (sacrificing individual human beings to the task, as making a world where it is "easier for people to be good" is more important than any actual individual human life), for the measuring and manipulation of nature and human beings.

I have long thought that Liberal Christianity's greatest problem (and by Liberal Christianity, I do not mean politically liberal in the American sense, though that is one annoying manifestation; I mean the desire to reconcile the claims made upon God's people -- the church -- in scripture with the Enlightenment) is its attempts to turn the Kingdom of God into a political and social project, one that can be achieved through deliberate, programmatic human effort. The Liberal Gospel seeks, as its grace-filled world, a world without sin, a world in which there is absolutely no need for God's grace.

On Exile

2009-07-03T14:05:00.002-05:00

I have, in the past, written some on exile, particularly as our (by our, I mean "God's called people") permanent condition, or at least our indefinite condition inbetwixt Eden and the Eschaton. I like the metaphor as a way of explaining the human condition, our lost-ness in the world, our journey to wherever. I know that some Jewish thinkers following the end of the Babylonian exile decided that exile never really ended, that we as God's people remain estranged from God and the promise.

And yet the promise from God, although unrealized in a material way, is still real and still fulfilled.

Anyway, I cam across this wonderful bit on exile in Marc Ellis' memoir of his time living and working in the Catholic Worker community in Manhattan, A Year at the Catholic Worker:

In the deepest reaches of man's psyche, in the beginning of humankind's mythical history, lies exile. With exile comes the definition of what it means to be human. Exile, in the expulsion of Adam, signals the beginning of time, of division, of multiple levels of reality. Exile is the end of infinity, the inheritance of moment. It is the loss of innocence. In exile we perceive our nakedness. Exile, too, is the tasting of death, the severed connection between humankind and God, and so becomes the essence of fear. Exile is the loss of home, and security, and place. It is the beginning of the perpetual wandering.

Exile is the expulsion of Eve, the appearance of pain and of condemnation. It is the perception of otherness, of separation, and distrust. Exile, at its very roots, becomes a struggle for physical and psychic survival and thus demands a distinction between human and nature. Its hand is in the beginning of the desire to conquer and the terror of risk. Exile spells the end of illusion and omnipotence. It is the tossing out into a world of uncertainty and danger and darkness. And when even the sworded cherubim disappears, exile is the beginning of loneliness.

I won't add much to this, 'cept that it's beautiful.

Things We Don't Do In Church Anymore

2009-06-25T18:48:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of Benjamin Kaplan, from Divided by Faith, who writes:

Churches were also practical structures. Not just places of worship, they were communal property with myriad uses.

Which, citing a study of churches in post-Reformation England, included:

In 1612 at Woburn, the curate baited a bear in church; 25 years later, also in Bedfordshire, there were cockfightings on three successive Shrove Tuesdays in Knottingly church, round the communion table. The minister and churchwardens were also present.

And for the poor pastor who needed some extra to make ends meet:

Gendulphus van Schagen, the impoverished pastor of Laar, a Flemish village, grew vegetables and raised hens, pigs, and doves in his churchyard. Parishioners complained to the archbishop only after his doves hit them with droppings during services and his hens laid eggs on the church’s altars.

Bear baiting and cockfighting! Around the altar! Now there's a project for an enterprising pastoral intern!

Tolerance Versus Toleration

2009-06-25T10:20:00.007-05:00

Ahh, I am back to the reading of serious books and commenting on them. I can see that in order to maintain sanity wherever I end up, it will have to be within spitting distance of a proper university library. By proper, I mean humanities.

I troll the new books at the seminary library, and occasionally find some gems. Last book I reviewed for Lew Rockwell, this book I'm not going to wait so long (like I had a running commentary on the Germany book, which I never did finish...) to comment on this one, DIVIDED BY FAITH: RELIGIOUS CONFLICT AND THE PRACTICE OF TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE by Benjamin Kaplan, an (an?) historian at University College in London and the University of Amsterdam.

Kaplan seeks to explain the rise of "tolerance" as an ideology in Europe more organically, from lived life rather than as an idea that arose out of nothing. One of the problems of doing intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is that it's easy to focus on one or several important thinkers who created an idea out of whole cloth. For example, in dealing with what I call Revolutuionary Islam, is it easy (and necessary) to focus on Sayyed Qutb, Maulana Maududi and Abdullah Azzam as the influential creators and thinkers, but this ignores how the idea spread -- newspaper editors, preachers, discussion groups, all spending time thinking, reflecting and talking about the ideas, mashing them together, creating a synthesis from which they acted (particularly in Afghanistan, where all these strains, plus others, came and were woven together). But it's hard work trying to do that kind of social excavation, given that newspapers decay rather rapidly, and so much of this is done orally, in sermons and speeches and conversations. Kaplan is trying to do this for tolerance. Good for him. I'm 55 pages into this book and it's absolutely fascinating reading.

Today's topic -- persecution. Kaplan has this to say about the role of coercion within the church:

Protestants and Catholics were both heirs to a heritage of Christian thought that legitimized persecution. Dating back to antiquity, that heritage had been shaped by one individual more than any other, the church father Augustine of Hippo. A reluctant persecutor, for years Augustine has counseled the church against resorting to force in its struggle with the Donatists, and to the end of his days he rejected applying torture or the death penalty to heretics. In his later writings, though, he offered a justification for lesser forms of coercion that became a fixed part of Catholic dogma and was taken over by Protestants as well. For Augustine, persecution was a form of tough love. “Thou shall beat him with the rod, and shall deliver his soul from hell” (Proverbs 23:14, [JPS Tanakh: Beat him with a rod and you will save him from the grave," in reference to the training of a child]), he quoted. Like a father who chastised his son, a shepherd who drove wandering sheep back into the fold, of God who sent tribulations to his chosen people, the church persecuted the wayward for their own good. Skillful application of corrective discipline could return heretics to the church, outside which there was no salvation. Leaving heretics mired in error condemned them to damnation. The one was therefore an act of Christian love, the other of uncaring neglect. In 1582 a Calvinist synod phrased the argument thus: “Regarding Christian love, it does not consist in having to tolerate every person in his disbelief without speaking against it or punishing him … He too uses love who admonishes and instructs with soft and hard words, as the need demands … The Reformed church cannot exempt [a person] from God's law nor teach anything else … or promise anyone freedom and salvation except those to whom God has promised them. Therefore, ministers do not neglect love in tolerating and admonishing where proper, and punishing in accord with God's ordinance where it is necessary.” Augustine found support for this argument in various passages of scripture, most notably the parable of the banquet in the Gospel of Luke (14:15-24). Spurned by his invited guests, a householder welcomed the poor and maimed to his meal, and when there still remained room around the table he ordered his servants to “go out to the highways and hedges, and whomsoever ye shall find, compel them to come in.” The banquet Augustine compared to “the unity of the body of Christ,” the highways and hedges to “heresies and schisms.”

To be sure, Augustine conceded, no one could force a person to believe anything. This principle had been firmly established by earlier church fathers, among them Tertullian. Faith, the latter asserted, was an internal conviction that no coercion could generate. It was therefore “against the nature of religion to force religion.” Augustine argued that one could at least make heretics listen to the truth, ponder it, and reconsider their views. Many people remained mired in error out of custom, negligence, or obstinacy. Such persons needed to be “shaken up in a beneficial way by a law bringing upon them inconvenience in worldly things.” Persecution could serve a valid pastoral function by making people amenable to instruction. Although it could not convince of its own power, wrote Anglican theologian Jonas Proast in 1690, it could “bring men to consider those reasons and arguments which are proper and sufficient to convince them, but which, without being forced, they would not consider.”

I find it interesting that a bit of Proverbs (a book I don't like anyway) about the training and disciplining of a child is applied to wayward members of the church. The idea that adults are somehow "children" in need of violent discipline when they stray, and need to be forced to consider ideas they might not otherwise, is pernicious. There is no end of evil this can be used for, especially when the "state" becomes the great family and whoever is sovereign over the state becomes daddy, and we that daddy's children.

But what kind of love -- and I mean real, honest, compassionate concern for the well being of others -- that pretends to care so much that it will inflict pain and suffering in order to prevent an allegedly worse outcome: eternal damnation? There is a vast amount of confidence in one's righteousness there, to inflict pain and suffering -- even death -- for such a cause. This isn't love, not really. It's sentimentality, the kind of emotion that leads the humanitarian to reach for the guillotine (to borrow from Isabel Paterson) when the intended recipients of help, aid and betterment refuse. Love gives, but it does not compel. Not ever.

(Remember, other adults in a community or society are not your children.)

But there's one more thing. To inflict this kind of pain, to compel others, requires someone to do the compeling, to inflict the pain. It is all well and good for someone to ache over the misguidedness or suffering of others and propose a solution, but who will get their hands dirty? Who will turn the wheels on the rack? Who will shoulder the rifle? The liberal who aches to save Darfur will end up wanting to send some (perhaps many) soldiers to the place who have nothing but contempt -- ugly, racist contempt -- for the people they are saving (and shooting). In order for the church to compel, it must make common cause, must employ and cultivate and promote and protect, sadists, who live to be cruel, to turn the wheel, to shoulder the rifle and pull the trigger. That God uses all means possible does not mean we should. Sadists have enough job opportunities -- as school teachers, police officers, spies, soldiers and the like -- without the church also needing their skills and talents.

The Bicycle-Eating Potholes of Chicago

2009-04-25T17:24:00.007-05:00

Of all the dangers a bicyclist faces in Chicago, potholes are probably the greatest. No part of this city is immune, and there are even streets in way upscale Hyde Park that look like they've been hit by cluster bombs and artillery submunitions. They can make motoring unpleasant. They can make cycling lethal -- try steering around some of these in heavy traffic...

Here are a few of the nastiest potholes I've come across. Most of these are on the West Side.

Fill this one with water and you could fish from it. I want to say this is on Lake Street, but I don't remember exactly where it is. It could possibly be visible from space.

This is on Lake Street, about five blocks or so west of Larramie. This has since been covered up with a steel plate which sits at a funny angle and is not quite flat, thus making a nice "clang!" every time someone drives over it. This one was a couple of feet deep, and I think the weed was actually growing in there. (There's a larger pothole on Lake in Oak Park that has swallowed a city trash can...)

I don't quite remember where this was either.

This yonical pothole was maybe a meter deep -- it might have its own mineral rights or lead to the kind of lost world Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about. This was somewhere just west of the West Loop area.

God, Hating and Loving

2009-04-22T15:54:00.006-05:00

As I pondered my previous blog post about Cain and Abel, I recalled these words from Malachi:

"I have loved you," says the Lord. But you say, "How have you loved us?" "Is not Esau Jacob's brother?" declares the Lord. "Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert." If Edom says, "We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins," the Lord of hosts says, "They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called 'the wicked country,' and 'the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.' " Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, "Great is the Lord beyond the borders of Israel." (Malachi 1:2-5, English Standard Version -- I'm using the ESV today because I don't have my Tanakh handy.)

(Paul echoes these words in Romans 9:13 when he speaks of God's choosing God's people.)

Our ideas about God are only partly derived from scripture -- the Church owes a great deal intellectually to Greek philosophy and reasoning (as does Islam, even as that reasoning articulates itself very differently among Muslims), perhaps more to Greek thought when it comes to ethics and theology than it does scripture. Scripture is harnessed to support and even recast the ideas put forward by the Greeks, but for much of Christendom, the Greeks come first. This may or may not be intellectually defensible -- the followers of Jesus did not witness to his death and resurrection, did not create his church, in an intellectual or cultural vacuum.

But many of the ideas are troublesome, especially when we are forced to fit them in scripture. The God of the "omnis" -- omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- as well as an "all good" God provides a serious problem for scripture. (Even in the Qur'an, which is a much better fit for the "omni-God" than is the Bible.)

The problem I have with theology is that it makes God an object, an idea, to be manipulated by human beings. We cannot help doing this. But the God of scripture is not an object or an idea. That God is encountered, viscerally and intensely, and scripture is the witness to that encounter. God is the subject as we, God's people, are the objects. Much happens in scripture that makes little or no moral sense, and we are foolish to try and make those things make sense.

"Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated." The ESV online study notes to these three verses speak of the distinction between "the Good and the Arrogantly Wicked." But was Esau wicked? Does Esau suffer for wickedness? No to both. He was merely cheated out of his inheritence -- his blessing -- by a far more obnoxious brother, Jacob, who then lives in fear of Esau. The two have a reconciliation of sorts in Genesis 33, and they bury their father Isaac together. In Malachi, God clearly has it in for Esau's descendants Edom, but Malachi speaks a great many more words of rebuke toward the priests of Israel.

Our idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God makes Malachi's words -- makes God's rejection of Cain -- make no sense. God couldn't reject them, not the God of the Omnis, not our idea of God. So it was Cain's fault that God rejected his sacrifice, and Esau's fault that God hated him, that God spoke those words through Malachi the prophet. If only they had worked harder.

But again, the God of the Omnis doesn't exist in scripture. The subjective experience of God is a God who chooses, capriciously, in a way that makes no sense. Esau did nothing except not be his brother Jacob, just as Cain did nothing except farm. Israel's experience was of a profound and lasting encounter with God, a God who chose them and no one else as God's people. A God who made that choice for no reason apparent to God's people, whose choice was not a matter of privilege, power and glory, but for the salvation of the world.

The essence of faith -- in Hebrew, Arabic and Greek -- is trust. Not assent to a set of ideas or principles, but trust in God. That a promise made by God, a promise that will never be seen by the one to whom the promise is made (Abraham and his many descendants), is as good as kept. Assent to a set of propositions -- the Lutheran confessions, for example -- is an intellectual exercise. One confesses, but does not have faith in the confessions themselves, as they are not promises.

To trust God is to trust in something we may not be able to see or understand. God loves God's people, but that does not stop God from visiting destruction upon God's people. It is to encounter and experience God and often times have no idea what to make of that encounter. It can be aided by reason and by the intellect, by ideas and concepts and theories and notions, but at its core, that experience is not itself an idea, not something that humans grasp, but it is about being grasped by God and God not letting go.

We can only struggle to make sense of that encounter. Which is why "Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated" doesn't bother me.

In The Land of Wandering & Exile

2009-04-21T10:41:00.003-05:00

For some reason, I found myself pondering Genesis 4 -- the story of Cain and Abel -- yesterday. Not sure why, maybe my current circumstances, but I think a lot about exile, and what that means. The world has never felt much like my home to begin with, not a place where I've been much wanted. Rather, it's felt like a wilderness, a place of exile, a largely inhospitable place I'm just traveling through on the way to someplace else. Not sure where that is. I only know I don't much belong here.

Enough of that. Genesis 4:1-16 tells the story of the first murder, the first time one human being in anger and jealously, took the life of another. There is much to be made of the story (including the alleged "mark"), but I'm interested in who and what Cain and Abel are. Abel is a "keeper of sheep" (4:2, JPS Tanakh -- again, this little Asus Eee PC doesn't let me do Hebrew), a pastoral nomad who wanders from pasture to pasture (scrubland in the Middle East), tending his flocks, while Cain is a "tiller of the soil," a settled farmer who doesn't wander, who is tied to land and place. Abel's life is one of tents, of open skies, of moving from place to place to follow the rains. His home is wandering, it's on his back and the backs of the animals he keeps. Cain's home is one of brick and mud and fences and furrows. He worries about the rains, but he cannot follow them -- he must remake the world around him to get the water for his crops, to build the tools to work the land.

The story continues:

In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil; and Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings from his flock. The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. (Gen. 4:3-5, JPS Tanakh)

Some might say that Cain's offering was inferior -- not firstfruits. Maybe. But it may also be that God was partial to Abel's "choicest of the firstlings" as opposed to whatever grain and fruit Cain offered. There is, I think, a subtext in Jewish scripture that laments Israel's slow evolution from pastoral nomads to a settled people, a concern reflected in the use of the pastoral metaphor (all the way through the gospels and the epistles, which use this metaphor extensively as well) to describe, in particular, David, and to condemn the kings of Israel (Ezekiel 34 is the example that comes to mind) for their failures. For a settled people there is wealth and power, but there is also intense inequality and exploitation -- the weakest suffer the most. The surplus wealth created by sedentary activities (farming and resource extraction, like mining and timber before silviculture) almost never goes to those who extract or create that wealth.

But this is not the matter up for discussion today. Cain, the first-born older brother, murders Abel. (In the Qur'an, he also buries him in an effort to hide what he has done.) Abel's blood cries out to God from the very soil (adamah) that Cain tilled. God then tells Cain: "If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer (yanad) on earth (ba'aretz)." (Gen. 4:12)

Cain is made a wander, and he goes to live in "the land of Nod" -- eretz nod -- the land of wandering/exile, "banished from the soil" (Cain's own words, 4:14) and away from the "presence of the Lord." What kind of wandering can a farmer do? What kind of exile is this, being yanked away from who and what he was? Did Cain love the land? Did he love tilling it? It's hard work, and perhaps he felt that God did not reward his work well enough. But maybe the sense of rejection he felt when God favored the firstling of Abel's flock was intolerable. Tilling the land wasn't just what he did, it was who he was, and clearly he saw that who he was simply was not good enough for God.

That's a hard pain to live with, that sense and perception that who and what he is, what he has to offer God, is simply not good enough for God. Perhaps this is how he understood what happened, and he took his despair and rage out on his brother who was clearly much more acceptable to God. How to imagine the despair and rage that comes from knowing that God has favored someone else over you, accepted them and rejected you? When one is rejected by God, what possible acceptance anywhere or by anyone can make up for that?

And yet it is Cain who separates himself from God. He tells God, “I must avoid Your presence." It is Cain who fears being killed, not God who threatens Cain with death. God, in an act of odd grace, "marks" Cain, and promises vengeance upon anyone who kills him. It is Cain who walks away from God. The greatest punishment he inflicts is upon himself. He compounds his alienation from the land, from what he does and who he is, with a self-imposed alienation from God. God condemned him to wander, but said nothing about avoiding the divine presence.

Cain did that. All on his own. Maybe that says something about us, as human beings, as we wander, as we pass through and try to live in eretz nod – the land of wandering and exile.

Secession, Patriotism and The Right

2009-04-18T13:57:00.002-05:00

The kerfluffle about Texas Gov. Rick Perry's recent comments about the possibility of secession from the United States reminded me of something John Ashcroft said in his Senate confirmation hearings back in January, 2001.

I was covering Capitol Hill at the time, and my professional interest was Bush Jong Il's appointment of Anne Veneman as USDA secretary, and not the nomination of Ashcroft as attorney general. But I remember there was a bit of a dustup over Ashcroft's comments to some so-called "Southern Heritage" magazine, speaking approvingly of the sacrifices, honor and commitment to their cause on the part of those who fought for the Confederacy in the War of 1861-65 (I really have no idea of what to call that war; it wasn't a proper civil war, since the two sides were not fighting to control the government in Washington). Most criticism of Ashcroft's comments focuses on race, of course, since we are Americans and race is something we simply cannot stop talking about (counter to AG Holder's idiotic assertions some weeks ago). We just cannot speak about it intelligently, but that is another matter for another day.

What I found is interesting is that no one bothered asking Ashcroft what was honorable in fighting to secede from the United States? How would he view secessionists today (the day he was interviewed)? How is secession, for whatever the reason, not an attack on the national state, defiance of the federal government?

Now, I'm no nationalist. I'm all for carving up the United States into dozens if not scores of small statelets (I will then go live in the Grand Duchy of San Francisco, because post-USA America needs a few monarchies, and world is painfully short of ruling grand dukes and prince-bishops). Okay, not carving up -- that reeks of planning and design -- but rather allowing such a thing to happen.

But the Right's talk of secession is not principled talk. If the state of Vermont were to leave the Union (while under GOP management) to become a socialist statelet (gay marriage, single-payer health care, whatever else it is progressives supposedly want), I'm certain the 10th Mountain Division would move quickly from Ft. Drum to Montpelier and subdue any attempt to resurrect the Green Mountain Boys. In fact, I bet Fox News would call for arrests and treason trials at the mere mention of such a thing. (And can you imagine the response if a Democratic state governor, in the wake of September 11, 2001, had called upon his/her state to leave the US because doing so would make the state's resident -- "Hey, we're not Americans anymore!" -- less vulnerable to attack?)

Indeed, there is much hyperventillating about the Obama regime on the Right, as if all those powers the Right religiously entrusted to Bush Jong Il suddenly became evil powers in the hands of the Mahatma. They forget an essential rule of "democratic" governance -- unless you are prepared to hold power at all costs from all comers, never give any power to anyone you don't eventually want used against you. Or: do you really want a Hillary Clinton Justice Department to have the tools of the Patriot Act at its disposal? Or: never make a weapon that may someday be turned on you.

Part of this shows just how wedded to executive power the Right is. There will be no end of their whining (jack-booted thugs again!) as long as a Democrat is in the "Presidential Palace." Of course, Obama will use presidential power (and NPR will refer to presidential "decrees" as if he is the leader of a junta or chairman of some politburo) to the maximum extent possible. But the problem lies not in the wielder of power, but the power itself. As long as it exists, it will be cultivated, used and expanded. It is a club that will be used to beat and to kill. There is no avoiding that.

We Name Our Children After What We Love

2009-04-16T15:27:00.003-05:00

So what does it mean that the gregarious little girl, very freindly -- she was three or four, asked me all sorts of questions about my bicycle gloves and my bike bag -- with the striking blue-green eyes was named Chanel? And her little brother was named Armani?

Yes, I realize those are both surnames. They are also brands. Strange.

Israel and "Property Rights"

2009-04-13T09:32:00.006-05:00

There meme current among many conservative (and probably some liberal) American Christians regarding Jews and the State of Israel is that God "gave" that land to the Jews, and thus the giving is effectively a deed -- Jews have a "property right" to the "land of Israel," an thus, an entitlement to possess it. Based on what I've read online, this also constitutes a majority opinion of conservative religious Jews as well.

So, I never tire of coming across scriptural citations that say otherwise. First, there is the entire history itself. If, as Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook wrote in mid-1967 (after the Six-Day War, when there much to NOT surrender), that scripture forbids God's people Israel from giving up any of the "land of Israel," then why does the Deuteronomic history (Deuteronomy through 2 Kings) end with the twin kingdoms of Israel and Judah conquered (by Assyria and Babylon respectively) and the last King of Judah, Jehoiachin, in comfortable exile in Babylon? Why does the other official history, Chronicles, end with Cyrus the King of Persia issuing a decree to rebuild the temple (allowing for restored temple worship) but NOT the restoration of Israel's monarchy? The sovereignty Judah possesses at the end of Chronicles (and in Ezra and Nehemiah) is a very limited sovereignty, as part of the Persian Empire, not as an independent polity. The Tanakh, as well as the Protestant Bible, ends its canon of scripture with these books, and thus the influence of Hellenism (the conquest of Persia by Greece and the switch of tolerant Persian imperial rule for intolerant Greek rule) on the canon is sporadic (parts of Daniel and Zechariah come to mind) at best.

So, I was very pleasantly surprised when I came across this in Ezekiel 33 (vv 21-26, citation from the JPS Tanakh):

In the twelfth year of our exile, on the fifth day of the tenth month, a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem and reported, "the city has fallen." Now the hand of the Lord had come upon me the evening before the fugitive arrived, and He opened my mouth before he came to me in the morning; thus my mouth was opened and I was no longer speechless.

The word of the Lord came to me: O mortal [son of Adam בֶן–אָדָם, rendered elsewhere as "Son of Man"], those who live in these ruins in the land of Israel argue, "Abraham was but one man, yet he was granted possession of the land. We are many; surely, the land has been given as a possession to us." Therefore say to them: Thus said the Lord God: You eat with the blood, you raise your eyes to your fetishes, and you shed blood -- yet you expect to possess the land! You have relied on your sword, you have committed abominations, you have defiled other men's wives -- yet you expect to possess the land!

Now, these words come after a lengthy warning from God to Ezekiel about the nature of God's warnings and accountability for human sinfulness, about Ezekiel's job as a warner to those living in exile in Babylon. And they are followed, in chapter 33 with a warning to those living in the midst of the rubble that they "shall fall by the sword" and be "food to the beasts." (v.27) Indeed, God is then fairly emphatic that Ezekiel's countrymen will not listen to him.

And the general narrative of Ezekiel continues with a condemnation of the "shepherds of Israel" and promise from God that Israel will be regathered and a new shepherd -- "My servant David" (34:23) -- appointed to tend and care for God's people. This promise is generally used by the church (and by that, I mean the church "catholic and apostolic," and not the non-denominational nincompoops that call themselves church but worship the United States and Israel) to refer to the regathering and restoring of God's covenant with God's people through Jesus Christ.

(There's more to Ezekiel which I won't deal with at this point.)

While these words of God in vv23-26 are given specifically to the Israelites who remain in land following the conquest, what's interesting about what God says to Israel just as easily applies to what is said -- "Abraham was but one man, but we are many. If the land was given to Abraham, surely it has been given to us." What is condemned here is a sense of entitlement, that just because the land was given to one man -- Abraham -- then is most certainly have been given those who lay claim to it as their patrimony through and from Abraham. God's condemnation of that sense of entitlement could easily apply to anyone who makes that claim, and not just the remnant of survivors in the ruins.

But there's also the nature of that condemnation -- eating with blood/defiling other men's wives, raising eyes to fetishes/committing abominations, shedding blood/relying on "your sword." God's people have failed to keep their end of the covenant made at Sinai, they have not adhered to God's teachings. They have also followed after other gods, sacrificed to them. The history and the other prophets are quite clear on both these matters, and God tells Israel in both Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 that failing to keep the covenant will result in suffering, conquest and death. "The Lord will send you back to Egypt in galleys, by a route which I told you you would not see again. There you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but none will buy" (Deut. 29:68)

The shedding of blood and reliance on "your" sword (Israel's sword) is not as clear as the other two condemnations, but I'm fairly certain it means that part of Israel's sin is its failure to rely on God for defense and protection, failure to trust in God and instead trust in itself, its own capabilities, to protect itself. Scripture isn't so insistent on this matter, since the Hebrew Bible is full of war, but the main motif given to Israel by God from the miracle of the Exodus is that God is Israel's defender, that God will act in history to defende God's people. That God's people must first and only look to their God to protect them, to fight and win their battles. Even in Ezekiel 38 and 39, when God gives the vision of war with Gog the prince of Magog, it is God who leads Gog to war, and it is God who defeats Gog and his armies. (Whether this is a "prophesy" of the fall of Babylon at the hands of Persia, or general prophetic metaphor that God will defeat Israel's enemies and fight Israel's battles from the time that Israel is regathered, the bones brought back to life, I do not know and won't guess. I will firmly state this is very likely not a prophesy of a war yet to come.)

What is clear is thart grant of land is not a property right and the Bible is a not a metes-and-bounds title deed (or any other kind of deed), though there are claims made. Scripture does not speak the language of rights, that's Enlightenment talk and it does not belong to antiquity. Israel's possession of the land is entirely conditioned on Israel's good behavior. This is made clear in scripture from the beginning. The prophets add component of (I hate the term) "social justice" to the matter, criticizing the unjust use of power and wealth among Israelites for division of the kingdom, civil war, conquest and exile. Much of scripture is an attempt to figure out what God's promises to Abraham, and God's deliverance of Israel at Sinai, with what followed.

Indeed, a case could be made that semi-exile -- living in the moment between exile and God's promise of reconciliation, deliverance and victory -- is the condition of God's people, Israel and the church, on earth right now.

Invisible People

2009-04-11T15:17:00.006-05:00

When I was working as a wire service reporter in Washington, I considered writing a book about a group of white supremacists who insert themselves patiently into D.C. -- one of whom was a wire service reporter covering (cough cough) the Department of Agriculture -- in order to eventually kill the president. I never got any farther than thinking about how they'd go about doing it, and I talked about the idea with Amatzia Baram, who at the time was a professor of mine at Georgetown (and sometime mentor). His addition to the plot was to have the would-be assasins tied, somehow, to Saddam Hussein. I didn't like the idea, and eventually discarded the project as not worth the effort.

I never put anything on paper because (1) I wanted them to be successful and get away, but I could not make that work and (2) I didn't want THAT kind of trouble. The kind of trouble one gets from being a wire service reporter at a government agency writing about a wire service reporter at a government agency who is part of a complex plot to assassinate the president of the United States. The idea of the book was a thought experiment -- a tight and patient cell of people (say, five) willing to work quietly and silently, could do something like that. It was only a thought experiment unwilling to become a shabby thriller.

One of the ideas running through my mind was to have two or three members of the cell go to work for the phone company as technicians. Phone company trucks were ubiquitous, even on Capitol Hill, and guys (they were guys, mostly) with gear checking the status of twisted pair and T1 lines were as close to invisible as possible. At the time, before September 11, 2001, they could go just about anywhere with boxes and toolbags and whatnot. So it was interesting when I came across this in an article in the UK Independent on urban survival training in the age of economic collapse:

He dropped us off in an alley in Bricktown where I'd cached a bag of disguises the night before. In a lecture on urban camouflage, Reeve and Alwood had taught us there was a certain category of people in cities called invisible men. If the city is a network of veins, invisible men are the white blood cells: they work to keep it clean. They're the janitors with bundles of keys on their belt loops, the alarm servicemen with clipboards and work orders, the UPS men hidden behind piles of boxes, and the construction workers with hard hats, safety vests, and tool belts.
In these disguises, Reeve and Alwood said, we could walk unnoticed into almost any event.

Interesting someone else noticed this.

NPR as Useful Idiot

2009-04-11T12:43:00.010-05:00

This short news piece from the 09 April Morning Edition broadcast made my blood boil. Well, not quite, but almost. It was NPR being stupid. And being used.

NPR newsgal Kelly McEvers is wandering around Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province as well as the tiny island Kingdom of Bahrain, documenting Shia unrest (can we please deep-six that obnoxious sounding word Shiite already? Because the BBC has...) in both states, beginning at a checkpoint and ending with the following words from a Bahraini "Shia activist" regarding seeking help from lagrely Shia Iran:

When a man has already lost everything, why should he care about the country around him? Why not just let it burn?

(Hmm, I wonder how NPR would play that quote if it came, say, from a Tibetan, or Russian opponent of the current Kremlin regime or a Burmese refugee?)

It is clear from this report that it was not gathered "on the sly," clandestinely, without the knowledge or the approval of at least some elements of the Saudi state, most likely the Interior Ministry. We know this because every time an intrepid NPR reporter gets a story from inside Myanmar, we are told that reporters aren't allowed in Myanmar, so it took courage and pluck to defy rules, hide equipment, interview people and get actualities from inside the country. Had that been the case, NPR would have told us just that at the beginning of this report. An American reporter, a woman, getting sound from a military/interior ministry checkpoint, getting interviews in a city surrounded by such checkpoints, well, that just doesn't happen. So, someone in Riyadh, likely someone very high up, wanted us to hear this report.

Why? To influence the debate within the regime of the Mahatma Obama as to what to do about Iran. If it's "clear" that Iran is "using" or "inciting" the Shia of the Eastern Province and Bahrain to misbehave -- and always be wary of the person in charge who says the moral equivalent of "our negroes are happy and content, only a few are agitated and angry, and then only because communists are stirring them up" -- then it's clear that the current Iranian government is attempting to destabilize two very important U.S. Arab allies. Be afraid. Something must be done. Stop dawdling. This, I'm guessing, is supposed to sweeten the "bomb them now" pot currently being stirred by Likudniks on both sides of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Consider that elements of the Saudi government (but only elements; I fully expect a less bellicose piece on Iran to come out of NPR's Riyadh bureau within the next few weeks), Binyamin Netanyahu and the American Enterprise Institute all singing from the same demonic hymnal. The Mahatma may (or may not) be willing to pressure Israel over Iran (but only because Bibi is PM; had Tzipi Livni or Ehud Barak won that post, it would be another matter entirely), but helping Saudi Arabia is another matter entirely -- it has been U.S. government policy to protect Saudi Arabia from any enemy foreign or domestic at virtually any cost since the second half of the Carter Administration. For those eagerly looking to clobber Iran, making nice with the likes of Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef is merely the price of doing business.

I listen to NPR because (1) I don't have Internet at home right now, so I can't listen to the BBC (2) I find AM talk radio mindless, stupid and insulting and (3) I hate commercials, which I find doubly insulting, even more than the self-serving twaddle that is a typical seasonal pledge break. While NPR is intellectually more engaging than just about any other broadcast news operation in the US, that isn't saying much (the BBC isn't what it was 20 years ago either). I generally find NPR's liberal statism and liberal nationalism repulsive. Generally, the liberal statist/nationalist wants the state, the order and stability it allegedly brings and the good it an do to improve the lot of people everywhere, but fails or refuses to acknowledge the violence necessary and needed for the state to accomplish what it does. But that urge to do good, to free people from oppression, ignorance, superstition and poverty, and the belief the state is the best or only way to do that, make liberals good and useful idiots for warmongering neocons/Likudniks, who harbor no illusions and just want to beat the crap out of people. People who aren't Jewish Israelis at any rate.

I would have hoped someone at NPR would have asked "why does someone want us to do this story, a story that fingers Iran as the problem," but you know, were I an Amreekee reporter in the KSA, twiddling my thumbs and knowing, like most reporters, I have a nose ring and a chain that someone can yank when I get out of line, then I'd of gotten excited when someone put a few more links in that chain and let me wander out someplace I'd never been before to get an exciting story. Or made it the price of getting a better story. Who knows. But people listening need to know they, and NPR, are being used. For a purpose that only ends with bombs falling on Iran.

Editor Needed

2009-04-10T15:56:00.004-05:00

Oh. My. This hit me, big as life, on the top of p.29 of the Monday, 30 March issue of the India Bulletin. (I'm having too much fun with this paper, and I simply do not have enough to do to keep my mind busy.) It's the lede to "Red Meat Raises Risk of All Kinds of Death" (really? auto accidents? gunshots? poisonous spider bites? getting impaled on big, sharp sticks? kidnapped and killed by Somali pirates? loose clothing caught in the John Deere PTO shaft? hit by meteorites from outer space?), which says the following:

People who eat the most red meat and the most processed meat have the highest overall risk of death from all causes, including heart disease and cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Um, isn't the word "premature" missing here? Or is it true -- that people who don't eat red meat don't die?