Remember that post I wrote a couple weeks ago on gay marriage?
How about this particular unintended consequence?
Dallas Judge's Ruling Saying Gay Couple could Divorce in Texas Rejected on Appeal.
Basically, two guys got married in Massachusetts, where it's legal. They then moved to Texas (for reasons I can't fathom), where it's not. Now they can't get a divorce.
I can imagine no clearer illustration to explain why this issue should most certainly not be left to the states to decide. I mean, other than the fact that "states rights" have been a cover argument for, "We walk to be a bunch of bigoted fuckwits and don't want anyone telling us not to be," since some time in the neighborhood of John C. Calhoun.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
On Gay Marriage
I had a pastor once who got a bug up his butt about abortion. I don’t know how it happened or when, but I remember that one Sunday morning he did a long message about the importance of fighting abortion. I don’t remember him ever really talking about abortion before that, so I’m guessing that it just kind of became a trigger one day. Or perhaps it had always been an issue, but he’d been holding it in. I don’t know.
I remember being pissed after that Sunday morning because he basically said that if you weren’t trying to stop abortion you were a bad Christian. I wasn’t trying to stop abortion, but I wasn’t a bad Christian.[1] It just wasn’t my issue.
One thing that the pastor said that morning has apparently stuck with me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Hell, it’s entirely possible that I agreed with it at the time, or at least allowed his argument to hold sway. Now, though, I just kind of want to smack him.
The argument basically went like this: “Opponents of abortion say we cannot legislate morality. But in America we legislate morality all the time. Look at all the laws against murder and theft.”
The pastor was a good man. He was a good speaker. He was a good husband and father. I’m going to assume he still is.
But he most definitely was not a Constitutional lawyer. Or if he was he got his degree from Hollywood Upstairs Law School. He was also not a historian.
See, I’m not a lawyer, either. I don’t pretend to be one. But I don’t have to be a lawyer to understand something: the laws of the United States of America were not designed and were not intended to legislate morality. They were designed to create a livable society. The problem that a lot of people have is that the necessary conditions to create a livable society and the necessary conditions to create a moral society have an awful lot of overlap. And most people are unwilling to understand the nuanced differences between the two things.
I can say that the religious or philosophical morality tells me I should not murder or steal. I can also say that a society that allows people to be murdered or stolen from is an inherently unstable society. Both of these statements are true[2] but both of these statements are not equal. Both of these statements are also immaterial. There isn’t anybody arguing against outlawing murder and theft.[3] We can all agree that they’re bad to do and bad for society to allow.[4]
It is in the lesser crimes and misdemeanors that we see the difference between a drive towards a moral society and a stable society. It is also where we can see that a drive towards a moral society is actually an inferior goal to a drive towards a stable society. Morality, after all, is fungible.
Let us consider for a moment the concept of usury. It was once considered one of the worst of all sins to charge any interest on a loan.[5] This is no longer considered an issue. This, though, is also one of those places where the proponents of a moral society and the proponents of a stable society really should be working together. I can stand behind the argument that credit card companies should not be extending lines of credit at better than 20% interest to anyone capable of filling out a form that arrives in convenient junk mail form is immoral. I can also stand behind the argument that the practices of the banks related to credit cards and mortgages destabilizes society. For evidence, please look at the last two years of life in America.[6] Even this, though, doesn’t really help me to illustrate my point. So let’s look at that most contentious argument in American politics: gay marriage.
The main arguments against gay, well, anything, have been primarily moral in America. It was simply regarded as being wrong. This was fine as long as the homosexual population was forced to stay in the closet. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Pride Movement, however, the idea of being an out and proud homosexual in America has gradually gained greater and greater acceptance. Now we’re at the point where gay marriage is allowed in some places and wide swaths of the country are fighting for it everywhere. Much like the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement before it, the fight has been taken up by people who are not part of the repressed group but realize that there is a greater issue at stake than the rights of people who are different.
When the issue of gay marriage comes before a court, as it recently did in California, the arguments about the morality of gay marriage do not matter. The issue is one of a stable society and the rights of those who reside in that society. Opponents of gay marriage are starting to get that, but it seems to me that they’re largely trying to work around that pesky First Amendment without seeing the larger issue. For this isn’t actually a First Amendment issue at all.
If the argument were as simple as one side waving its favored religious text and the other side holding up the Constitution, we’d be able to handle this in a jiffy. But there are religious people on both sides of the argument. There are religious people pointing to different verses in the same exact holy books on both sides of the argument. And no one is going to say that we should make gay marriage illegal on First Amendment grounds because someone reads that verse where Paul says that there is no longer male or female, slave or free now that Jesus has done his thing, then extrapolates that to say we shouldn’t make distinctions between gay and straight.
The concept of marriage for civil society is quite different from the concept of marriage in religion. For the religious it is often a sign of some sort of miraculous, god-given institution. For civil society it is a contract that binds two people together and brings with it certain benefits related to inheritance, the custody of children, responsibility and visitation in the event of illness, and probably a bunch of other things that have never really mattered that much to me personally. It is a legal combining of household assets and debts that allows us to have a more stable society because we can see the contract. The fact that gay people cannot get married to each other right now means that they do not have access to those same contracts. This reduces the stability to society. It is also a violation of the rights of a non-zero number of American citizens. This, I would argue, is wrong.[7]
Any argument against gay marriage, then, has to be an argument from stability.
This is why we’re being subjected to the bullshit of people like the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. They have to argue that gay people will make bad parents. They have to argue that gay marriage will somehow destroy straight marriage. They have to argue that the tyranny of the majority should be allowed to trump the rule of law in this case. They have to do this because these are the only sorts of argument that will make sense given the parameters of the argument.
Consider the ever-popular slippery slope argument. Gay marriage opponents stand up and hyperventilate about how if we allow gay marriage we’ll have to allow polygamous marriage and if we allow that we’ll have to allow adults to marry children and people to marry ducks. It’s a hilariously ignorant argument about societal instability, but that’s exactly what the argument is. If gay marriage were made legal tomorrow in the entire country the only thing that would change is that gay people could enter in to a marriage contract with each other. It’s that contractual agreement part that matters, too. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Ducks and dogs can’t either. There’s the question of polygamous marriages, but that’s a different argument.[8]
Similar, too, is the “gay marriage will destroy straight marriage” argument. It’s not a valid logical argument. In fact, it’s a pretty fucking stupid argument from a logical perspective. But it’s a visceral argument that attempts to paint a picture of a bleak future where the very fabric of American society has been ripped apart.
The very absurdity of the arguments, though, point to the complete indefensibility of the position being argued for. The thing that’s truly sad, though, is that we have to have these arguments at all. And that, for the moment at least, the side that is in favor of ignorance and absurdity still has the upper hand.
--------------------------------
Side note: people talk about allowing civil unions as a substitute for marriage in order to keep the precious religious folks from worrying. It's stupid, especially when you consider it from the perspective that marriage is simply a contract in the eyes of the law. If a civil union is going to be thought of in the same way as a marriage for contractual perspective, then they're the same thing. But they're not, which brings up a thorny issue: a little case called Brown v. Board of Education.
A marriage and a civil union that are separated because a certain class of people is considered less desirable to have one or the other creates a situation known as "separate but equal." That term comes from a court case called Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board overturned the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Creating a separate category of civil unions specifically to allow gay marriage would require overturning Brown v. Board. Which is a bit problematic. This is a backdoor argument, but it shows exactly why the gay marriage fight is a Civil Rights activity.
--------------------------------
[1]Seeing as how I’m no longer a Christian this will become a point of contention for certain parties. If I am not now a Christian that means that I could never have possibly been a real or good Christian because to admit that it’s possible for me to realize it was a load of bullshit and walk away would require them to admit that they could decide to do the same thing. This is terrifying.
I have decided that from here on out I will not accept any other argument for this phenomenon without a hell of a lot of additional support. The arguments that I hear from a certain segment of Christians for why people leave Christianity are completely founded on laying blame and projecting. This cannot be accidental. The entire fundamentalist Christian mindset is founded on maintaining beliefs that cannot stand up to prolonged exposure to reality. The desperate anti-evolution fights, attempts to change history curricula, and creation of an isolated, parallel Christian educational subculture bear this out and offer more than a little proof of the fact that those who are in the evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures are, at the very least, viscerally aware of this. Constant checking of Bible verses that belittle the idea of the wisdom of man whenever this Bible/reality divide comes up doesn’t really help any attempt to make a case for the contrary, either.
[2]The former statement requires more qualification than the latter, however. But for the sake of simplicity I’m drawing a bright line around murder and theft and labeling them as Bad Things.
[3]With the possible exception of Basil Marceaux.com.
[4]Even there, though, we can have an argument. Watch a couple episodes of Leverage and you’ll understand what I mean. The entire concept for the show revolves around the idea that there are some people who absolutely need help and cannot get it, so a team of thieves and con artists who have switched to the good side pull off elaborate schemes to right the wrongs done. This generally involves some measure of deception and theft and general lawlessness, but we overlook that because the people who have been wronged have had much greater evils visited upon them by much worse people. Hence the show’s tagline: “Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys.”
[5]This was actually the root of European anti-Semitism and the root of the myth of the cabal of Jewish bankers who rule the world. The Church did not allow Christians to charge any interest but did not give a shit what the Jews did, since they were all going to Hell for killing Our Lord and Savior, anyway. This meant that if people needed money for something and had to get a loan the only people who were likely to loan money were the Jews because they, unlike anyone else in Christian Europe, could demand an appropriate ROI. Note, too, the idea that it’s not okay to loan money at interest, but it’s absolutely a-okay to take out a loan with interest. Morality is flexible.
[6]This, unfortunately, is one of those places where absolutely no one was looking out for morality or stability. It was a maelstrom of idealistic attempts to help create the American Dream combining with corporate greed. And that’s where we absolutely need the government to step in and regulate. There exist in this world greedy motherfuckers who will take everything they can get their hands on just because they want it. There also exist in this world people who are unwilling or unable to properly plan ahead. The government should be doing everything in its power to minimize the damage that can be done when these groups meet. This supports societal stability and, I would argue, is a morally important position to take. Also, I feel like Fred Clark right now.
[7]I would argue this is another example of the fungibility of an argument from morality. Fred Phelps would argue that gay sex is immoral. I would argue that violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens is immoral. How do we choose between those two arguments, especially since Phelps would argue that he trumps me because his arguments come from a higher moral authority while I would argue that I trump him because his moral authority is nothing but his imaginary friend and his own overinflated sense of outrage. Arguments from morality are fungible precisely because moral frameworks vary according to people and experience.
This is, ultimately, why we have the First Amendment of the Constitution. By eliminating religion as a consideration, the Constitution allows us to create a nation based on the idea of creating a stable society specifically to allow people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as they see fit. If I am killed I obviously cannot do that. If my possessions are stolen from me I cannot pursue happiness. If I decide to pursue a homosexual relationship I am attempting to use my Constitutional freedoms to find happiness. This is why murder and theft should be illegal, while homosexuality should not. Once we get over that hurdle the question of whether gay marriage should be allowed is merely academic.
[8]I have nothing against polyamory or polygamous marriages, morally or legally speaking. However, if we’re talking about marriage in terms of a contract that handles inheritance and questions of who is responsible for making medical decisions in the event of incapacitation, I’m willing to hear arguments against polygamous marriages from a stability standpoint. Again, IANAL.[9]
[9]That’s one of my favorite internet acronyms, by the by. Because although IANAL, I cannot say that I anal. Although I can say that I am anal…
I remember being pissed after that Sunday morning because he basically said that if you weren’t trying to stop abortion you were a bad Christian. I wasn’t trying to stop abortion, but I wasn’t a bad Christian.[1] It just wasn’t my issue.
One thing that the pastor said that morning has apparently stuck with me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Hell, it’s entirely possible that I agreed with it at the time, or at least allowed his argument to hold sway. Now, though, I just kind of want to smack him.
The argument basically went like this: “Opponents of abortion say we cannot legislate morality. But in America we legislate morality all the time. Look at all the laws against murder and theft.”
The pastor was a good man. He was a good speaker. He was a good husband and father. I’m going to assume he still is.
But he most definitely was not a Constitutional lawyer. Or if he was he got his degree from Hollywood Upstairs Law School. He was also not a historian.
See, I’m not a lawyer, either. I don’t pretend to be one. But I don’t have to be a lawyer to understand something: the laws of the United States of America were not designed and were not intended to legislate morality. They were designed to create a livable society. The problem that a lot of people have is that the necessary conditions to create a livable society and the necessary conditions to create a moral society have an awful lot of overlap. And most people are unwilling to understand the nuanced differences between the two things.
I can say that the religious or philosophical morality tells me I should not murder or steal. I can also say that a society that allows people to be murdered or stolen from is an inherently unstable society. Both of these statements are true[2] but both of these statements are not equal. Both of these statements are also immaterial. There isn’t anybody arguing against outlawing murder and theft.[3] We can all agree that they’re bad to do and bad for society to allow.[4]
It is in the lesser crimes and misdemeanors that we see the difference between a drive towards a moral society and a stable society. It is also where we can see that a drive towards a moral society is actually an inferior goal to a drive towards a stable society. Morality, after all, is fungible.
Let us consider for a moment the concept of usury. It was once considered one of the worst of all sins to charge any interest on a loan.[5] This is no longer considered an issue. This, though, is also one of those places where the proponents of a moral society and the proponents of a stable society really should be working together. I can stand behind the argument that credit card companies should not be extending lines of credit at better than 20% interest to anyone capable of filling out a form that arrives in convenient junk mail form is immoral. I can also stand behind the argument that the practices of the banks related to credit cards and mortgages destabilizes society. For evidence, please look at the last two years of life in America.[6] Even this, though, doesn’t really help me to illustrate my point. So let’s look at that most contentious argument in American politics: gay marriage.
The main arguments against gay, well, anything, have been primarily moral in America. It was simply regarded as being wrong. This was fine as long as the homosexual population was forced to stay in the closet. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Pride Movement, however, the idea of being an out and proud homosexual in America has gradually gained greater and greater acceptance. Now we’re at the point where gay marriage is allowed in some places and wide swaths of the country are fighting for it everywhere. Much like the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement before it, the fight has been taken up by people who are not part of the repressed group but realize that there is a greater issue at stake than the rights of people who are different.
When the issue of gay marriage comes before a court, as it recently did in California, the arguments about the morality of gay marriage do not matter. The issue is one of a stable society and the rights of those who reside in that society. Opponents of gay marriage are starting to get that, but it seems to me that they’re largely trying to work around that pesky First Amendment without seeing the larger issue. For this isn’t actually a First Amendment issue at all.
If the argument were as simple as one side waving its favored religious text and the other side holding up the Constitution, we’d be able to handle this in a jiffy. But there are religious people on both sides of the argument. There are religious people pointing to different verses in the same exact holy books on both sides of the argument. And no one is going to say that we should make gay marriage illegal on First Amendment grounds because someone reads that verse where Paul says that there is no longer male or female, slave or free now that Jesus has done his thing, then extrapolates that to say we shouldn’t make distinctions between gay and straight.
The concept of marriage for civil society is quite different from the concept of marriage in religion. For the religious it is often a sign of some sort of miraculous, god-given institution. For civil society it is a contract that binds two people together and brings with it certain benefits related to inheritance, the custody of children, responsibility and visitation in the event of illness, and probably a bunch of other things that have never really mattered that much to me personally. It is a legal combining of household assets and debts that allows us to have a more stable society because we can see the contract. The fact that gay people cannot get married to each other right now means that they do not have access to those same contracts. This reduces the stability to society. It is also a violation of the rights of a non-zero number of American citizens. This, I would argue, is wrong.[7]
Any argument against gay marriage, then, has to be an argument from stability.
This is why we’re being subjected to the bullshit of people like the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. They have to argue that gay people will make bad parents. They have to argue that gay marriage will somehow destroy straight marriage. They have to argue that the tyranny of the majority should be allowed to trump the rule of law in this case. They have to do this because these are the only sorts of argument that will make sense given the parameters of the argument.
Consider the ever-popular slippery slope argument. Gay marriage opponents stand up and hyperventilate about how if we allow gay marriage we’ll have to allow polygamous marriage and if we allow that we’ll have to allow adults to marry children and people to marry ducks. It’s a hilariously ignorant argument about societal instability, but that’s exactly what the argument is. If gay marriage were made legal tomorrow in the entire country the only thing that would change is that gay people could enter in to a marriage contract with each other. It’s that contractual agreement part that matters, too. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Ducks and dogs can’t either. There’s the question of polygamous marriages, but that’s a different argument.[8]
Similar, too, is the “gay marriage will destroy straight marriage” argument. It’s not a valid logical argument. In fact, it’s a pretty fucking stupid argument from a logical perspective. But it’s a visceral argument that attempts to paint a picture of a bleak future where the very fabric of American society has been ripped apart.
The very absurdity of the arguments, though, point to the complete indefensibility of the position being argued for. The thing that’s truly sad, though, is that we have to have these arguments at all. And that, for the moment at least, the side that is in favor of ignorance and absurdity still has the upper hand.
--------------------------------
Side note: people talk about allowing civil unions as a substitute for marriage in order to keep the precious religious folks from worrying. It's stupid, especially when you consider it from the perspective that marriage is simply a contract in the eyes of the law. If a civil union is going to be thought of in the same way as a marriage for contractual perspective, then they're the same thing. But they're not, which brings up a thorny issue: a little case called Brown v. Board of Education.
A marriage and a civil union that are separated because a certain class of people is considered less desirable to have one or the other creates a situation known as "separate but equal." That term comes from a court case called Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board overturned the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Creating a separate category of civil unions specifically to allow gay marriage would require overturning Brown v. Board. Which is a bit problematic. This is a backdoor argument, but it shows exactly why the gay marriage fight is a Civil Rights activity.
--------------------------------
[1]Seeing as how I’m no longer a Christian this will become a point of contention for certain parties. If I am not now a Christian that means that I could never have possibly been a real or good Christian because to admit that it’s possible for me to realize it was a load of bullshit and walk away would require them to admit that they could decide to do the same thing. This is terrifying.
I have decided that from here on out I will not accept any other argument for this phenomenon without a hell of a lot of additional support. The arguments that I hear from a certain segment of Christians for why people leave Christianity are completely founded on laying blame and projecting. This cannot be accidental. The entire fundamentalist Christian mindset is founded on maintaining beliefs that cannot stand up to prolonged exposure to reality. The desperate anti-evolution fights, attempts to change history curricula, and creation of an isolated, parallel Christian educational subculture bear this out and offer more than a little proof of the fact that those who are in the evangelical and fundamentalist subcultures are, at the very least, viscerally aware of this. Constant checking of Bible verses that belittle the idea of the wisdom of man whenever this Bible/reality divide comes up doesn’t really help any attempt to make a case for the contrary, either.
[2]The former statement requires more qualification than the latter, however. But for the sake of simplicity I’m drawing a bright line around murder and theft and labeling them as Bad Things.
[3]With the possible exception of Basil Marceaux.com.
[4]Even there, though, we can have an argument. Watch a couple episodes of Leverage and you’ll understand what I mean. The entire concept for the show revolves around the idea that there are some people who absolutely need help and cannot get it, so a team of thieves and con artists who have switched to the good side pull off elaborate schemes to right the wrongs done. This generally involves some measure of deception and theft and general lawlessness, but we overlook that because the people who have been wronged have had much greater evils visited upon them by much worse people. Hence the show’s tagline: “Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys.”
[5]This was actually the root of European anti-Semitism and the root of the myth of the cabal of Jewish bankers who rule the world. The Church did not allow Christians to charge any interest but did not give a shit what the Jews did, since they were all going to Hell for killing Our Lord and Savior, anyway. This meant that if people needed money for something and had to get a loan the only people who were likely to loan money were the Jews because they, unlike anyone else in Christian Europe, could demand an appropriate ROI. Note, too, the idea that it’s not okay to loan money at interest, but it’s absolutely a-okay to take out a loan with interest. Morality is flexible.
[6]This, unfortunately, is one of those places where absolutely no one was looking out for morality or stability. It was a maelstrom of idealistic attempts to help create the American Dream combining with corporate greed. And that’s where we absolutely need the government to step in and regulate. There exist in this world greedy motherfuckers who will take everything they can get their hands on just because they want it. There also exist in this world people who are unwilling or unable to properly plan ahead. The government should be doing everything in its power to minimize the damage that can be done when these groups meet. This supports societal stability and, I would argue, is a morally important position to take. Also, I feel like Fred Clark right now.
[7]I would argue this is another example of the fungibility of an argument from morality. Fred Phelps would argue that gay sex is immoral. I would argue that violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens is immoral. How do we choose between those two arguments, especially since Phelps would argue that he trumps me because his arguments come from a higher moral authority while I would argue that I trump him because his moral authority is nothing but his imaginary friend and his own overinflated sense of outrage. Arguments from morality are fungible precisely because moral frameworks vary according to people and experience.
This is, ultimately, why we have the First Amendment of the Constitution. By eliminating religion as a consideration, the Constitution allows us to create a nation based on the idea of creating a stable society specifically to allow people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness as they see fit. If I am killed I obviously cannot do that. If my possessions are stolen from me I cannot pursue happiness. If I decide to pursue a homosexual relationship I am attempting to use my Constitutional freedoms to find happiness. This is why murder and theft should be illegal, while homosexuality should not. Once we get over that hurdle the question of whether gay marriage should be allowed is merely academic.
[8]I have nothing against polyamory or polygamous marriages, morally or legally speaking. However, if we’re talking about marriage in terms of a contract that handles inheritance and questions of who is responsible for making medical decisions in the event of incapacitation, I’m willing to hear arguments against polygamous marriages from a stability standpoint. Again, IANAL.[9]
[9]That’s one of my favorite internet acronyms, by the by. Because although IANAL, I cannot say that I anal. Although I can say that I am anal…
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
About that Anti-Monster Dogmatic Worldview...
This is an excellent YouTube video of a series of clips from a lecture by Robert M. Price.
I lack the necessary time to say anything about the video itself now, but suffice it to say I’m a fan.
My disturbingly, massively long treatise on battleships is drawing to a close while I focus far more specifically on my other topic of awesomeness of the moment: the Byzantine Empire. To study the Byzantines even at the highest level without studying theology is to both not understand what drove the Empire and to decide that you don’t actually want to. I have been thinking of looking at the Byzantines as an example of how an educated society handles religious disputes when religion is the very center of everyday life.
It was originally about how the argument by apologists that without religion society will disintegrate is completely and totally wrong, not in that society won’t disintegrate, but in that religion has no magical adhesive effect and, often, does quite the opposite. But as the Byzantine narrative unfolds that seems far too limiting.
Either way, as I move from the modern narrative to the medieval, consider the words of Price. And, hell, next time I hit AtF consider the words of Price.
Also, one of the things he points out in the video is that historians can be skeptical of the Jesus story and apologists can in no way prove it, but that these two things do not mean that the story can be disproven. I’m aware of many people who would say that’s wrong. I agree with the point.
One of the interesting things that you learn about historians, especially the ancient ones, is that they care about what they care about and focus on what they focus on. At one point (and I forget which, damn my eyes!) during Byzantium: The Apogee, John Julius Norwich laments the fact that the primary (by which I mean both primary in terms of "source nearest to the moment" and "source from which we can draw information) source we have of a particular treaty devoted his entire narrative to the pomp and ceremonial surrounding it and never actually bothered to record the terms of the agreement. These things happen.
Moreover, it’s not like we have an official record of all the days on which no one came back to life at the local cemetery. No one keeps track of such things because, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here by saying this, no one really feels they have to. Even in ancient times where the idea of a resurrection from the dead didn’t seem quite so impossible.
We do have plenty of evidence that people were accidentally interred while still alive. The entire point of the wake was originally to make sure that the person didn’t, y’know, wake up. There were clever devices that could be used to sound an alarm should someone awaken and find themselves prematurely entombed. Vampire myths and other stories of the undead seem to have arisen from the unearthing of graves where the buried wasn’t actually dead, leading to a few final, horrific hours clawing futilely at a sealed casket.
But even with all of that, no one sat at the cemetery gates with a spreadsheet that read, “April 4th: no one came back. April 5th: no one came back. April 6th: no one came back.”
All we have is the knowledge that there isn’t enough evidence to even conclusively prove Jesus of Nazareth existed, let alone was the son of god born of a virgin who died and on the third (second…) day rose again. All we have is the knowledge that children aren’t born of virgins (I mean, with the possible exception of in-vitro fertilization) and don’t come back from the dead today and the biology probably hasn’t changed much in the last two thousand years. To attempt to prove even one iota more would be folly and result in failure.
Either way, go watch some R.M. Price. (Via Atheist Experience…).
I lack the necessary time to say anything about the video itself now, but suffice it to say I’m a fan.
My disturbingly, massively long treatise on battleships is drawing to a close while I focus far more specifically on my other topic of awesomeness of the moment: the Byzantine Empire. To study the Byzantines even at the highest level without studying theology is to both not understand what drove the Empire and to decide that you don’t actually want to. I have been thinking of looking at the Byzantines as an example of how an educated society handles religious disputes when religion is the very center of everyday life.
It was originally about how the argument by apologists that without religion society will disintegrate is completely and totally wrong, not in that society won’t disintegrate, but in that religion has no magical adhesive effect and, often, does quite the opposite. But as the Byzantine narrative unfolds that seems far too limiting.
Either way, as I move from the modern narrative to the medieval, consider the words of Price. And, hell, next time I hit AtF consider the words of Price.
Also, one of the things he points out in the video is that historians can be skeptical of the Jesus story and apologists can in no way prove it, but that these two things do not mean that the story can be disproven. I’m aware of many people who would say that’s wrong. I agree with the point.
One of the interesting things that you learn about historians, especially the ancient ones, is that they care about what they care about and focus on what they focus on. At one point (and I forget which, damn my eyes!) during Byzantium: The Apogee, John Julius Norwich laments the fact that the primary (by which I mean both primary in terms of "source nearest to the moment" and "source from which we can draw information) source we have of a particular treaty devoted his entire narrative to the pomp and ceremonial surrounding it and never actually bothered to record the terms of the agreement. These things happen.
Moreover, it’s not like we have an official record of all the days on which no one came back to life at the local cemetery. No one keeps track of such things because, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here by saying this, no one really feels they have to. Even in ancient times where the idea of a resurrection from the dead didn’t seem quite so impossible.
We do have plenty of evidence that people were accidentally interred while still alive. The entire point of the wake was originally to make sure that the person didn’t, y’know, wake up. There were clever devices that could be used to sound an alarm should someone awaken and find themselves prematurely entombed. Vampire myths and other stories of the undead seem to have arisen from the unearthing of graves where the buried wasn’t actually dead, leading to a few final, horrific hours clawing futilely at a sealed casket.
But even with all of that, no one sat at the cemetery gates with a spreadsheet that read, “April 4th: no one came back. April 5th: no one came back. April 6th: no one came back.”
All we have is the knowledge that there isn’t enough evidence to even conclusively prove Jesus of Nazareth existed, let alone was the son of god born of a virgin who died and on the third (second…) day rose again. All we have is the knowledge that children aren’t born of virgins (I mean, with the possible exception of in-vitro fertilization) and don’t come back from the dead today and the biology probably hasn’t changed much in the last two thousand years. To attempt to prove even one iota more would be folly and result in failure.
Either way, go watch some R.M. Price. (Via Atheist Experience…).
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
LOST in Thought
[For the record, this post is about LOST. So if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading. If you don’t care about LOST, you might not care. But, as with so much else that I write, this isn’t actually about the subject at hand...]
Rise. Life is in motion. I’m stuck in line.
Oh rise. You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
One day…these symptoms fade. Think I’ll throw these pills away.
And if hope can grow from dirt like me, it can be done.
Won’t let the light escape from me.
Won’t let the darkness swallow me.
--Pearl Jam, “Down”
Six years of my life I gave, to varying degrees, to LOST. At times I obsessively tried to follow clues through Lostpedia and random blog entries. At times I swore I’d never watch the show again. This past season was the first time I was genuinely ambivalent about the show. It wasn’t asking any more questions, but it wasn’t really answering them, as it had promised. It was just kind of…ending.
This was an idea that I greeted with equal parts happiness and horror. There are really only two other TV shows that I have invested in like LOST: Babylon 5 and Scrubs. In the end, all three shows were rewarding. And in the end, both Babylon 5 and LOST made me cry at the end.
There’s this moment at the end of Babylon 5. It comes during the end credits. We see all the main characters in split screen, with one half at the beginning and the other half at the end. John Sheridan has died. The station has blown up. But the moment that always catches me is the sight of Marcus, on the left side as the Ranger, on the right as a personnel file…dead.
Babylon 5 is strongly anti-religious. In a weird way, the most concrete point we get to that is the indication that Marcus is just…dead. But, really, the overall message is much stronger. The angels and demons we worship turn out not to be supernatural, just super advanced, and most definitely handicapped by their own flaws. We find out that the angels aren’t so pure and the demons aren’t so corrupt. We also find out that, in the end, the gods don’t actually much care about the people they’re supposed to be fighting over. They’re just a means to an end.
LOST…well…LOST went that same way. It was, I think, more overt. Jack spent the run of the show searching for his father, a man named Christian Shepherd. When we first learned about Jacob I quickly put “Jacob” and “Christian Shepherd” together in their proper context. The show finally, FINALLY, hung a lampshade on it in the very finale.
When we first met the Man in Black I named him Esau. It seemed so apropos. And when we learned that they were twins, that Esau was the favorite, but Jacob ended up with his birthright…
At the beginning of season 6, the episode where Ben killed Jacob, I made my Facebook status, “Consider my servant, Job.” Ben had done everything he could in Jacob’s name. Jacob had taken everything away. Jacob didn’t fucking care. And when we realized that the whole thing was just a game between Jacob and Esau…
Then, of course, there was the Dharma Initiative. The doing of duty that leads to nirvana.
I’ve read some reviews and discussions of the final episode in the last couple days. The thing that struck me with the first couple was the way the reviewers tiptoed around the issue of religious imagery. One kept reminding his readers that he was an agnostic. Another apologized for feeling the need to sing “Amazing Grace.”
Then I saw a couple reviews that were angry about it. They were atheists, pissed about the fact that the LOSTies were sent to some sort of weird, wishy-washy heaven-esque eternity.
I gave up religion at the same time I found storytelling. So at the same time I was turning my back on the literal supernatural, I was coming to see the narrative value of that same thing. So all the religious under- (and over) tones of LOST bothered me not one bit. I can’t imagine why anyone would be pissed that they were there, just as I can’t imagine why anyone would feel they had to apologize just for noticing and pointing them out.
Religion serves as a cultural touchstone of, well, culture. It serves as a touchstone of society. By placing a scene in a church I can say a lot about the purpose of that scene.
By putting a stained-glass window in a supposed church with symbols of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism it says you’re subverting a trope. By making it the same church that acted as a cover for Eloise’s station that found the mysterious, moving island…well…
And what of that mysterious, moving island? What of the fact that the entire goddamn island was a symbol of Buddhism? It’s the Dharmacakra, the symbol of the eightfold path.
It’s the same image we see time and again as the symbol of the Dharma Initiative and in the lower left of that stained glass window. And it’s what all the characters are searching for throughout the show: enlightenment.
In the end, too, Jack and Hurley become Bodhisattvas, given up the possibility of life, of rescue, to save others. Jack chooses an insular route, attempting to save his friends and the island. Hurley, we can only imagine, goes on to do something even greater. Everyone seemed to notice the “Jack as Jesus” angle, but, in all honesty, “Jack as Bodhisattva” makes way more sense. It’s a difference, I suppose, of degrees. Jesus, it could be argued, was a Middle Eastern Bodhisattva.
But, really, it doesn’t matter. Because LOST wasn’t really about the religious imagery it borrowed.
It was far more interesting to take note of how LOST completely and totally broke that religious imagery in the process. I saw Jacob as a god-like character, Esau as the tempter. In the end, though, we find out that all of the rules that the people on the island had to play by were invented by an annoying, whiny mama’s boy who just hated losing.[1] We found out that Esau wasn’t really evil, he was just restless.
That bright, glowy, Holy MacGuffin? That thing that everyone wanted to know the meaning of but that most people seem pissed didn’t really have any purpose other than as a radically unclever plot device? Yeah…about that…
That bright, glowy MacGuffin was…are you ready for it? The Meaning of Life. The island’s rules were religion itself. They were arbitrary, immature, invented by a child with no social skills who had never really gotten around to growing up and didn’t actually give a shit about people except to see how he could use them to win a bet with his brother.
Consider my servant Job.
There are many, many places where Babylon 5 and LOST intersect in my mind. The fact that Mira Furlan is in both doesn’t hurt a bit, either.[2] But there’s also the simple fact that, really, neither John Sheridan nor Jack Shepherd were the most interesting characters in the shows that supposedly revolved around them. The two best characters in Babylon 5 were Londo and G’Kar. The best character in LOST was Ben. And all three played the exact same role: the scoundrel patriot who finds that all he worked for has come to naught and, in the end, he has lost everything.
Londo got the throne he’d so desired, but as a puppet of the servants of the devils he’d dealt with.
G’Kar got the respect and followers he’d desired, but after he no longer wanted them and had to leave to find peace.
Ben lost everything in exchange for nothing, not even a tiny bit of recognition from his self-absorbed master and, even after revenge and possible redemption found himself outside the church, unable or unwilling to take the few steps inside.
I wanted Londo to find happiness as emperor by the end. I wanted G’Kar to find peace in his home. I wanted Ben to walk in to that church. But, in the end, I think their punishment fit the crimes they’d committed. They got what they wanted, but only after it had turned to ashes. And then they couldn’t forgive themselves or find any external agency to do it for them. Of course with G’Kar and Ben it was still possible. And that’s the hope that they carried forward, the lesson that they offer.
And everyone else, well, they needed each other to move on. Sure, there were gaping holes in the pews at that final send off. But, when you think about it, Ana Lucia couldn’t forgive herself and had never made the necessary connections to do so in the LOST universe. Perhaps she did outside of it, though. Michael’s only real connection was to Walt, but when we last knew of Michael and Walt, Michael was barred from his son’s life and died alone, trapped on the island’s purgatory. Perhaps he could escape, perhaps not. But he couldn’t go with the rest of the LOSTies.[3] Miles, Faraday, Charlotte, Lapidus, Danielle, and Alex, well…we can hope that they had their own places of meeting to go to in the end, too.
That, in the end, is why I’m genuinely baffled as to why anyone would raise a stink about the religious imagery at the end of the series finale of LOST. We’re told that they built that place of meeting together. So they would have used common images to do so. And, as I recall, more than a few of them had some idea of what that particular church represented: the way to find their way back to the island together in reality, the way to find their way to make the next step in the afterlife.[4]
And, really, we need each other to give life meaning out here in the real world. We create that shared meaning through symbols. For many that means religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Unitarianism…ah, hell, you get the point. Even for those of us who aren’t religious the common touchpoints of religious symbolism hold meaning, even if those meanings aren’t actually transcendent in any way, shape, or form. They’re quick shorthand to grasp an otherwise hard to explain concept.
This is where I’ve come…if not quite full-circle, at least to a point of release on the subject of religion. There was a time when I, too, probably would have been mad that everyone met at a church at walked in to the light. It probably would have been mitigated by the fact that I’ve never really expected anyone to tailor the world to my expectations of how something should begin or end.[5] Erm, well, there was that one time.[6]
Now…well, I find that I’m annoyed by those I refer to as being “dogmatically non-religious.” I don’t mean the people who assert that their life is meaningful without religion. I don’t even necessarily mean the PZ Myerses or Richard Dawkinses of the world. I get the impression that they find plenty of meaning outside of being vocally anti-religious and if all religion disappeared tomorrow they’d be happy to go on to other pursuits.
What I mean is the people who get pissed that there is religion or that popular entertainment would dare use any religious imagery (even the extremely watered-down sort used by LOST). In truth, I think LOST could probably do more to subvert the idea of religion than even something like the extremely obviously atheistic Star Trek: The Next Generation.
By setting up Jacob as a character worth derision more than worship as soon as he steps out from behind the curtain, LOST invites us to question our views about god. By setting up Esau as evil-because-Jacob-says-so we’re invited to question whether “evil” is really such a black and white concept. By showing all of Ben’s machinations turn to ashes in his mouth LOST suggests we should ask if sacrificing everything to a “greater good” we don’t understand or question is really a good idea.
And, of course, by handing the island over to the most caring, the most humane, the most human of all the characters, LOST asks if maybe we should be looking to find a better set of rules than the ones we’ve followed for so very long.
So I suppose you could say I don’t begrudge LOST its religiously-tinged finale. You could even say I loved it precisely for that.
Well, at the fact that it made me cry. And it reminded me to believe in the power of, well, love and togetherness.
-----------------------------------
[1]I found “Across the Sea” to be utterly terrible when I first saw it. But, in retrospect, it was massively useful to understanding…well, everything. Yeah, it had the terrible MacGuffin, but…wait…I’ll get to it in the main text.
[2]Seriously, my well-publicized love for Kristen Bell aside, I’d have to say that Mira Furlan is probably my favorite actress, like, ever. She owned two absolutely crucial roles in two of the most important television shows of my life. That’s got to be worth something, right?
[3]And, of course, Walt ain’t 11 anymore. They probably could have dealt with that in some way, but…well. And the actor who played Eko just didn’t want to be there, so there’s only so much they could do about that.
[4]I’m still not giving up my pet theory that the entire sideways universe was just Jack’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”-style dying fantasy. In that case it makes about 1000% more sense.
[5]Seriously. Expecting the last episode of LOST to ditch all the religious stuff it had built up at become militantly atheist just because you don’t like religion is stupid, silly, and juvenile. It’s, well, it’s exactly like the religious folks who get mad about the rock music and the books that talk about sex and stuff.
[6]She still doesn’t talk to me. Actually, I suppose that’s my own Ben moment. Everyone I’ve met since Her isn’t good enough or doesn’t come around at the right time or whatever. I spent a long time just sitting alone and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I was, basically, the scoundrel patriot, attempting to shape every single event, moment, and interaction towards my own end goals. Perhaps I simply haven’t been able to forgive myself for that and I’ve just been sitting outside the church…waiting.
Rise. Life is in motion. I’m stuck in line.
Oh rise. You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
One day…these symptoms fade. Think I’ll throw these pills away.
And if hope can grow from dirt like me, it can be done.
Won’t let the light escape from me.
Won’t let the darkness swallow me.
--Pearl Jam, “Down”
Six years of my life I gave, to varying degrees, to LOST. At times I obsessively tried to follow clues through Lostpedia and random blog entries. At times I swore I’d never watch the show again. This past season was the first time I was genuinely ambivalent about the show. It wasn’t asking any more questions, but it wasn’t really answering them, as it had promised. It was just kind of…ending.
This was an idea that I greeted with equal parts happiness and horror. There are really only two other TV shows that I have invested in like LOST: Babylon 5 and Scrubs. In the end, all three shows were rewarding. And in the end, both Babylon 5 and LOST made me cry at the end.
There’s this moment at the end of Babylon 5. It comes during the end credits. We see all the main characters in split screen, with one half at the beginning and the other half at the end. John Sheridan has died. The station has blown up. But the moment that always catches me is the sight of Marcus, on the left side as the Ranger, on the right as a personnel file…dead.
Babylon 5 is strongly anti-religious. In a weird way, the most concrete point we get to that is the indication that Marcus is just…dead. But, really, the overall message is much stronger. The angels and demons we worship turn out not to be supernatural, just super advanced, and most definitely handicapped by their own flaws. We find out that the angels aren’t so pure and the demons aren’t so corrupt. We also find out that, in the end, the gods don’t actually much care about the people they’re supposed to be fighting over. They’re just a means to an end.
LOST…well…LOST went that same way. It was, I think, more overt. Jack spent the run of the show searching for his father, a man named Christian Shepherd. When we first learned about Jacob I quickly put “Jacob” and “Christian Shepherd” together in their proper context. The show finally, FINALLY, hung a lampshade on it in the very finale.
When we first met the Man in Black I named him Esau. It seemed so apropos. And when we learned that they were twins, that Esau was the favorite, but Jacob ended up with his birthright…
At the beginning of season 6, the episode where Ben killed Jacob, I made my Facebook status, “Consider my servant, Job.” Ben had done everything he could in Jacob’s name. Jacob had taken everything away. Jacob didn’t fucking care. And when we realized that the whole thing was just a game between Jacob and Esau…
Then, of course, there was the Dharma Initiative. The doing of duty that leads to nirvana.
I’ve read some reviews and discussions of the final episode in the last couple days. The thing that struck me with the first couple was the way the reviewers tiptoed around the issue of religious imagery. One kept reminding his readers that he was an agnostic. Another apologized for feeling the need to sing “Amazing Grace.”
Then I saw a couple reviews that were angry about it. They were atheists, pissed about the fact that the LOSTies were sent to some sort of weird, wishy-washy heaven-esque eternity.
I gave up religion at the same time I found storytelling. So at the same time I was turning my back on the literal supernatural, I was coming to see the narrative value of that same thing. So all the religious under- (and over) tones of LOST bothered me not one bit. I can’t imagine why anyone would be pissed that they were there, just as I can’t imagine why anyone would feel they had to apologize just for noticing and pointing them out.
Religion serves as a cultural touchstone of, well, culture. It serves as a touchstone of society. By placing a scene in a church I can say a lot about the purpose of that scene.
By putting a stained-glass window in a supposed church with symbols of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism it says you’re subverting a trope. By making it the same church that acted as a cover for Eloise’s station that found the mysterious, moving island…well…
And what of that mysterious, moving island? What of the fact that the entire goddamn island was a symbol of Buddhism? It’s the Dharmacakra, the symbol of the eightfold path.
It’s the same image we see time and again as the symbol of the Dharma Initiative and in the lower left of that stained glass window. And it’s what all the characters are searching for throughout the show: enlightenment.
In the end, too, Jack and Hurley become Bodhisattvas, given up the possibility of life, of rescue, to save others. Jack chooses an insular route, attempting to save his friends and the island. Hurley, we can only imagine, goes on to do something even greater. Everyone seemed to notice the “Jack as Jesus” angle, but, in all honesty, “Jack as Bodhisattva” makes way more sense. It’s a difference, I suppose, of degrees. Jesus, it could be argued, was a Middle Eastern Bodhisattva.
But, really, it doesn’t matter. Because LOST wasn’t really about the religious imagery it borrowed.
It was far more interesting to take note of how LOST completely and totally broke that religious imagery in the process. I saw Jacob as a god-like character, Esau as the tempter. In the end, though, we find out that all of the rules that the people on the island had to play by were invented by an annoying, whiny mama’s boy who just hated losing.[1] We found out that Esau wasn’t really evil, he was just restless.
That bright, glowy, Holy MacGuffin? That thing that everyone wanted to know the meaning of but that most people seem pissed didn’t really have any purpose other than as a radically unclever plot device? Yeah…about that…
That bright, glowy MacGuffin was…are you ready for it? The Meaning of Life. The island’s rules were religion itself. They were arbitrary, immature, invented by a child with no social skills who had never really gotten around to growing up and didn’t actually give a shit about people except to see how he could use them to win a bet with his brother.
Consider my servant Job.
There are many, many places where Babylon 5 and LOST intersect in my mind. The fact that Mira Furlan is in both doesn’t hurt a bit, either.[2] But there’s also the simple fact that, really, neither John Sheridan nor Jack Shepherd were the most interesting characters in the shows that supposedly revolved around them. The two best characters in Babylon 5 were Londo and G’Kar. The best character in LOST was Ben. And all three played the exact same role: the scoundrel patriot who finds that all he worked for has come to naught and, in the end, he has lost everything.
Londo got the throne he’d so desired, but as a puppet of the servants of the devils he’d dealt with.
G’Kar got the respect and followers he’d desired, but after he no longer wanted them and had to leave to find peace.
Ben lost everything in exchange for nothing, not even a tiny bit of recognition from his self-absorbed master and, even after revenge and possible redemption found himself outside the church, unable or unwilling to take the few steps inside.
I wanted Londo to find happiness as emperor by the end. I wanted G’Kar to find peace in his home. I wanted Ben to walk in to that church. But, in the end, I think their punishment fit the crimes they’d committed. They got what they wanted, but only after it had turned to ashes. And then they couldn’t forgive themselves or find any external agency to do it for them. Of course with G’Kar and Ben it was still possible. And that’s the hope that they carried forward, the lesson that they offer.
And everyone else, well, they needed each other to move on. Sure, there were gaping holes in the pews at that final send off. But, when you think about it, Ana Lucia couldn’t forgive herself and had never made the necessary connections to do so in the LOST universe. Perhaps she did outside of it, though. Michael’s only real connection was to Walt, but when we last knew of Michael and Walt, Michael was barred from his son’s life and died alone, trapped on the island’s purgatory. Perhaps he could escape, perhaps not. But he couldn’t go with the rest of the LOSTies.[3] Miles, Faraday, Charlotte, Lapidus, Danielle, and Alex, well…we can hope that they had their own places of meeting to go to in the end, too.
That, in the end, is why I’m genuinely baffled as to why anyone would raise a stink about the religious imagery at the end of the series finale of LOST. We’re told that they built that place of meeting together. So they would have used common images to do so. And, as I recall, more than a few of them had some idea of what that particular church represented: the way to find their way back to the island together in reality, the way to find their way to make the next step in the afterlife.[4]
And, really, we need each other to give life meaning out here in the real world. We create that shared meaning through symbols. For many that means religion, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Unitarianism…ah, hell, you get the point. Even for those of us who aren’t religious the common touchpoints of religious symbolism hold meaning, even if those meanings aren’t actually transcendent in any way, shape, or form. They’re quick shorthand to grasp an otherwise hard to explain concept.
This is where I’ve come…if not quite full-circle, at least to a point of release on the subject of religion. There was a time when I, too, probably would have been mad that everyone met at a church at walked in to the light. It probably would have been mitigated by the fact that I’ve never really expected anyone to tailor the world to my expectations of how something should begin or end.[5] Erm, well, there was that one time.[6]
Now…well, I find that I’m annoyed by those I refer to as being “dogmatically non-religious.” I don’t mean the people who assert that their life is meaningful without religion. I don’t even necessarily mean the PZ Myerses or Richard Dawkinses of the world. I get the impression that they find plenty of meaning outside of being vocally anti-religious and if all religion disappeared tomorrow they’d be happy to go on to other pursuits.
What I mean is the people who get pissed that there is religion or that popular entertainment would dare use any religious imagery (even the extremely watered-down sort used by LOST). In truth, I think LOST could probably do more to subvert the idea of religion than even something like the extremely obviously atheistic Star Trek: The Next Generation.
By setting up Jacob as a character worth derision more than worship as soon as he steps out from behind the curtain, LOST invites us to question our views about god. By setting up Esau as evil-because-Jacob-says-so we’re invited to question whether “evil” is really such a black and white concept. By showing all of Ben’s machinations turn to ashes in his mouth LOST suggests we should ask if sacrificing everything to a “greater good” we don’t understand or question is really a good idea.
And, of course, by handing the island over to the most caring, the most humane, the most human of all the characters, LOST asks if maybe we should be looking to find a better set of rules than the ones we’ve followed for so very long.
So I suppose you could say I don’t begrudge LOST its religiously-tinged finale. You could even say I loved it precisely for that.
Well, at the fact that it made me cry. And it reminded me to believe in the power of, well, love and togetherness.
-----------------------------------
[1]I found “Across the Sea” to be utterly terrible when I first saw it. But, in retrospect, it was massively useful to understanding…well, everything. Yeah, it had the terrible MacGuffin, but…wait…I’ll get to it in the main text.
[2]Seriously, my well-publicized love for Kristen Bell aside, I’d have to say that Mira Furlan is probably my favorite actress, like, ever. She owned two absolutely crucial roles in two of the most important television shows of my life. That’s got to be worth something, right?
[3]And, of course, Walt ain’t 11 anymore. They probably could have dealt with that in some way, but…well. And the actor who played Eko just didn’t want to be there, so there’s only so much they could do about that.
[4]I’m still not giving up my pet theory that the entire sideways universe was just Jack’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”-style dying fantasy. In that case it makes about 1000% more sense.
[5]Seriously. Expecting the last episode of LOST to ditch all the religious stuff it had built up at become militantly atheist just because you don’t like religion is stupid, silly, and juvenile. It’s, well, it’s exactly like the religious folks who get mad about the rock music and the books that talk about sex and stuff.
[6]She still doesn’t talk to me. Actually, I suppose that’s my own Ben moment. Everyone I’ve met since Her isn’t good enough or doesn’t come around at the right time or whatever. I spent a long time just sitting alone and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I was, basically, the scoundrel patriot, attempting to shape every single event, moment, and interaction towards my own end goals. Perhaps I simply haven’t been able to forgive myself for that and I’ve just been sitting outside the church…waiting.
Friday, May 14, 2010
When Love Comes Tumbling Down
If I bent like you said was best
Would that change a thing?
If I spent myself ‘til nothing’s left
Would you still leave me here?
You’re so sorry ‘bout it all
Now that it’s over,
Should I thank you for that dear?
You’re so sorry ‘bout it all
And I hope you’ll always be
--Matt Nathanson, “Bent”
I love it when Fred Clark steps in and says everything I’ve been trying to say. I love the irony that I read it while I was listening to Matt Nathanson’s “Bent.”
Over the course of nine months in 2004 I lost 110 pounds. I’d always been the fat kid. I was always aware of it, too. I hated myself for it. I assumed I’d never be happy and never be loved. So when I finally decided that, yes it was time to lose weight I did so with a single-minded determination. I would be thin. I would be happy.
I got one of those things right. For a while. The problem was, though, that I spent that entire nine months denying myself all the foods that I wanted to eat and working out obsessively. I ramped up my metabolism while fantasizing about all the fatty, delicious foods I wasn’t eating any more. Then one day I decided I’d lost enough weight. And I started eating all the foods I’d been missing and stopped working out.
Worse, I still saw myself as the fat kid. So as I started putting weight back on I hit this cycle of denial and shame. Eventually I hit the point where I stopped seeing the fat kid who had disappeared and started trying to pretend I wasn’t seeing the fat kid that had made an 80% or so return.
Then, one day, I said, “Fuck it. I’ve got to do something about this.”
That was the second week of September 2009. In the eight months since I’ve dropped 65 pounds. Compared to my pace last time around this seems pretty lackadaisical.[1] The fact is, though, that I’ll take the way I’m doing it this time around over the way I did it last time around without any questions. See, I’m not single-minded in my pursuit of weight loss. I don’t obsess over it 24/7. I eat ice cream or ribs if I want to. I drink beer. And not light beer.
And this time I don’t fantasize about food. I don’t look forward to when I can finally stop doing this work. I got back to the weight I was when I left for WIU this week, which is a key benchmark for me. But the far more important benchmark came about two weeks ago, when I realized that I can stop thinking of myself as fat again.
Realistically speaking I’m not exactly skinny. I’m not thin. It’s still pretty obvious that I’ve got a ways to go. And once I get there I’m going to have to be vigilant to stay there. But I’ve realized it’s okay to say I’m not fat. I can theoretically hit my goal in about three or four months, but if it takes six or eight that’s just fine by me. I’ll get there. It’s not a life-and-death struggle to hit a specific weight by the end of summer.
It’s a good place to be, really. I’m a far different person than I was in 2004.
In truth, I want to go back to the fall of 2004 and smack that version of me around a bit. I want to tell him to chill the fuck out, slow the fuck down, and stop being so damn obsessive. Unfortunately, though, that’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. And I’m only slowly starting to realize that it applies to so much of the rest of my life.
I want to be at the end when I start. Or, at least, I want to know what the end looks like.
This explains my utterly pathetic love life. I spent two years tying myself in knots trying to create an impossible outcome with Her. Since then I’ve decided not to even attempt second dates after deciding right away that things wouldn’t work.[2] Worse, though, I decided upon meeting someone who was awesome that it would never, ever go anywhere and didn’t even really try.
Arguing that it won’t work so you might as well not even try is synonymous with cowardice. It’s just a more neatly packaged justification.
It’s exhausting, I’ve realized, to have to constantly obsess over the minor details. It’s a burden that I put down with relief. But putting that burden down ended up costing me quite a bit.
So this brings us back around to today’s posts on Slacktivist and the way Fred managed to make the exact point I was trying to make in my On Writing post without even trying.
Evangelical Christianity seeks to be the central focus in the life of the believer. It sucks all the joy out of life unless that joy is properly directed towards approved things. And even proper, approved joy is short-lived, since the world can only be held at bay for so long and the believer knows it.
I remember being in high school at some youth group function. I was sitting with some of the leaders and one of them was saying that he liked Marcy Playground, but then qualified it by saying that he knew he really shouldn’t, but it wasn’t so bad. I owned the self-titled Marcy Playground album at the time. For reasons I totally don’t understand I ripped it, so it’s on my computer and mp3 player right now.
It’s strange to contemplate, though. Something as silly as a random album from the ‘90s was enough to cause real anguish for my youth leader. Music shouldn’t cause anguish.[3]
This, though, is why I have problems with church scenes in my writing. It is not, for me, simply a matter of creating some canned dialogue. It’s not a matter of sidestepping the issue and saying, “Ah, well, I’ll just be an unreliable narrator.”
It’s a matter of compassion, of sympathy. It’s a matter of pity. I am watching these characters go through struggles and turning to a deaf, mute, and uncaring god for help. I am watching their lives fall apart. And I’m trying to play out those earnest conversations I had so many times about how it’s all just a lesson and god is really in control.
In order to see the pain of the slowly dawning realization of misplaced faith, though, I need to be able to show honest faith, I need to be able to show faith in the face of doubt. And I need to show the laying down of that burden as a moment of relief mixed with fear, regret, and sadness.
I can’t do that while winking at my audience. As narrator I need to be pitilessly neutral in order to invite the compassion of the audience.
Anything less diminishes the story I hope to be able to tell.
-----------------------------------
[1]It’s funny, too. That sounds like a huge number to most people. I’m like, “Eh, I’ve done better…”
[2]To be fair, there’s only one of those 1st dates that never went anywhere that I actually regret not going anywhere. And that one, well, I gone done fucked it up, anyway.
[3]Well, unless Miley Cyrus is involved…
Would that change a thing?
If I spent myself ‘til nothing’s left
Would you still leave me here?
You’re so sorry ‘bout it all
Now that it’s over,
Should I thank you for that dear?
You’re so sorry ‘bout it all
And I hope you’ll always be
--Matt Nathanson, “Bent”
I love it when Fred Clark steps in and says everything I’ve been trying to say. I love the irony that I read it while I was listening to Matt Nathanson’s “Bent.”
Over the course of nine months in 2004 I lost 110 pounds. I’d always been the fat kid. I was always aware of it, too. I hated myself for it. I assumed I’d never be happy and never be loved. So when I finally decided that, yes it was time to lose weight I did so with a single-minded determination. I would be thin. I would be happy.
I got one of those things right. For a while. The problem was, though, that I spent that entire nine months denying myself all the foods that I wanted to eat and working out obsessively. I ramped up my metabolism while fantasizing about all the fatty, delicious foods I wasn’t eating any more. Then one day I decided I’d lost enough weight. And I started eating all the foods I’d been missing and stopped working out.
Worse, I still saw myself as the fat kid. So as I started putting weight back on I hit this cycle of denial and shame. Eventually I hit the point where I stopped seeing the fat kid who had disappeared and started trying to pretend I wasn’t seeing the fat kid that had made an 80% or so return.
Then, one day, I said, “Fuck it. I’ve got to do something about this.”
That was the second week of September 2009. In the eight months since I’ve dropped 65 pounds. Compared to my pace last time around this seems pretty lackadaisical.[1] The fact is, though, that I’ll take the way I’m doing it this time around over the way I did it last time around without any questions. See, I’m not single-minded in my pursuit of weight loss. I don’t obsess over it 24/7. I eat ice cream or ribs if I want to. I drink beer. And not light beer.
And this time I don’t fantasize about food. I don’t look forward to when I can finally stop doing this work. I got back to the weight I was when I left for WIU this week, which is a key benchmark for me. But the far more important benchmark came about two weeks ago, when I realized that I can stop thinking of myself as fat again.
Realistically speaking I’m not exactly skinny. I’m not thin. It’s still pretty obvious that I’ve got a ways to go. And once I get there I’m going to have to be vigilant to stay there. But I’ve realized it’s okay to say I’m not fat. I can theoretically hit my goal in about three or four months, but if it takes six or eight that’s just fine by me. I’ll get there. It’s not a life-and-death struggle to hit a specific weight by the end of summer.
It’s a good place to be, really. I’m a far different person than I was in 2004.
In truth, I want to go back to the fall of 2004 and smack that version of me around a bit. I want to tell him to chill the fuck out, slow the fuck down, and stop being so damn obsessive. Unfortunately, though, that’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. And I’m only slowly starting to realize that it applies to so much of the rest of my life.
I want to be at the end when I start. Or, at least, I want to know what the end looks like.
This explains my utterly pathetic love life. I spent two years tying myself in knots trying to create an impossible outcome with Her. Since then I’ve decided not to even attempt second dates after deciding right away that things wouldn’t work.[2] Worse, though, I decided upon meeting someone who was awesome that it would never, ever go anywhere and didn’t even really try.
Arguing that it won’t work so you might as well not even try is synonymous with cowardice. It’s just a more neatly packaged justification.
It’s exhausting, I’ve realized, to have to constantly obsess over the minor details. It’s a burden that I put down with relief. But putting that burden down ended up costing me quite a bit.
So this brings us back around to today’s posts on Slacktivist and the way Fred managed to make the exact point I was trying to make in my On Writing post without even trying.
Evangelical Christianity seeks to be the central focus in the life of the believer. It sucks all the joy out of life unless that joy is properly directed towards approved things. And even proper, approved joy is short-lived, since the world can only be held at bay for so long and the believer knows it.
I remember being in high school at some youth group function. I was sitting with some of the leaders and one of them was saying that he liked Marcy Playground, but then qualified it by saying that he knew he really shouldn’t, but it wasn’t so bad. I owned the self-titled Marcy Playground album at the time. For reasons I totally don’t understand I ripped it, so it’s on my computer and mp3 player right now.
It’s strange to contemplate, though. Something as silly as a random album from the ‘90s was enough to cause real anguish for my youth leader. Music shouldn’t cause anguish.[3]
This, though, is why I have problems with church scenes in my writing. It is not, for me, simply a matter of creating some canned dialogue. It’s not a matter of sidestepping the issue and saying, “Ah, well, I’ll just be an unreliable narrator.”
It’s a matter of compassion, of sympathy. It’s a matter of pity. I am watching these characters go through struggles and turning to a deaf, mute, and uncaring god for help. I am watching their lives fall apart. And I’m trying to play out those earnest conversations I had so many times about how it’s all just a lesson and god is really in control.
In order to see the pain of the slowly dawning realization of misplaced faith, though, I need to be able to show honest faith, I need to be able to show faith in the face of doubt. And I need to show the laying down of that burden as a moment of relief mixed with fear, regret, and sadness.
I can’t do that while winking at my audience. As narrator I need to be pitilessly neutral in order to invite the compassion of the audience.
Anything less diminishes the story I hope to be able to tell.
-----------------------------------
[1]It’s funny, too. That sounds like a huge number to most people. I’m like, “Eh, I’ve done better…”
[2]To be fair, there’s only one of those 1st dates that never went anywhere that I actually regret not going anywhere. And that one, well, I gone done fucked it up, anyway.
[3]Well, unless Miley Cyrus is involved…
Monday, May 10, 2010
Remember that Bit Where I Said Chris Hedges is Useless?
He's at it again.
In this case he's arguing that removing religion will inevitably lead to a dystopic Nietzschean hell world.[1]
But here's the rub:
I mean, I'm assuming that not everyone who went to Seminary studied Just War doctrine. He went to Harvard Divinity, which is more likely to be occupied by those pointy-head liberal elite types than, say Dallas Theological or Phoenix Seminary.[2] The Evangelical Seminaries are far more interested in teaching apologetics and the practical issues of running churches than the philosophy of religion. Which isn't to say that Just War doesn't come up in such places, but I strongly suspect it's easier to avoid. Or they teach how to turn any war in to a Just War...
Either way, the very next paragraph is this one:
What. The. Fuck?
Seriously, Nietzsche was a raving fucking lunatic. We're not descending in to Nietzsche-world. At least, we're not inevitably descending in that direction. It's entirely possible to not do so, especially since we don't have to take the rantings of a random German philosopher loved best by rebellious high schoolers and jackass religious apologists who need something to rail against as our sole marching orders.
Also, um, what the hell does the BP oil spill have to do with anything? Does Chris Hedges realize he's putting himself on the same level as Pat Robertson claiming hurricanes as vengeance from god for homosexuality when he places the oil spill as punishment for our supposed sins of selfish self-determination?
Um, no. No they didn't. The great religions added nothing to the critical thinking of humankind. Medieval Europe was ruled by just as much fear and superstition as any society that came before. The conflicts between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox or between Christian and Pagan or Christian and Muslim simply indicated that there were new tribes and new closed societies. In reality, the Hellenistic world set up by the conquests of Alexander the Great was far more open to people of different societies and tribes than anything in Christianity. That's the joy of polytheism: you can say, "This god in your pantheon looks a lot like this god in our pantheon, so let's just combine them." Yahweh, the Christian God, and Allah are ostensibly the same exact god and yet we don't see too many Jews, Christians, or Muslims working to create a synthesis of the three.
The Renaissance, meanwhile, was kicked off by Petrarch, who made it a point to stop trying to harmonize the classical writers with Christian thought. This lead to the humanists, who brought about a revival of science, philosophy, and critical thinking that specifically looked to the ancient Romans and Greeks who had apparently been superseded by Christianity, at least in the mind of Christopher Hedges. If that's the case, why is it that Europe flourished over the two or so centuries of the Renaissance in ways it hadn't in the thousand years since the Italian peninsula was overrun by the barbarian tribes?[3]
I think that once I get done with my gushing over battleships I'll have to move to my other current historical obsession: the Byzantine Empire. Specifically because one of the most fascinating aspects of the fall of Rome and the near-destruction of Constantinople on any number of occasions (and, for that matter, the fall of Constantinople in 1453) can be summed up in just a couple words: Christian infighting. It's something that has to be acknowledged if you're going to claim religion in general and Christianity specifically holds societies together.
It doesn't. Not by a long shot.
Yeah. Because all those enlightened religious folk who worship godandcountry and talk about wiping Islam off the map and, oh by the way, "Drill, baby, drill!" are so goddamn much more moral than those non-believers who just don't want to see the world for what it is.
You know what? I've decided that "useless" doesn't describe Chris Hedges enough. How about, "Chris Hedges is a horrible, thoughtless jackass?"
-----------------------------------------
[1]To be fair, the Nietzcheans in Andromeda were pretty bad ass...
[2]These were two of the Seminaries on my own short list. Just this morning Ken Pulliam reminded me that Wayne Grudem moved from DTS to PS a few years ago. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet...
[3]Who were, largely, Arian Christians.
In this case he's arguing that removing religion will inevitably lead to a dystopic Nietzschean hell world.[1]
But here's the rub:
A Gallup poll in 2006 found that “the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.” Given that Jesus was a pacifist, and given that all of us who graduated from seminary rigorously studied Just War doctrine, which was flagrantly violated by the invasion of Iraq, this is a rather startling statistic.
I mean, I'm assuming that not everyone who went to Seminary studied Just War doctrine. He went to Harvard Divinity, which is more likely to be occupied by those pointy-head liberal elite types than, say Dallas Theological or Phoenix Seminary.[2] The Evangelical Seminaries are far more interested in teaching apologetics and the practical issues of running churches than the philosophy of religion. Which isn't to say that Just War doesn't come up in such places, but I strongly suspect it's easier to avoid. Or they teach how to turn any war in to a Just War...
Either way, the very next paragraph is this one:
But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.
What. The. Fuck?
Seriously, Nietzsche was a raving fucking lunatic. We're not descending in to Nietzsche-world. At least, we're not inevitably descending in that direction. It's entirely possible to not do so, especially since we don't have to take the rantings of a random German philosopher loved best by rebellious high schoolers and jackass religious apologists who need something to rail against as our sole marching orders.
Also, um, what the hell does the BP oil spill have to do with anything? Does Chris Hedges realize he's putting himself on the same level as Pat Robertson claiming hurricanes as vengeance from god for homosexuality when he places the oil spill as punishment for our supposed sins of selfish self-determination?
The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate—a belief that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society.
Um, no. No they didn't. The great religions added nothing to the critical thinking of humankind. Medieval Europe was ruled by just as much fear and superstition as any society that came before. The conflicts between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox or between Christian and Pagan or Christian and Muslim simply indicated that there were new tribes and new closed societies. In reality, the Hellenistic world set up by the conquests of Alexander the Great was far more open to people of different societies and tribes than anything in Christianity. That's the joy of polytheism: you can say, "This god in your pantheon looks a lot like this god in our pantheon, so let's just combine them." Yahweh, the Christian God, and Allah are ostensibly the same exact god and yet we don't see too many Jews, Christians, or Muslims working to create a synthesis of the three.
The Renaissance, meanwhile, was kicked off by Petrarch, who made it a point to stop trying to harmonize the classical writers with Christian thought. This lead to the humanists, who brought about a revival of science, philosophy, and critical thinking that specifically looked to the ancient Romans and Greeks who had apparently been superseded by Christianity, at least in the mind of Christopher Hedges. If that's the case, why is it that Europe flourished over the two or so centuries of the Renaissance in ways it hadn't in the thousand years since the Italian peninsula was overrun by the barbarian tribes?[3]
I think that once I get done with my gushing over battleships I'll have to move to my other current historical obsession: the Byzantine Empire. Specifically because one of the most fascinating aspects of the fall of Rome and the near-destruction of Constantinople on any number of occasions (and, for that matter, the fall of Constantinople in 1453) can be summed up in just a couple words: Christian infighting. It's something that has to be acknowledged if you're going to claim religion in general and Christianity specifically holds societies together.
It doesn't. Not by a long shot.
They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our callousness toward the weak and the poor.
Yeah. Because all those enlightened religious folk who worship godandcountry and talk about wiping Islam off the map and, oh by the way, "Drill, baby, drill!" are so goddamn much more moral than those non-believers who just don't want to see the world for what it is.
You know what? I've decided that "useless" doesn't describe Chris Hedges enough. How about, "Chris Hedges is a horrible, thoughtless jackass?"
-----------------------------------------
[1]To be fair, the Nietzcheans in Andromeda were pretty bad ass...
[2]These were two of the Seminaries on my own short list. Just this morning Ken Pulliam reminded me that Wayne Grudem moved from DTS to PS a few years ago. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet...
[3]Who were, largely, Arian Christians.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
That Lovely Arizona Immigration Law
This is interesting. And terrifyingly logical.
I read an article this morning (via C&L) by Greg Palast. His argument, which makes a frighteningly large amount of sense, is that the recent Arizona anti-immigration bill is actually about disenfranchising Hispanic voters in the state and it comes as the culmination of a long-term strategy to keep an overwhelmingly Democratic voting block from pushing the Republicans out of power. The further argument, then, is that the media totally missed the angle because they’re so busy pushing the, “ZOMG, racists!” angle.
At the same time we have news of Michael Steele admitting to the “Southern Strategy.” This was, for those who’ve been hanging out under rocks, the bit where the Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party post-Civil Rights Movement and turned the old Confederacy in to a red bloc. This move, meanwhile, went back to a recently banned form of voter intimidation in the South: the Jim Crow Laws.
We tend to look at segregated lunch counters and things like Brown v. Board of Education when considering Jim Crow. But the main purpose of those laws wasn’t really explicit public segregation; it was disenfranchisement without violation of the 15th Amendment. The public segregation would have been impossible without the disenfranchisement.
In order to understand that, though, we need to go back a little further still. Following the end of the Civil War the North basically occupied the South as a conquering, foreign power. As long as the North was in charge the freedom granted by the Emancipation Proclamation, then made permanent by the 13th Amendment and the freedoms granted by the 14th and 15th Amendments were rigorously defended.
Then in 1876 the Republicans traded Reconstruction for four more years in the Presidency (which brought my favorite Presidential nickname: Rutherfraud B. Hayes). The former slaveholder, white, Democrat aristocracy saw this as an opportunity to take back their states. But the newly enfranchised former slave population voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Republicans. And the 14th Amendment meant that they couldn’t simply be disenfranchised.
So the Jim Crow laws were enacted. These usually came in the form of a poll tax, literacy test, and/or requirements to show some proof of residency. Former slaves were generally poor, illiterate, and lived as tenant farmers, so they couldn’t meet the requirements.
This had the problem of also disenfranchising some poor white voters. For a while there were Grandfather clauses that worked around it. But this was largely really not a problem, since the goal was simply to keep those who voted Republican out of the polling places. If a few poor whites were also barred, oh well. Besides, poor whites were also more likely to vote Republican. Southern Democrats were an aristocratic phenomenon.
But, again, when looking at Jim Crow we tend to focus on the segregation of society and ignore the segregation of the voting system. Quite frankly, it’s how America has handled race for many years. We’d prefer to cry, “Racist!” and feel better about ourselves or vote for a black candidate so we can say we’re “post racial” and then turn the narrative of “against Obama = racist hick” than tackle the real issues. And those issues go beyond, “How do we look at race,” to, “How do we look at government,” and, “Is our system really creating laws and programs that benefit us as a whole or simply churning out politicians who are attempting to hold on to power no matter what?”
That’s what we seem to have in Arizona. There is a strong undercurrent of racism, but the anti-immigration hysteria is what’s needed to keep the attention of the voters who are already in the fold.
The bigger question is the one of, “Who benefits and who loses?” It’s already illegal to be in America illegally. Illegal immigrants are deported every day. This law doesn’t change that. And the governor has admitted that she has no idea how to identify an illegal immigrant, anyway. So the anti-immigration people don’t really get anything they didn’t already have.
What changes with this law, though, is the thing that changed with Jim Crow. Those who want to create a segregated society now have the opportunity to do so. Those who want to create reasonable doubt to throw out votes now have the opportunity to do so, too.
And the votes that would likely be thrown out would probably go to the Democratic candidates.
------------------------------
Meanwhile, there are two things that interest me in all of this.
First of all, as best I can tell this new Arizona law has been brought to you by the same people who are likely to call Obama a Commie-Fascist dictator. The irony of the freedom-loving opposition party creating a state where you can be pulled over on a whim and have a policeman ask for your papers is palpable.
Second, talking points from the anti-Obama crowd ever since the election have often sneeringly used the fact that he came from Chicago. Chicago, in this case, is used to sneeringly refer to sneaky backroom deals, machine politics, and the old, “In Chicago vote early and vote often.” This is pointed out as political corruption at its finest.
The thing about machine politics is that they are relentlessly local. It’s a sort of, “I do this for you so long as you vote for our guy.” That guy is usually going to be running for alderman. With enough power the machine can put a favorable Mayor in place, then a Representative and maybe a Senator. The machine can also raise politicians to a national spotlight, but making the leap to putting a President in office is well nigh impossible. A Chicago machine can deliver Illinois, since whither goes Chicago there goes the state, but one state does not a President make.
Meanwhile, the machine really only has power as long as the ballot is not secret. If someone says, “Vote for our guy or else,” they can only follow through on the threat if they know you voted for their guy. And the “vote early, vote often,” thing only works when you can’t keep track of who has and who hasn’t voted already. In Illinois you register to vote, go to your polling place, then tell them your name, after which they pull your little slip of paper out of the book of registered voters in the precinct and you can’t go back. It’s still entirely possible to perpetrate fraud, but it’s not nearly as easy.
It is, in fact, much easier to game the system by having votes you know will go against you thrown out or disallowed in the first place than to fraudulently increase your own vote totals. And if you can find ways to keep those you know will vote against you from going to the polls in the first place, well, more power to you. Literally.
But as long as “Chicago politics” is given as the byword for electoral fraud that issue will be largely ignored…
I read an article this morning (via C&L) by Greg Palast. His argument, which makes a frighteningly large amount of sense, is that the recent Arizona anti-immigration bill is actually about disenfranchising Hispanic voters in the state and it comes as the culmination of a long-term strategy to keep an overwhelmingly Democratic voting block from pushing the Republicans out of power. The further argument, then, is that the media totally missed the angle because they’re so busy pushing the, “ZOMG, racists!” angle.
At the same time we have news of Michael Steele admitting to the “Southern Strategy.” This was, for those who’ve been hanging out under rocks, the bit where the Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party post-Civil Rights Movement and turned the old Confederacy in to a red bloc. This move, meanwhile, went back to a recently banned form of voter intimidation in the South: the Jim Crow Laws.
We tend to look at segregated lunch counters and things like Brown v. Board of Education when considering Jim Crow. But the main purpose of those laws wasn’t really explicit public segregation; it was disenfranchisement without violation of the 15th Amendment. The public segregation would have been impossible without the disenfranchisement.
In order to understand that, though, we need to go back a little further still. Following the end of the Civil War the North basically occupied the South as a conquering, foreign power. As long as the North was in charge the freedom granted by the Emancipation Proclamation, then made permanent by the 13th Amendment and the freedoms granted by the 14th and 15th Amendments were rigorously defended.
Then in 1876 the Republicans traded Reconstruction for four more years in the Presidency (which brought my favorite Presidential nickname: Rutherfraud B. Hayes). The former slaveholder, white, Democrat aristocracy saw this as an opportunity to take back their states. But the newly enfranchised former slave population voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Republicans. And the 14th Amendment meant that they couldn’t simply be disenfranchised.
So the Jim Crow laws were enacted. These usually came in the form of a poll tax, literacy test, and/or requirements to show some proof of residency. Former slaves were generally poor, illiterate, and lived as tenant farmers, so they couldn’t meet the requirements.
This had the problem of also disenfranchising some poor white voters. For a while there were Grandfather clauses that worked around it. But this was largely really not a problem, since the goal was simply to keep those who voted Republican out of the polling places. If a few poor whites were also barred, oh well. Besides, poor whites were also more likely to vote Republican. Southern Democrats were an aristocratic phenomenon.
But, again, when looking at Jim Crow we tend to focus on the segregation of society and ignore the segregation of the voting system. Quite frankly, it’s how America has handled race for many years. We’d prefer to cry, “Racist!” and feel better about ourselves or vote for a black candidate so we can say we’re “post racial” and then turn the narrative of “against Obama = racist hick” than tackle the real issues. And those issues go beyond, “How do we look at race,” to, “How do we look at government,” and, “Is our system really creating laws and programs that benefit us as a whole or simply churning out politicians who are attempting to hold on to power no matter what?”
That’s what we seem to have in Arizona. There is a strong undercurrent of racism, but the anti-immigration hysteria is what’s needed to keep the attention of the voters who are already in the fold.
The bigger question is the one of, “Who benefits and who loses?” It’s already illegal to be in America illegally. Illegal immigrants are deported every day. This law doesn’t change that. And the governor has admitted that she has no idea how to identify an illegal immigrant, anyway. So the anti-immigration people don’t really get anything they didn’t already have.
What changes with this law, though, is the thing that changed with Jim Crow. Those who want to create a segregated society now have the opportunity to do so. Those who want to create reasonable doubt to throw out votes now have the opportunity to do so, too.
And the votes that would likely be thrown out would probably go to the Democratic candidates.
------------------------------
Meanwhile, there are two things that interest me in all of this.
First of all, as best I can tell this new Arizona law has been brought to you by the same people who are likely to call Obama a Commie-Fascist dictator. The irony of the freedom-loving opposition party creating a state where you can be pulled over on a whim and have a policeman ask for your papers is palpable.
Second, talking points from the anti-Obama crowd ever since the election have often sneeringly used the fact that he came from Chicago. Chicago, in this case, is used to sneeringly refer to sneaky backroom deals, machine politics, and the old, “In Chicago vote early and vote often.” This is pointed out as political corruption at its finest.
The thing about machine politics is that they are relentlessly local. It’s a sort of, “I do this for you so long as you vote for our guy.” That guy is usually going to be running for alderman. With enough power the machine can put a favorable Mayor in place, then a Representative and maybe a Senator. The machine can also raise politicians to a national spotlight, but making the leap to putting a President in office is well nigh impossible. A Chicago machine can deliver Illinois, since whither goes Chicago there goes the state, but one state does not a President make.
Meanwhile, the machine really only has power as long as the ballot is not secret. If someone says, “Vote for our guy or else,” they can only follow through on the threat if they know you voted for their guy. And the “vote early, vote often,” thing only works when you can’t keep track of who has and who hasn’t voted already. In Illinois you register to vote, go to your polling place, then tell them your name, after which they pull your little slip of paper out of the book of registered voters in the precinct and you can’t go back. It’s still entirely possible to perpetrate fraud, but it’s not nearly as easy.
It is, in fact, much easier to game the system by having votes you know will go against you thrown out or disallowed in the first place than to fraudulently increase your own vote totals. And if you can find ways to keep those you know will vote against you from going to the polls in the first place, well, more power to you. Literally.
But as long as “Chicago politics” is given as the byword for electoral fraud that issue will be largely ignored…
Thursday, April 8, 2010
"Collateral Murder" and the Problem of Framing
I figure by now you’ve probably seen a video making the rounds called “Collateral Murder.” It’s simple and straightforward and shows the cold-blooded murder of civilians and reporters at the hands of American soldiers in Iraq. Specifically Americans at the controls of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.
Oh. And children. They shot children, too.
It’s quite chilling, really. The sort of thing that that’s simultaneously revolting and fascinating. It’s also the sort of thing that brings together disparate ends of the internet. I saw the 18 minute video on Slacktivist the day after it was posted on Pharyngula. That should tell you something right there.
As with any such thing the first round of responses we get to “Collateral Murder” were universal horror. People were angry. People were calling for blood. Then we got some responses saying that everyone should calm down. They didn’t know the whole story, these other voices claimed. These second voices were quickly shot down. No one wants to listen to a murder apologist, after all.
This, for the record, is the internet in microcosm. Something happens and it makes it on to the web. People rush in to attack. Others show up to defend. Then the two sides start arguing with each other over who is right and who is wrong. In the end, no one actually learns much and no opinions are changed.
I was horrified by what I saw in “Collateral Murder.” Quite frankly, I still am. Let me walk you through.
The video starts with a grainy, black-and-white Apache gun cam focused on a group of people in a street. They’re just kind of milling about. It’s obvious that there’s some sort of meeting going on. The video then helpfully points out the Reuters reporters who are the subject of the video and the camera equipment mis-identified as RPGs. There are also AK-47s, but we can basically ignore them.* The problem, as “Collateral Murder” points out over and over again, is that there aren’t any RPGs. That’s camera equipment.
The pilots request permission to fire on the gathering and claim they have drawn fire, which does not appear to be the case. Still, permission is granted and 30mm cannon fire rains down on the little knot of people. Only one person is still moving afterwards.
This brings up part two. A van arrives. The people in the van get out and move to help the sole survivor of the attack. They do not take defensive precautions against the Apaches. If anything, they appear completely oblivious. The video also helpfully points out that two figures moving inside the van are children.
Permission to fire is again requested. After a delay its granted and the helicopters open up on the van.
Now we get to part three. American ground forces arrive and discover that there were, indeed, children in the van. Someone says, “Well, they shouldn’t have brought their children to a battle.”
“Collateral Murder” ends shortly after that with a reminder that the Pentagon tried to cover the incident up.
Again, this is horrifying. It’s an indication of the truly despicable actions the United States engages in while fighting colonial wars on the other side of the world.
Before I go any further, I feel the need to make something clear. Fred Clark puts it best: you’re not allowed to kill civilians. Period. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts.
There is such a thing as “collateral damage.” That’s the bit where people who shouldn’t be killed happen to get caught in a blast radius intended for others. It’s also what happens when bombs are targeted at the wrong place. This is unfortunate. It’s also, sadly, a reality of war. “Collateral damage” cannot be called “murder,” as murder implies premeditation.
What we have in “Collateral Murder” appears to be murder, however. Pilots opened fire on non-combatant civilians in the absence a clear and present danger.
At least, that’s what the video wants you to believe. Reality is not quite so cut and dry.
Let me walk you through my response to “Collateral Murder.” I saw it. I was horrified. Once I got over my initial revulsion I started to try to figure out how, exactly, the actions of the pilots could be justified.
I considered, first of all, the possibility that the mis-identification of the camera equipment as RPGs was honest. I still couldn’t see how there was any possibility that the people in the gun camera were an imminent danger to the helicopters or American ground troops. They were just milling around in the middle of a street. This is not good form for setting an ambush. Still, we have to bear in mind that there are a lot of people in Baghdad who want to set ambushes and the video was taken in 2007 during the Surge. Things were bad in Baghdad then. Well, bad-er.
Second, though, I considered the van. This was the one that bugged me. The people in the van appeared to be doing nothing but attempting to provide humanitarian aid. Even in the absence of identifying that there were children in the van, the vehicle did not appear to take anything even closely approximating a threatening posture. If anything, the van people seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the helicopters were loitering and focused entirely on helping an injured man.
Now, you can turn this around. If the pilots genuinely thought they were firing on insurgents originally, then it’s not a stretch to believe they genuinely thought they were firing on reinforcements. If you take Assumption A, then Assumption B follows quite easily. “Collateral Murder” becomes “Tragic Case of Mistaken Identity Exacerbated by Continued Mistakes.”
Even so, I cannot watch that part of the video and see the van operating in any way other than that of an ambulance. And you do not fire on ambulances, even if they’re helping your enemy. This is simply not done.
Third, I considered that, again, this whole sordid affair is done in the absence of any real, credible threat to anyone from the street below.
Fourth, there’s the simple fact that cover-ups have a bad habit of making the parties doing the covering look really fucking guilty.
Then Big A watched the full video of the incident, not the 18 minute “Collateral Murder” segment. His conclusion was that things were not as they seemed. And here we come to the crux of the problem.
See, the people behind “Collateral Murder” have a story they want to tell. This story they want to tell is set against a larger story. The smaller story is that American troops are carelessly killing innocent Iraqis. The larger story is that the US is in Iraq as part of a larger set of imperial ambitions and it should be stopped.
This is set against a different story, however. This is the official White House and Pentagon story that the war has been one of liberation and everything is going quite well and everyone’s all happy because we liberated the Iraqi people and made everything better for them.
“Collateral Murder” undermines the official story. Blows it out of the water, really. It’s just too bad that in“Collateral Murder’s” own zeal to tell its story it actually undermines itself.
The fact is that members of the United States military killed people who weren’t doing anything to endanger American troops. The fact is that attempts were then made to cover up the incident and claim that this was actually a battle and not a slaughter. Moreover, the fact is that this was an extremely avoidable situation.
See, the helicopter pilots were looking for reasons to pull the trigger. They were given clearance to do so by their superiors under the Rules of Engagement in place at the time. They then treated a van full of people, including children, as enemy combatants because the people in the van were rendering aid to people who had already been deemed enemy combatants. No rules were broken.
This is a problem. We need new rules. We need more circumspection in deciding who should be shot and who shouldn’t. This video could be a powerful reminder. It could also be a powerful reminder that war is a shitty, shitty thing to bring to other people.
That bit where the injury of the children was dismissed with the words, “They shouldn’t have brought their kids to a battle?” There’s a simple response to that: “We shouldn’t have brought a battlefield to their neighborhood. We shouldn’t have allowed our politicians to goad us in to supporting a war based on nothing.
See, we wouldn’t be singing that tune if there were Iraqi helicopters firing on minivans full of kids in San Francisco or Boston. We wouldn’t be saying, “Oops, shouldn’t have brought the kids.” We’d be saying, “Why did you bring your violence here?”
In editing the video to create 18 minutes of thoughtless, senseless slaughter, the makers of “Collateral Murder” ruined that message. Because there’s a larger context to that video that shows that things were a lot messier than that.
There were Americans on the ground nearby. They’d been shot at by insurgents. The helicopter pilots caught sight of someone with an RPG near the group of noncombatants and started asking for permission to open fire without spending enough time properly identifying their targets. They then compounded the problem when they assumed that the people helping the “insurgents” were, themselves, insurgents and, therefore, viable targets.
Then, of course, there was that bit about the cover-up. Cover-ups are bad. Especially the bits after they’re uncovered.
But “Collateral Murder” is, itself, a cover-up. It covers up the larger context of nearby insurgents firing on nearby American troops in favor of its own narrative about trigger-happy helo pilots.
It’s too bad, too. There could have been a real learning moment. The, "America never fucks up," crowd could have gotten an education on the general messiness of war. The, "Soldiers are trigger-happy killers," could have gotten an education on what happens when mistakes are made in the heat of battle, especially when the goal is to keep Americans from getting killed. Loveseat warriors who have never gotten closer to war than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 could have learned that in the real world the bad guys aren't conveniently tagged.
Mostly, though, we could have learned that kids get caught in the crossfire when we bring war to their front doors, so maybe it would be a good idea to think about that while we rattle our sabers at Iran over that nuclear program that's been on schedule to deliver weapons "next year" since the eighties.
Instead we just get more internet rhetoric. Then again, there are a lot of people who seem to think those are meaningful.
-
*Possession of an AK-47 is not so much a problem in Iraq, for the record. Everyone is permitted to own one. For the record, anyone who knows me knows that I do not own guns and have no intention of changing that. This is a stance based on my general ambivalence towards guns and not any anti-gun stance. However, I can assure you that if I wake up tomorrow and find I’ve been mysteriously transported to Baghdad in the night, my very first errand would involve a run to Kalashnikovs R Us.
Oh. And children. They shot children, too.
It’s quite chilling, really. The sort of thing that that’s simultaneously revolting and fascinating. It’s also the sort of thing that brings together disparate ends of the internet. I saw the 18 minute video on Slacktivist the day after it was posted on Pharyngula. That should tell you something right there.
As with any such thing the first round of responses we get to “Collateral Murder” were universal horror. People were angry. People were calling for blood. Then we got some responses saying that everyone should calm down. They didn’t know the whole story, these other voices claimed. These second voices were quickly shot down. No one wants to listen to a murder apologist, after all.
This, for the record, is the internet in microcosm. Something happens and it makes it on to the web. People rush in to attack. Others show up to defend. Then the two sides start arguing with each other over who is right and who is wrong. In the end, no one actually learns much and no opinions are changed.
I was horrified by what I saw in “Collateral Murder.” Quite frankly, I still am. Let me walk you through.
The video starts with a grainy, black-and-white Apache gun cam focused on a group of people in a street. They’re just kind of milling about. It’s obvious that there’s some sort of meeting going on. The video then helpfully points out the Reuters reporters who are the subject of the video and the camera equipment mis-identified as RPGs. There are also AK-47s, but we can basically ignore them.* The problem, as “Collateral Murder” points out over and over again, is that there aren’t any RPGs. That’s camera equipment.
The pilots request permission to fire on the gathering and claim they have drawn fire, which does not appear to be the case. Still, permission is granted and 30mm cannon fire rains down on the little knot of people. Only one person is still moving afterwards.
This brings up part two. A van arrives. The people in the van get out and move to help the sole survivor of the attack. They do not take defensive precautions against the Apaches. If anything, they appear completely oblivious. The video also helpfully points out that two figures moving inside the van are children.
Permission to fire is again requested. After a delay its granted and the helicopters open up on the van.
Now we get to part three. American ground forces arrive and discover that there were, indeed, children in the van. Someone says, “Well, they shouldn’t have brought their children to a battle.”
“Collateral Murder” ends shortly after that with a reminder that the Pentagon tried to cover the incident up.
Again, this is horrifying. It’s an indication of the truly despicable actions the United States engages in while fighting colonial wars on the other side of the world.
Before I go any further, I feel the need to make something clear. Fred Clark puts it best: you’re not allowed to kill civilians. Period. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts.
There is such a thing as “collateral damage.” That’s the bit where people who shouldn’t be killed happen to get caught in a blast radius intended for others. It’s also what happens when bombs are targeted at the wrong place. This is unfortunate. It’s also, sadly, a reality of war. “Collateral damage” cannot be called “murder,” as murder implies premeditation.
What we have in “Collateral Murder” appears to be murder, however. Pilots opened fire on non-combatant civilians in the absence a clear and present danger.
At least, that’s what the video wants you to believe. Reality is not quite so cut and dry.
Let me walk you through my response to “Collateral Murder.” I saw it. I was horrified. Once I got over my initial revulsion I started to try to figure out how, exactly, the actions of the pilots could be justified.
I considered, first of all, the possibility that the mis-identification of the camera equipment as RPGs was honest. I still couldn’t see how there was any possibility that the people in the gun camera were an imminent danger to the helicopters or American ground troops. They were just milling around in the middle of a street. This is not good form for setting an ambush. Still, we have to bear in mind that there are a lot of people in Baghdad who want to set ambushes and the video was taken in 2007 during the Surge. Things were bad in Baghdad then. Well, bad-er.
Second, though, I considered the van. This was the one that bugged me. The people in the van appeared to be doing nothing but attempting to provide humanitarian aid. Even in the absence of identifying that there were children in the van, the vehicle did not appear to take anything even closely approximating a threatening posture. If anything, the van people seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the helicopters were loitering and focused entirely on helping an injured man.
Now, you can turn this around. If the pilots genuinely thought they were firing on insurgents originally, then it’s not a stretch to believe they genuinely thought they were firing on reinforcements. If you take Assumption A, then Assumption B follows quite easily. “Collateral Murder” becomes “Tragic Case of Mistaken Identity Exacerbated by Continued Mistakes.”
Even so, I cannot watch that part of the video and see the van operating in any way other than that of an ambulance. And you do not fire on ambulances, even if they’re helping your enemy. This is simply not done.
Third, I considered that, again, this whole sordid affair is done in the absence of any real, credible threat to anyone from the street below.
Fourth, there’s the simple fact that cover-ups have a bad habit of making the parties doing the covering look really fucking guilty.
Then Big A watched the full video of the incident, not the 18 minute “Collateral Murder” segment. His conclusion was that things were not as they seemed. And here we come to the crux of the problem.
See, the people behind “Collateral Murder” have a story they want to tell. This story they want to tell is set against a larger story. The smaller story is that American troops are carelessly killing innocent Iraqis. The larger story is that the US is in Iraq as part of a larger set of imperial ambitions and it should be stopped.
This is set against a different story, however. This is the official White House and Pentagon story that the war has been one of liberation and everything is going quite well and everyone’s all happy because we liberated the Iraqi people and made everything better for them.
“Collateral Murder” undermines the official story. Blows it out of the water, really. It’s just too bad that in“Collateral Murder’s” own zeal to tell its story it actually undermines itself.
The fact is that members of the United States military killed people who weren’t doing anything to endanger American troops. The fact is that attempts were then made to cover up the incident and claim that this was actually a battle and not a slaughter. Moreover, the fact is that this was an extremely avoidable situation.
See, the helicopter pilots were looking for reasons to pull the trigger. They were given clearance to do so by their superiors under the Rules of Engagement in place at the time. They then treated a van full of people, including children, as enemy combatants because the people in the van were rendering aid to people who had already been deemed enemy combatants. No rules were broken.
This is a problem. We need new rules. We need more circumspection in deciding who should be shot and who shouldn’t. This video could be a powerful reminder. It could also be a powerful reminder that war is a shitty, shitty thing to bring to other people.
That bit where the injury of the children was dismissed with the words, “They shouldn’t have brought their kids to a battle?” There’s a simple response to that: “We shouldn’t have brought a battlefield to their neighborhood. We shouldn’t have allowed our politicians to goad us in to supporting a war based on nothing.
See, we wouldn’t be singing that tune if there were Iraqi helicopters firing on minivans full of kids in San Francisco or Boston. We wouldn’t be saying, “Oops, shouldn’t have brought the kids.” We’d be saying, “Why did you bring your violence here?”
In editing the video to create 18 minutes of thoughtless, senseless slaughter, the makers of “Collateral Murder” ruined that message. Because there’s a larger context to that video that shows that things were a lot messier than that.
There were Americans on the ground nearby. They’d been shot at by insurgents. The helicopter pilots caught sight of someone with an RPG near the group of noncombatants and started asking for permission to open fire without spending enough time properly identifying their targets. They then compounded the problem when they assumed that the people helping the “insurgents” were, themselves, insurgents and, therefore, viable targets.
Then, of course, there was that bit about the cover-up. Cover-ups are bad. Especially the bits after they’re uncovered.
But “Collateral Murder” is, itself, a cover-up. It covers up the larger context of nearby insurgents firing on nearby American troops in favor of its own narrative about trigger-happy helo pilots.
It’s too bad, too. There could have been a real learning moment. The, "America never fucks up," crowd could have gotten an education on the general messiness of war. The, "Soldiers are trigger-happy killers," could have gotten an education on what happens when mistakes are made in the heat of battle, especially when the goal is to keep Americans from getting killed. Loveseat warriors who have never gotten closer to war than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 could have learned that in the real world the bad guys aren't conveniently tagged.
Mostly, though, we could have learned that kids get caught in the crossfire when we bring war to their front doors, so maybe it would be a good idea to think about that while we rattle our sabers at Iran over that nuclear program that's been on schedule to deliver weapons "next year" since the eighties.
Instead we just get more internet rhetoric. Then again, there are a lot of people who seem to think those are meaningful.
-
*Possession of an AK-47 is not so much a problem in Iraq, for the record. Everyone is permitted to own one. For the record, anyone who knows me knows that I do not own guns and have no intention of changing that. This is a stance based on my general ambivalence towards guns and not any anti-gun stance. However, I can assure you that if I wake up tomorrow and find I’ve been mysteriously transported to Baghdad in the night, my very first errand would involve a run to Kalashnikovs R Us.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Willful Ignorance
The great thing about Facebook is that it teaches you how dumb and hate filled the people you know can really be. This is especially true for those of us who still have a lot of friends in conservative Christian circles.* A couple years ago I de-friended a guy because he’d been annoying me with his crap. The last straw came when he slapped up a link to Ann Coulter’s If Liberals were Smart They’d be Conservatives. I was done. Then there was that time that I made some sort of approving statement about Obama during the campaign and was informed that I shouldn’t vote for him because he’s a baby killer.
Anyway, last week a guy who was one of the youth leaders of my high school youth group started putting up statuses with “hilarious” ObamaCare-related themes. It was literally stuff like, “is going to the hospital for some free stuff.” Each status got slightly dumber and was given with the promise of more awesome status updates from the same vein. One of the updates was even about how he got free stuff but had to pay for parking, which actually confused me. I’ve never in my life had to pay to park at a hospital.
Now, then, say what you will about health care reform in principle. Say what you will about the reform bill as passed. My intent here isn’t to discuss the reform idea itself. It is, instead, to discuss objective reality. Two aspects of objective reality, in fact:
First, there was nothing that could have been done differently the day after the bill was passed. It was simply a legislative maneuver.
Second, there is nothing in the health care bill that would lead anyone who actually knows a damn thing about the bill to think they could now “go to the hospital to get some free stuff.”
The bigger problem I see, though, is that the individual in question was not one of those mis-spelled sign waving tea partiers. He’s intelligent, capable, and college educated.
Last night, since I already had started in on this post and I hate attacking people who don’t know I disagree with them, I broke my number one rule of Facebook: never, ever respond to people’s stupid statuses. So I tossed this one up:
I chose these four points for specific reasons:
1. To establish that the person has simply been parroting talking points when making his posts.
2. Historical precedent. I chose Orrin Hatch and Kit Bond specifically because they’re still Senators and Bond has referred to the new legislation as Obama’s health care “take over” on his website.
3. Reality check.
4. I, quite frankly, don’t give a flying crap what Jesus said. I just found it necessary to establish that he doesn’t, either.
Either way, I got this response this morning:
Note how this doesn’t actually answer any of my questions. I also love the implication that everyone will quit their jobs in droves the moment they get this mythical “free health care.” Because, really, I don’t have rent or car payments to make. And I don’t like eating. Or my television.
Also, what, exactly, does a private lawsuit brought against McDonald’s have to do with, well, anything?
Now, it’s entirely possible to make a principled and rational argument that the government should not be involved in health care. I’m pretty sure that the one I’m seeing above ain’t one of those…
EDIT: In case anyone is interested, here's my response:
------------------------------
*This is not to say that all of my Facebook Christian friends are dumb and hate filled. Plenty aren’t. It’s just that some are and they proudly flaunt it on their statuses. I’m apparently one of about three people on the planet who realizes that statuses are public and, therefore, not a good place to write things that might well piss everyone else off. Of course there’s the terrifying possibility that people who write disturbing statuses don’t realize that they’re doing it and that other people might read them.
Anyway, last week a guy who was one of the youth leaders of my high school youth group started putting up statuses with “hilarious” ObamaCare-related themes. It was literally stuff like, “is going to the hospital for some free stuff.” Each status got slightly dumber and was given with the promise of more awesome status updates from the same vein. One of the updates was even about how he got free stuff but had to pay for parking, which actually confused me. I’ve never in my life had to pay to park at a hospital.
Now, then, say what you will about health care reform in principle. Say what you will about the reform bill as passed. My intent here isn’t to discuss the reform idea itself. It is, instead, to discuss objective reality. Two aspects of objective reality, in fact:
First, there was nothing that could have been done differently the day after the bill was passed. It was simply a legislative maneuver.
Second, there is nothing in the health care bill that would lead anyone who actually knows a damn thing about the bill to think they could now “go to the hospital to get some free stuff.”
The bigger problem I see, though, is that the individual in question was not one of those mis-spelled sign waving tea partiers. He’s intelligent, capable, and college educated.
Last night, since I already had started in on this post and I hate attacking people who don’t know I disagree with them, I broke my number one rule of Facebook: never, ever respond to people’s stupid statuses. So I tossed this one up:
Hey, [person], before you get too much farther in your little orgy of anti health
care reform please try to answer a few questions:
1. When, exactly, did the Constitution of the United States get amended to
allow the President to write legislation? I am aware of various attempts at
health care bills written by members of Congress, but not aware of any
written by President Obama, as this would be a violation of the Separation
of Powers, and, therefore, unconstitutional.
2. How, exactly, is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
substantively different from 1993's Health Equity and Access Reform Today
Act, co-sponsored by 19 Republican Senators, including Orrin Hatch and "Kit"
Bond? I'll give you a hint: it's not.
3. How does a government mandated buy-in to private insurance coverage,
even with available government subsidy, amount to hospitals giving away
"free stuff?"
4. Where in the Bible does Jesus say, "Screw the needy. They're a bunch of
lazy pikers, anyway?" Was it before or after he told the rich man to sell
all he had and give the proceeds to the poor?
I chose these four points for specific reasons:
1. To establish that the person has simply been parroting talking points when making his posts.
2. Historical precedent. I chose Orrin Hatch and Kit Bond specifically because they’re still Senators and Bond has referred to the new legislation as Obama’s health care “take over” on his website.
3. Reality check.
4. I, quite frankly, don’t give a flying crap what Jesus said. I just found it necessary to establish that he doesn’t, either.
Either way, I got this response this morning:
love it but answer me this - how much in percentage or raw dollar did you pay in taxes over the past two years? when did national heathcare become a right? is it not aready possible to get heathcare based on need at the county level? if employers stop offering group insurance would you consider not working there? yes there are many things wrong with the system but why do i have to pay for everything? go to woodfield mall and have dinner on me but you have to pay the tax 11 3/4% when is too much tax regardless of Jesus' teaching? remember Jesus hung out with tax collectors the where as bad as the prostitutes! Jesus also said render until ceasar so people have always struggled with burden of tax. so i can bet you that the price of coffee at McDonalds would be cheaper if the judge would have thrown out Stella's lawsuit, her car had cup holders.
Note how this doesn’t actually answer any of my questions. I also love the implication that everyone will quit their jobs in droves the moment they get this mythical “free health care.” Because, really, I don’t have rent or car payments to make. And I don’t like eating. Or my television.
Also, what, exactly, does a private lawsuit brought against McDonald’s have to do with, well, anything?
Now, it’s entirely possible to make a principled and rational argument that the government should not be involved in health care. I’m pretty sure that the one I’m seeing above ain’t one of those…
EDIT: In case anyone is interested, here's my response:
Now, I'm not Constitutional lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that the issue of the "right" to health care was established with the Social Security Act of 1965 and its earlier precedents in the New Deal's Social Security Act and the Kerr-Mills Act and SSA 1965, however, was the legislation that established Medicare and Medicaid. Or, possibly, it had something to do with the Veteran's Administration, which has its roots back in 1778. My guess is that it has something to do with a combination of Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 1 of the Constitution, specifically the general welfare clause, in conjunction with the Ninth Amendment and probably the Interstate Commerce Clause, since that thing gets invoked for pretty much everything.
Second, you've established the availability of health care. It has to be provided and there is assistance provided at the state and county level, but its inconsistent at best and doesn't really go far enough. That is why the federal government needs to take some action on the issue.
Third, why, exactly, would I quit my job just to get not-at-all-free medical insurance? I'm pretty sure that medical insurance does not cover my rent or car payments, nor does it buy food or electricity. Also, I like my job. The issue at hand, though, is that many people don't like their jobs but have to stay because they don't get insurance otherwise or switching to a different job means switching to a different health insurance program that will not cover a pre-existing condition.
Fourth, where in, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," does one find, "As long as it's capped off at a maximum of 15% of gross income? And what does the fact that Jesus hung out with tax collectors have to do with anything? Jewish hatred tax collectors was due to the fact that they were corrupt, unregulated, and acting as collaborators with an occupying foreign power. The IRS is a heavily regulated agent of our duly elected government. Ergo, your argument is a non-sequitur.
Fifth, what does a private law suit have to do with anything?
------------------------------
*This is not to say that all of my Facebook Christian friends are dumb and hate filled. Plenty aren’t. It’s just that some are and they proudly flaunt it on their statuses. I’m apparently one of about three people on the planet who realizes that statuses are public and, therefore, not a good place to write things that might well piss everyone else off. Of course there’s the terrifying possibility that people who write disturbing statuses don’t realize that they’re doing it and that other people might read them.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Liberation Theology
My new company has a weird obsession with pop psychology fads. We seem to be endlessly taking random tests designed to help us understand our communication styles, our areas of strength, and to help us figure out how to work better together. I’m not a big fan of the whole thing. I’m also not really good at disguising my contempt for it, which might bite me in the ass one of these days.
I had to deal with another in the endless rotation of meetings today.* This one involved the sort of online test that’s familiar to anyone who has ever tried to find out what their dating style is or what type of shoe they’d be while attempting to kill the crushing boredom and mind-numbingly slow passage of time inherent in being at work at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. It then broke my weighted answers to non-mutually-exclusive A or B questions down and scientifically determined what my top five strengths are out of thirty-four categories that were all named with made up words. I was also supposed to read some stuff in a book beforehand, but you can rest assured that I had better things to do with my time.
Now, in general, I prefer to game these tests. How much I game them largely depends on how bored I am (when the test is, “Which State are You?” you’re damn right I’m going to answer in such a way that I’m able to proudly say, “The internet says I’m Illinois.”), how much effort it will take to game them, and how worried I am that someone will actually see my results and decide to treat me accordingly. As such, I gamed this test very lightly, mostly erring on the side of saying I prefer history to science fiction when those two things were placed against each other.
Anyway, I learned from my test that I’m an intellectual, strategic thinker who wants to learn as much as possible and understand the context of what I have learned. Also, I learned that water is wet. News at 11.
What I also learned is that I’m really, really bad at following the directions when I don’t give a flying crap (or, alternately, when I do give a crap but am not paying attention, like, say, when I’m the last person to show up at Trinity Hall on a Saturday for a shindig that I scheduled. I was playing Battlestations Pacific, dagnabit. It’s the Xbox 360’s fault I wasn’t looking at a clock…). See, I missed the bit where I was supposed to send my results to, um, somebody or other so they could properly prepare the materials and I would be able to hold a card in front of me at the meeting and see that I’m a strategic thinking connection drawer with a ravenous desire to learn.** Y’know, just in case I forgot.
This actually lead to a really interesting exchange, however. One of the facilitators asked me if I’d actually taken the test. I replied in the affirmative. She said, “Oh, good. Did anything about it surprise you?” I simply replied, “No.” She asked me why.
I matter of factly said, “Because I’ve known what my strengths are for years.”
Now, this might not have been the best thing to say, as my team immediately took it as a form of arrogance. But, really, I know what my strengths are. I don’t need some pop psychology bullshit filled with made up words to tell me what they are. I’ve been playing to my strengths for years and compensating for my weaknesses without really thinking too hard about it.
Let’s put it this way. I had the ability to find out that Seneca was in town last weekend. I had the ability to get some people to want to go see them. I did not have the ability to give a consistent time for this, nor did I have the ability to actually show up at any of the times I said to do it. Ergo, if you were going to put me in charge of, say, a music venue, you’d probably want me to find out what bands are out there, figure out how to promote events, and find anyone but me to actually schedule the damn gigs.
Or, to put it another way, there’s a reason I’m more likely to get immersed in Medieval II: Total War than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I find both enjoyable, but I find COD far, far more frustrating and Medieval II far, far more replayable.
I think that’s why I find these things so annoying. There’s no inherent self-discovery in them for me. For me they’re just a game, either to see how much I can get them to tell me what I already know or to see how much I can get them to tell me what I want them to say.
If you ask me who I am I’m most likely to refer to myself as three things: a writer, a historian, and a storyteller. These three things say everything you need to know about me. Whenever I take one of those silly assessments and am actually honest with them I can fit everything it says about me under some aspect of those three parts of my personality. I’ve known I want to be a writer since I was in first grade. I’ve known I wanted to be a historian since third grade. The storyteller thing didn’t come in until the last couple years, but it was because I didn’t know what storytelling was, so when I met storytellers it was an, “Aha!” moment, but one where I found there was a new way to do what I was already doing or an outlet to express some part of myself that wasn’t served by the “writer” and “historian” parts, not an, “I never knew I could do this or be interested in it before,” moment.
And, really, if you think about it, the mental leap from “writer, historian, storyteller,” to “strategic thinking, always learning, intellectual drawer of connections” is really just a short hop.
Now, I understand why a large company would find such tests valuable. I really do. It helps create a common language, which is always nice for communication across the various lines of experience and background that people bring with them. It also can help quite a bit in situations where employees are less than gruntled because they’re constantly being given tasks that they’re just not good at or don’t much care for. In all honestly, I understand the pop psychology bullshit well enough to get that its useful in those contexts. The fact that I can consistently game those tests is actually a pretty good indication that they are reliable at the pattern recognition they’re designed to facilitate. My main problem is that they’re often presented in a way that’s, shall we say, evangelical in nature.
I do not enjoy going to work and wondering why I’m sitting in front of a televangelist. This is, of course, ironic coming from a former InterVarsity Outreach Coordinator. When it gets right down to it, though, being an Outreach Coordinator meant I was playing to my strengths. Y’know, except for the bit where I didn’t much like telling people about Jesus.
This is all a really, really long way around to a follow-up to my post about home and how heaven really ain’t it. There were a couple of responses from jessa which directed me towards some thoughts I didn’t really put in to my original post, mostly because I wasn’t thinking of the issue from this direction. But I’d like to focus on this thought:
There is a place where Christianity makes quite a bit of sense. Consider that the beginning of Jesus’s ministry was marked by him walking in to the synagogue and reading Isaiah 61:1, in which the prophet proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor and release of the captives. This is jubilee, this is manna from heaven. This is salvation.
For the captives in Babylon the declaration of the Year of Jubilee would have been wonderful. For the Jews living under the foot of Rome the declaration would have been just as energizing. The theology of liberation is fantastic for the repressed in all contexts where the temporal authority has everything and the downtrodden nothing.
The problem is, though, that Christianity does not make any sense outside of this context. It is a completely different religion than the one that supposedly spawned it. You cannot read the Jewish Bible and get Jesus of Nazareth unless you intentionally do so. You cannot read the endless commandments from Yahweh to kill all the inhabitants of a certain land or family that displeased him without finding that whole idea of a loving, forgiving and also unchanging god a little hard to swallow.
And for the Romans, well, there’s no way that the message of Jubilee and the release of the captives would win them over. You don’t get the creditor on your side by promising the forgiveness of debt, after all.
This is why jessa is absolutely right to point out that those who live in poverty have little else but faith and are, therefore, going to probably be more faith filled than the average middle class suburbanite. It’s also why the very first missionary in Christ’s name managed to switch Christ’s message from one of Jubilee to one of escaping damnation. Paul, you see, wanted to reach the Romans. Most of the rest of the Jews just wanted to be rid of them. That’s what the myriad Messiahs of Jesus’s time were supposed to do, from Judas Maccabeus’s successful casting off of Antiochus Epiphanes IV through the Sicarii, Bar Kochba, Masada, and the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora.
The Messiah was never supposed to be a world redeemer. He was supposed to be a world remover.
Enter Satan as a Zoroastrian-influenced evil counter to Yahweh. It’s not a hard leap to make, either. People were ignorant and superstitious, believed in gods, angels, and demons by default, and had no better explanations for disease, drought, and famine.
Modern Evangelical Christianity has a vested interest in maintaining that ignorance in its followers. That’s the only way for it to stay in business.
The problem I have with it, though, is that it’s basically impossible to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault any more. The liars for Jesus have, themselves, been deceived. At least, the ones on the local church who are the vanguard of evangelism. The pastors who are in charge are often in that position because someone told them that they’d be good at it and they felt they’d been “called by god.” There are those who genuinely believe and those who don’t really believe but don’t know what else to do. There are those who reinforce their faltering faith by trying to make sure no one around them has (or at least expresses) doubt. And there are those who want out but can’t leave because it means severing ties, losing friends, families, and loved ones. Then there are those who genuinely believe, simply because they either don’t have the capacity or need to ask the hard questions that lead to doubt.
The reason I was an Outreach Coordinator and planning on going in to ministry was because I wanted to find a way to make use of the things that I knew I was good at within the narrow, limited territory allowed by my Christian walk. The reason I was a terrible Outreach Coordinator was because I had this bad habit of looking at the non-Christians I knew and realizing that Christianity could do nothing to help them. In many cases I realized that they were a lot less miserable than I was. I could not, in good conscience, see someone with a 37” LCD HD TV and tell them that a scratchy 12” black and white set was better.
In that case the only way to make that sale is to say, “So you’ll have this for a while, but in the future you’ll get your own movie theater. Trust me. The only catch is that you won’t get the theater until after you die and, no, I don’t have any proof that it even exists. Oh, and it’ll cost you 10% of your income for the rest of your life. It’s optional and stuff, but we’re gonna guilt the fuck out of you for it.”
There’s a reason the most popular form of the Gospel in America is the Prosperity Gospel. Now it’s more like, “You send us a thousand dollars and god will send you a 56” 3D HD TV. And then you’ll get an even better set up in heaven. Pinky swear.”
I’m much happier to be a former Outreach Coordinator. I still find myself having to find some way to make use of my talents in a job that’s something other than my ideal. But the fact is that I like my job. And it’s been a far better financial boon than doing that whole ministry thing. The fact is, too, that no one is forcing me to stay in my job. No one is telling me that if I quit I’ll hurt other people, I’ll ruin their desire to stay at their jobs. Stupid meetings and pop psychology employee evaluations still aggravate me to no end, but I’m not going to quit my job over them. I did once quit my religion due in no small part to them, though.
That should say something.
------------------------------
*Side note: it’s weird, but I hate these meetings on principle. However, I like my job, really like my team and, in general, enjoy work when I’m, y’know, doing my job. This actually flies directly in the face of the meeting I had today, since I rarely engage in any of the activities that would be considered “my strengths.” Whenever the whole career development discussion comes up I attempt to find ways to work the stuff I like doing in to future possibilities. I’ve been doing that since before I found out what my strengths are, since, y’know, it’s pretty damn obvious to me.
The lesson, as always, is that I’m smarter than pop psychology. I should probably start offering the Geds Super-Dooper Strengths for Employees Strategification Seminar series.
**In my defense, I also missed the bit in the memo that said I could wear jeans. And I got the bit where the boss said we could go home as soon as the meeting was over but still managed to stay at the office for another three and a half hours. Or, y’know, an hour and a half or so after I usually leave work. That first part there was, I’m assuming, karma. The second part just adds to my hatred of such meetings.
I had to deal with another in the endless rotation of meetings today.* This one involved the sort of online test that’s familiar to anyone who has ever tried to find out what their dating style is or what type of shoe they’d be while attempting to kill the crushing boredom and mind-numbingly slow passage of time inherent in being at work at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. It then broke my weighted answers to non-mutually-exclusive A or B questions down and scientifically determined what my top five strengths are out of thirty-four categories that were all named with made up words. I was also supposed to read some stuff in a book beforehand, but you can rest assured that I had better things to do with my time.
Now, in general, I prefer to game these tests. How much I game them largely depends on how bored I am (when the test is, “Which State are You?” you’re damn right I’m going to answer in such a way that I’m able to proudly say, “The internet says I’m Illinois.”), how much effort it will take to game them, and how worried I am that someone will actually see my results and decide to treat me accordingly. As such, I gamed this test very lightly, mostly erring on the side of saying I prefer history to science fiction when those two things were placed against each other.
Anyway, I learned from my test that I’m an intellectual, strategic thinker who wants to learn as much as possible and understand the context of what I have learned. Also, I learned that water is wet. News at 11.
What I also learned is that I’m really, really bad at following the directions when I don’t give a flying crap (or, alternately, when I do give a crap but am not paying attention, like, say, when I’m the last person to show up at Trinity Hall on a Saturday for a shindig that I scheduled. I was playing Battlestations Pacific, dagnabit. It’s the Xbox 360’s fault I wasn’t looking at a clock…). See, I missed the bit where I was supposed to send my results to, um, somebody or other so they could properly prepare the materials and I would be able to hold a card in front of me at the meeting and see that I’m a strategic thinking connection drawer with a ravenous desire to learn.** Y’know, just in case I forgot.
This actually lead to a really interesting exchange, however. One of the facilitators asked me if I’d actually taken the test. I replied in the affirmative. She said, “Oh, good. Did anything about it surprise you?” I simply replied, “No.” She asked me why.
I matter of factly said, “Because I’ve known what my strengths are for years.”
Now, this might not have been the best thing to say, as my team immediately took it as a form of arrogance. But, really, I know what my strengths are. I don’t need some pop psychology bullshit filled with made up words to tell me what they are. I’ve been playing to my strengths for years and compensating for my weaknesses without really thinking too hard about it.
Let’s put it this way. I had the ability to find out that Seneca was in town last weekend. I had the ability to get some people to want to go see them. I did not have the ability to give a consistent time for this, nor did I have the ability to actually show up at any of the times I said to do it. Ergo, if you were going to put me in charge of, say, a music venue, you’d probably want me to find out what bands are out there, figure out how to promote events, and find anyone but me to actually schedule the damn gigs.
Or, to put it another way, there’s a reason I’m more likely to get immersed in Medieval II: Total War than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I find both enjoyable, but I find COD far, far more frustrating and Medieval II far, far more replayable.
I think that’s why I find these things so annoying. There’s no inherent self-discovery in them for me. For me they’re just a game, either to see how much I can get them to tell me what I already know or to see how much I can get them to tell me what I want them to say.
If you ask me who I am I’m most likely to refer to myself as three things: a writer, a historian, and a storyteller. These three things say everything you need to know about me. Whenever I take one of those silly assessments and am actually honest with them I can fit everything it says about me under some aspect of those three parts of my personality. I’ve known I want to be a writer since I was in first grade. I’ve known I wanted to be a historian since third grade. The storyteller thing didn’t come in until the last couple years, but it was because I didn’t know what storytelling was, so when I met storytellers it was an, “Aha!” moment, but one where I found there was a new way to do what I was already doing or an outlet to express some part of myself that wasn’t served by the “writer” and “historian” parts, not an, “I never knew I could do this or be interested in it before,” moment.
And, really, if you think about it, the mental leap from “writer, historian, storyteller,” to “strategic thinking, always learning, intellectual drawer of connections” is really just a short hop.
Now, I understand why a large company would find such tests valuable. I really do. It helps create a common language, which is always nice for communication across the various lines of experience and background that people bring with them. It also can help quite a bit in situations where employees are less than gruntled because they’re constantly being given tasks that they’re just not good at or don’t much care for. In all honestly, I understand the pop psychology bullshit well enough to get that its useful in those contexts. The fact that I can consistently game those tests is actually a pretty good indication that they are reliable at the pattern recognition they’re designed to facilitate. My main problem is that they’re often presented in a way that’s, shall we say, evangelical in nature.
I do not enjoy going to work and wondering why I’m sitting in front of a televangelist. This is, of course, ironic coming from a former InterVarsity Outreach Coordinator. When it gets right down to it, though, being an Outreach Coordinator meant I was playing to my strengths. Y’know, except for the bit where I didn’t much like telling people about Jesus.
This is all a really, really long way around to a follow-up to my post about home and how heaven really ain’t it. There were a couple of responses from jessa which directed me towards some thoughts I didn’t really put in to my original post, mostly because I wasn’t thinking of the issue from this direction. But I’d like to focus on this thought:
Evangelicals look at some of these people, usually those in poverty, and say, "They have so much faith despite having so little. We have been so blessed, all the more reason for us to have faith." I think it is more that the impoverished have so much faith BECAUSE they have so little: faith is the only thing they have left to rely on for food, water, and shelter, whereas the typical megachurch attender has more resources that they can rely on for their daily needs and wants. Not only do they not have to hope for heaven when they are content on earth, but they don't have to hope for material help from heaven because they are already materially wealthy.
There is a place where Christianity makes quite a bit of sense. Consider that the beginning of Jesus’s ministry was marked by him walking in to the synagogue and reading Isaiah 61:1, in which the prophet proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor and release of the captives. This is jubilee, this is manna from heaven. This is salvation.
For the captives in Babylon the declaration of the Year of Jubilee would have been wonderful. For the Jews living under the foot of Rome the declaration would have been just as energizing. The theology of liberation is fantastic for the repressed in all contexts where the temporal authority has everything and the downtrodden nothing.
The problem is, though, that Christianity does not make any sense outside of this context. It is a completely different religion than the one that supposedly spawned it. You cannot read the Jewish Bible and get Jesus of Nazareth unless you intentionally do so. You cannot read the endless commandments from Yahweh to kill all the inhabitants of a certain land or family that displeased him without finding that whole idea of a loving, forgiving and also unchanging god a little hard to swallow.
And for the Romans, well, there’s no way that the message of Jubilee and the release of the captives would win them over. You don’t get the creditor on your side by promising the forgiveness of debt, after all.
This is why jessa is absolutely right to point out that those who live in poverty have little else but faith and are, therefore, going to probably be more faith filled than the average middle class suburbanite. It’s also why the very first missionary in Christ’s name managed to switch Christ’s message from one of Jubilee to one of escaping damnation. Paul, you see, wanted to reach the Romans. Most of the rest of the Jews just wanted to be rid of them. That’s what the myriad Messiahs of Jesus’s time were supposed to do, from Judas Maccabeus’s successful casting off of Antiochus Epiphanes IV through the Sicarii, Bar Kochba, Masada, and the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora.
The Messiah was never supposed to be a world redeemer. He was supposed to be a world remover.
Enter Satan as a Zoroastrian-influenced evil counter to Yahweh. It’s not a hard leap to make, either. People were ignorant and superstitious, believed in gods, angels, and demons by default, and had no better explanations for disease, drought, and famine.
Modern Evangelical Christianity has a vested interest in maintaining that ignorance in its followers. That’s the only way for it to stay in business.
The problem I have with it, though, is that it’s basically impossible to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault any more. The liars for Jesus have, themselves, been deceived. At least, the ones on the local church who are the vanguard of evangelism. The pastors who are in charge are often in that position because someone told them that they’d be good at it and they felt they’d been “called by god.” There are those who genuinely believe and those who don’t really believe but don’t know what else to do. There are those who reinforce their faltering faith by trying to make sure no one around them has (or at least expresses) doubt. And there are those who want out but can’t leave because it means severing ties, losing friends, families, and loved ones. Then there are those who genuinely believe, simply because they either don’t have the capacity or need to ask the hard questions that lead to doubt.
The reason I was an Outreach Coordinator and planning on going in to ministry was because I wanted to find a way to make use of the things that I knew I was good at within the narrow, limited territory allowed by my Christian walk. The reason I was a terrible Outreach Coordinator was because I had this bad habit of looking at the non-Christians I knew and realizing that Christianity could do nothing to help them. In many cases I realized that they were a lot less miserable than I was. I could not, in good conscience, see someone with a 37” LCD HD TV and tell them that a scratchy 12” black and white set was better.
In that case the only way to make that sale is to say, “So you’ll have this for a while, but in the future you’ll get your own movie theater. Trust me. The only catch is that you won’t get the theater until after you die and, no, I don’t have any proof that it even exists. Oh, and it’ll cost you 10% of your income for the rest of your life. It’s optional and stuff, but we’re gonna guilt the fuck out of you for it.”
There’s a reason the most popular form of the Gospel in America is the Prosperity Gospel. Now it’s more like, “You send us a thousand dollars and god will send you a 56” 3D HD TV. And then you’ll get an even better set up in heaven. Pinky swear.”
I’m much happier to be a former Outreach Coordinator. I still find myself having to find some way to make use of my talents in a job that’s something other than my ideal. But the fact is that I like my job. And it’s been a far better financial boon than doing that whole ministry thing. The fact is, too, that no one is forcing me to stay in my job. No one is telling me that if I quit I’ll hurt other people, I’ll ruin their desire to stay at their jobs. Stupid meetings and pop psychology employee evaluations still aggravate me to no end, but I’m not going to quit my job over them. I did once quit my religion due in no small part to them, though.
That should say something.
------------------------------
*Side note: it’s weird, but I hate these meetings on principle. However, I like my job, really like my team and, in general, enjoy work when I’m, y’know, doing my job. This actually flies directly in the face of the meeting I had today, since I rarely engage in any of the activities that would be considered “my strengths.” Whenever the whole career development discussion comes up I attempt to find ways to work the stuff I like doing in to future possibilities. I’ve been doing that since before I found out what my strengths are, since, y’know, it’s pretty damn obvious to me.
The lesson, as always, is that I’m smarter than pop psychology. I should probably start offering the Geds Super-Dooper Strengths for Employees Strategification Seminar series.
**In my defense, I also missed the bit in the memo that said I could wear jeans. And I got the bit where the boss said we could go home as soon as the meeting was over but still managed to stay at the office for another three and a half hours. Or, y’know, an hour and a half or so after I usually leave work. That first part there was, I’m assuming, karma. The second part just adds to my hatred of such meetings.
False Equivalence
This.
This.
A thousand times this.
Also, it's kind of odd. Yesterday I linked disapprovingly to Truthdig. Today I link ecstatically to Truthdig.
This.
A thousand times this.
Also, it's kind of odd. Yesterday I linked disapprovingly to Truthdig. Today I link ecstatically to Truthdig.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Chris Hedges is Useless
Seriously. I read American Fascists a couple years ago and appreciated it. But over the last year or so everything I've read of his has made me want to pound my head against the wall. Or, maybe, his.
Especially this brilliantly insightful think piece.
It's called "Is America 'Yearning for Fascism?'" Basically, what he's arguing is that we're at the early stages of Germany's handing over of power to Hitler. We have a massive class of increasingly hopeless unemployed who feel powerless and are ready to take to the streets en masse. On this I cannot help but agree.
But who is to blame for this, according to Hedges? The Democrats. Because they're not liberal enough and, therefore, um...profit?
The argument basically boils down to this: Democrats aren't doing enough to help people. They're backed by a limp-wristed and useless liberal intellectual elite that just doesn't understand the problems facing real Americans. The bailout wasn't enough. Health care reform as we (kind of) got it isn't enough. We need to get Americans back to work and back on the path to prosperity. Meanwhile, the left has been focusing on all the wrong things, like racism and idiotic rhetoric.
Now, the fantastic thing about this is that Hedges isn't wrong. I agree with him that the Democrats have been focused on the wrong things and that sending taxpayer money to banks that fucked the system over while forcing people who couldn't afford buy in to the health system without actually doing anything to fix the larger ills of that system is not the way to do things. And, when it gets right down to it, the Democrats are about as liberal these days as President Roosevelt. Not Franklin, mind you. Teddy.
In this the Tea Partiers and the actual Progressives have common cause. Neither side is particularly happy with the Democrats. But the left doesn't like that the Democrats are far too rightward leaning and too willing to cave to the demands of the right.
But that's why you can't treat the Democrats as if they have been operating in a vacuum. A large number of those same people who could probably stand a little government assistance to step back from the abyss of imminent poverty are the same ones who hold up signs claiming Barack Obama is simultaneously worse than Stalin and Hitler. The ones who showed up at the Town Hall Meetings to scream about IslamoSocialistFascists destroying their democracy fail to see that the first effective step the Nazis took was to stop the proper functioning of their elected government.
The folks running off to the wilderness to stock up on ammo and plan for the revolution aren't doing it because they're worried the Democrats and the pointy-headed liberal intellectual elites aren't doing enough to help them. They're doing it because they believe that the tiny steps that have been taken to help are an imminent sign of the destruction of America as they know it. But they're not going to start the revolution shouting, "Health care for all!" They're going to take to the streets looking for "socialists" to put up against the wall.
So we're left with the all-important question: who profits from this? Certainly not Democrats or the liberal elite. It's the right wing power brokers. It's the pundits, talking heads, and would-be Presidents who keep their names and voices in the media every day on our new, wearisome four-year Presidential campaign trail.
The terrifying thing about nascent American fascism, though, is this: there is no American Hitler. Now, I suppose it's strange to call the lack of a Hitler a good thing, but consider the implications.
Hitler tapped in to an underlying vein of discontent in the Wiemar Republic. He laid down the principles for the National Socialists and built his movement from a centralized plan. Nazism had principles, such as they were, before it had power.
America's so-called "yearning for fascism" wasn't built by one, but by many. It has no central figure, no central theme, no unifying concept. Arguing against the proto-fascist movement in America is fighting a mist. It's principles were laid down by the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys in a quest for ratings or the Sarah Palins in an attempt to secure future votes. But in any politic built on fear the one thing that keeps the followers following must be constantly ratcheted up or the crowds will depart. In doing so the only thing that can be created is a monster. Without an American Hitler there is no one to control the monster.
We're already seeing the results of this de-centralization of fascism. There were the Hutaree raids yesterday, but that's just one militia among hundreds with one single plan to kick off a war no one else knew they were fighting that was frightfully simple in its scope and relative ease of execution.
We lack an American Hitler. But in his place we have a hundreds of potential Hutarees, we have thousands of potential Timothy McVeighs. Not one of those groups can possibly take over America in its name. But what they can all do together is worse: they can force it in to anarchy.
If that happens it won't be Barack Obama's fault. But I'm pretty sure that will be left to tomorrow's historians to determine.
Especially this brilliantly insightful think piece.
It's called "Is America 'Yearning for Fascism?'" Basically, what he's arguing is that we're at the early stages of Germany's handing over of power to Hitler. We have a massive class of increasingly hopeless unemployed who feel powerless and are ready to take to the streets en masse. On this I cannot help but agree.
But who is to blame for this, according to Hedges? The Democrats. Because they're not liberal enough and, therefore, um...profit?
The argument basically boils down to this: Democrats aren't doing enough to help people. They're backed by a limp-wristed and useless liberal intellectual elite that just doesn't understand the problems facing real Americans. The bailout wasn't enough. Health care reform as we (kind of) got it isn't enough. We need to get Americans back to work and back on the path to prosperity. Meanwhile, the left has been focusing on all the wrong things, like racism and idiotic rhetoric.
Now, the fantastic thing about this is that Hedges isn't wrong. I agree with him that the Democrats have been focused on the wrong things and that sending taxpayer money to banks that fucked the system over while forcing people who couldn't afford buy in to the health system without actually doing anything to fix the larger ills of that system is not the way to do things. And, when it gets right down to it, the Democrats are about as liberal these days as President Roosevelt. Not Franklin, mind you. Teddy.
In this the Tea Partiers and the actual Progressives have common cause. Neither side is particularly happy with the Democrats. But the left doesn't like that the Democrats are far too rightward leaning and too willing to cave to the demands of the right.
But that's why you can't treat the Democrats as if they have been operating in a vacuum. A large number of those same people who could probably stand a little government assistance to step back from the abyss of imminent poverty are the same ones who hold up signs claiming Barack Obama is simultaneously worse than Stalin and Hitler. The ones who showed up at the Town Hall Meetings to scream about IslamoSocialistFascists destroying their democracy fail to see that the first effective step the Nazis took was to stop the proper functioning of their elected government.
The folks running off to the wilderness to stock up on ammo and plan for the revolution aren't doing it because they're worried the Democrats and the pointy-headed liberal intellectual elites aren't doing enough to help them. They're doing it because they believe that the tiny steps that have been taken to help are an imminent sign of the destruction of America as they know it. But they're not going to start the revolution shouting, "Health care for all!" They're going to take to the streets looking for "socialists" to put up against the wall.
So we're left with the all-important question: who profits from this? Certainly not Democrats or the liberal elite. It's the right wing power brokers. It's the pundits, talking heads, and would-be Presidents who keep their names and voices in the media every day on our new, wearisome four-year Presidential campaign trail.
The terrifying thing about nascent American fascism, though, is this: there is no American Hitler. Now, I suppose it's strange to call the lack of a Hitler a good thing, but consider the implications.
Hitler tapped in to an underlying vein of discontent in the Wiemar Republic. He laid down the principles for the National Socialists and built his movement from a centralized plan. Nazism had principles, such as they were, before it had power.
America's so-called "yearning for fascism" wasn't built by one, but by many. It has no central figure, no central theme, no unifying concept. Arguing against the proto-fascist movement in America is fighting a mist. It's principles were laid down by the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys in a quest for ratings or the Sarah Palins in an attempt to secure future votes. But in any politic built on fear the one thing that keeps the followers following must be constantly ratcheted up or the crowds will depart. In doing so the only thing that can be created is a monster. Without an American Hitler there is no one to control the monster.
We're already seeing the results of this de-centralization of fascism. There were the Hutaree raids yesterday, but that's just one militia among hundreds with one single plan to kick off a war no one else knew they were fighting that was frightfully simple in its scope and relative ease of execution.
We lack an American Hitler. But in his place we have a hundreds of potential Hutarees, we have thousands of potential Timothy McVeighs. Not one of those groups can possibly take over America in its name. But what they can all do together is worse: they can force it in to anarchy.
If that happens it won't be Barack Obama's fault. But I'm pretty sure that will be left to tomorrow's historians to determine.
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