The Season of Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 5, 2017 by hessd

Bette seems never to have cared about Valentine’s Day one way or the other. I always did: I hated it. As an elementary school child, I ran into the “valentines for everyone in the class” rule. Hated it! Why would I send a valentine to Bumpy Gray [1] and if I did, what would it say?

I don’t remember the Valentine scuffles in my first marriage. I suspect there were some because I learned with great relief that my second wife didn’t care about Valentine’s Day one way or the other. I took that as an opportunity to put the practice behind me and very likely railed against “Hallmark Holidays” invented for the sole purpose of selling cards.

I met Bette late in January, twelve Januaries ago. [2] And Valentines Day was upon me before I could devise a strategy for it.

Buffalo Alums.jpgThis was a whole new thing for me. I was completely smitten and was rooting around for occasions that would allow me to say something that I very much wanted to say. This wasn’t being fastened upon me, as in grade school, or a matter of mutual disinterest, as with my second wife. No, this was me looking for an occasion and seizing on Valentine’s Day as an excuse. That changed my attitude toward it entirely. {The picture is from the right era, at least. In it, we are celebrating Bette’s alma mater, (North Dakota State) which is represented by the same colors as my alma mater (the University of Oregon.)

Besides that, I got from Bette that Valentine’s Day a much-treasured confirmation that this lady was something special. I showed up at the door of her condo prepared for courtship. I had arranged four kinds of flour—I did quite a bit of baking back in those days—in plastic bags and I gave them to her as we stood there at the door. I said that I didn’t know her well enough to know what her favorite flowers were (implying that I would have bought them if I had known), so instead, I brought these (handing them to her) because they are my favorite flours.

She was very gracious about receiving the flours from me. We chatted for a little while in the kitchen until I thought I had been there long enough. But when I started to leave, she said, “Thank you for the flours” in the tone and with the look of a woman who has just been given a dozen perfect roses, which happened to be her favorite flower. That look. That tone.  It was wonderful!

I really liked that and Bette and I have celebrated Valentine’s Day in a big way ever since. I have decided that her willingness to marry me ought not to mean that I stop courting her. She is willing to continue to be courted, particularly during what I have come to think of as “the Valentine’s Day season.” So it works out really well.

This year, Starbucks is featuring a shortbread cookie as a valentine. It has the stereotypical “heart” shape and a truly cryptic message on it. It says XO OX, as you can plainly see. I’ve worked a little on cracking the code this year and I want to tell you what I have discovered.IMG_0487.jpg

As I see it, it means “bovine barbecue.” I’m not entirely sure why that is specially appropriate for Valentine’s Day, particularly because you don’t get to be an ox without parting with a precious part of your anatomy. You can be Presbyterian without that, I am glad to say, an allusion that will be explored in just a moment.

Looking first at XO. The only language I have found in which this is actually a word is Chinese. Xo is a spicy seafood sauce originating in Hong Kong. Why you would want to put that on the flesh of an ox is puzzling, of course, but then naming a celebration of courtly love after a priest [3] isn’t all that straightforward either. And if you call beef with barbecue sauce on it “barbecued beef,” then Xo Ox is perfectly understandable.

You may have thought that the reference to Presbyterians was casual, but it was not. Etymology comes once again to the rescue. Presbyterianism is a form of church governance characterized by rule by “elders.” The Greek presbyteros is not very far away; it means “elder.” But why does it mean “elder?” The prefix pre- meaning “before” is not a puzzle. That leaves us only -buteros, from the root bous, meaning “ox.” There was, according to one of the accounts I read, a favored position saved for an old man, leading the ox to the place where the ox would be sacrificed. [4] So it is the combination “the old man in the front with the ox” that gives us presbyteros and prestyteros that gives us Presbyterianism, the rule of the church by such elders.

So much for meaning. There remains the question of just why XO has come to meanXOXO2.jpg“hugs and kisses.” First, it ought to mean “kisses and hugs” because the X is the symbol that is supposed to refer to osculation. Still, we make do with the language as we find it.

As to just why the X symbol means what it is supposed to mean and the O what it is supposed to mean, I recommend a bouquet of speculations collected and arranged by Deborah Honeycutt at Today I Found Out. Some of the explanations have to do with Tic-Tac-Toe; some with X as a lingering symbol for Christ; some with the purported practice of Jewish immigrants “signing” with an O because they didn’t want to sign with “a Christian symbol.” [5]

So this “Valentine’s Day season,” there is a great deal to think about. I have, I am delighted to say, a wife who still likes to be courted. There is the whole season of Valentine’s Day which provides a context that otherwise I would have to invent. And there are cards which say little fragments (each) of the things I would like to say to Bette in the Valentine’s Day season. Some are a little goofy; some are sweet; some are sexy. Some are borrowed from other occasions; if I like the picture enough, I just change the message.

So much to do. So little time.

[1] I actually did have a classmate named Bumpy Gray. I didn’t find out his name was Paul until a substitute teacher called the roll one time. We all said, “Who?”
[2] We just celebrated the 12th anniversary of our first date. At Starbucks. I had learned in six months of dating that “coffee” is a god amount of time for a first date because you never know how it is going to turn out.
[3] One of the plausible actual Valentines who might have been associated with sainthood was a Roman Catholic priest, who presumably would have been celibate. I understand that there were exceptions, but the combination of a non-participating priest and a castrated bovine in the celebration of romantic love is just too much to pass up.

[4] Partridge in his Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English says originally meant “(an ox) leading the way.” Barnhart, in The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology thinks it might refer to an old man (presbyteros is the comparative form of presbys, meaning “old”) who leads a herd of cattle.
[5] In the middle of this explanation, I learned that kike, a derogatory term referring to Jews, comes from kikel, the Yiddish word meaning “circle.” And if it is true that Jewish immigrants signed with a circle while other immigrants signed with an X, that would actually make sense.

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Groundhog

Posted on February 3, 2017 by hessd

So here is what Punxsatawney Phil actually said today. [1]

“It’s mighty cold weather, you’ve been braving. Is it more winter or is it spring that you’re craving? Since you’ve been up all night and starting to tottle, I, Punxsutawney Phil, shall not dawdle,” the proclamation read. “My faithful followers, I could clearly see a beautiful, perfect shadow of me. Six more weeks of winter, it shall be!”

So now we know. What we don’t know is whether life means anything if it isn’t “going anywhere.” It’s a question worth asking, so I think we ought to begin with a Japanese existentialist novel. What better place?

dunes-1Kobo Abe’s 1964 novel The Woman in the Dunes is the first treatment of this theme I know about. The protagonist , Niki Junpei, is an entomologist who is trapped in a sand pit because the locals won’t let him leave. All day every day he must shovel back the ever-advancing sand dunes. A young woman lives in the cave as well and they both work at this task. Eventually, working at this endless task along with the young woman comes to seem an appropriate way to spend his life.

The movie of the same name by director Masaki Kobayashi is also well known. Reviewer Michelle “Izzy” Organa characterizes the entomologist’s original reaction to his plight as “his arrogance and desire to leave.” So someone—either director Kobayashi or reviewer Organa—feels that the entomologist’s desire to go where he wants to go and do what he wants to do is “arrogant.” [2]

Grappling with the trials of Niki Junpei is much heavier work than grappling with the trials of Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is the same story as Woman in the Dunes in every thematic sense, but no one has ever said Woman in the Dunes is a comedy. Groundhog Day is certainly a comedy.

In each, however, there comes a point when the protagonist either “chooses” (Junpei) or “accepts” (Connors) his fate. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of the plot.

Murray plays Phil Connors, an arrogant Pittsburgh TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, finds himself caught in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again. After indulging in hedonism and committing suicide numerous times, he begins to re-examine his life and priorities.

Note that “arrogant” shows up again. We could make Groundhog Day a much more serious movie than director Harold Ramis wants it to be by asking just what rights the “arrogant” Connors has “arrogated to himself,” but that is not the way the movie goes.

And when Connors says, “I’m happy now,” it means a lot more than it would mean if I said it. If I said “now,” I would be contrasting it with some “then” or other. Maybe “back then” or some “will I still be happy then” in the future. But for a man who knows that “now” is all he will ever have, to be happy “now” is a very big deal.

Connors has become happy “now” by taking his recurring day—just the one day: every daydune-5 begins with the same weather forecast and the same music and the same pointless jokes on the radio—and turning it into a ritual of good deeds. He changes the flat tire on a car, peforms the Heimlich maneuver on a man choking to death in a local restaurant, catches a kid falling out of a tree, rescues a homeless man from starving and freezing to death. And…he honestly courts a woman he loves, knowing that she will continue to reject him and that he will continue to deserve rejection.

Of course “she,” Andie McDowell, does in fact fall in love with him and either that or something else breaks the spell and magically “tomorrow” arrives with its resolution of absolutely everything.

Still…I like to find and cherish the serious questions embedded in comedies. Perhaps I don’t feel so threatened by them if they are in comedies. But the question is, What would you do with your life if nothing “mattered” in the sense of leading to anything. Your actions, good or bad, have no consequences at all for “tomorrow.” In that context, would you choose to do good to your fellows?

Would you really? Why?

[1]  For the benefit of western or non-North American readers, Punxsatawney Phil is a groundhog is western Pennsylvania who is supposed to come out of his hole on the second day of February and look around to see if he can see his shadow.  If he can, that means there will be six more weeks of cold weather.  It may sound like the sheerest nonsense, but it is dear to the merchants of Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania.

[2]  There is the question, of course, of what is arrogant about wanting to get on with your plans for your life.  Etymologically, you are arrogant if you arrogate to yourself some good, to “claim or seize with out right,” says my Webster’s phone app.  That makes the relationship between arrogate and arrogant clear.  But both come from the Latin verb rogare, which means “to ask.”  That connection does not seem clear to me.

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Narcissist-in-Chief

Posted on January 30, 2017 by hessd

Imagine a man [1] who is a father, an employer, and a mayor. Oh…and he is a narcissist. What does that personal condition [2] imply for the three roles I mentioned?

Let’s start at the other end of the question. In two of those instances (employer and mayor) there are expectations and permissions that go with that status. A person comes to occupy that status and learns, suddenly, that he is expected to behave in this way and that way and that quite a few behaviors that were previously criticized are now expected or forgiven. He may very well begin to act in those new ways not so much because he needs to, but because he is expected to and finds that he gets a kick out of it.

If I had to have a name for that sequence, I think I would call it “role-oriented narcissism-4narcissism.”  But the case I presented is not like that. This guy—the father, employer, mayor—IS a narcissist. It is what he is like ; he overestimates his abilities and has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation. [3] And that means that he will be a narcissistic father, a narcissistic employer, and a narcissistic mayor. He brings his condition, in other words, to the statuses he occupies and as he plays out the roles those statuses demand, characteristic traits of NPD show up at home and at the workplace and at city hall.

What should we look for? Here’s a series of signs rather grandiosely labeled “the seven deadly sins of narcissism” by Sandy Hotchkiss. [4] She names them

  • shamelessness
  • magical thinking
  • arrogance
  • envy
  • entitlement
  • exploitation, and
  • bad boundaries.

Let’s take the mayor’s role for our example. Hotchkiss’s descriptions overlap a bit, so I will choose the ones that seem most distinct from each other. [5]

Shamelessness: the mayor does things he should be ashamed of, but he is not. This lack of shame is seen as a deficiency. When shame works properly, it signals that important social norms have been transgressed. Being “shameless” means having to do without those cues.

Magical thinking: the mayor uses distortion and illusion to maintain his image of himself and his office and he projects faults, personal and political, onto others.

Entitlement: the mayor feels that he is entitled to particularly favorable treatment and is not to be held to the standards to which most mayors are held.

Exploitation: the mayor exploits the vulnerability of others, without regard for their legitimate interests or the interests of their departments.

Poorly defined boundaries: The mayor sees his office as central to everything that is going on—whether it is or not—failing to realize that other people and other offices are not just extensions of himself and his office.

The point to notice here is that this is “person-oriented” narcissism. The person who is the mayor—and the employer and the father—is a narcissist, so he takes these traits with him to every status, every position, he holds. He is a narcissist no matter what, but the effects of his narcissism are magnified as he has access to statuses that give him power over others.

It would be a really bad thing to elect a narcissist to be President of the most powerful nation in the world. That would be a very bad thing. And it would not be, in the way I have been defining it, because this man would be less narcissistic without these roles to play; it would be because the effects of his narcissism will be more widespread as he gets access to more and more powerful roles.

narcissist-5That brings me to Donald Trump. And for those of you who are wondering why it took me so long, the answer is that I am trying to distinguish between the effects of narcissistic behavior, on the one hand, and the causes or the signs of it on the other

I saw a short news story on the Rachel Maddow Show a few days ago. [6] She showed a collection of interviews with Republican candidate Donald Trump (not President Trump) in which he said that as long as we were in Iraq, we should just take the oil. I think that’s a bad thing to say, even for a blowhard jingoist like Trump, but that isn’t what horrified me. It was the justifications that horrified me.

There are two. First, that there is no entity that can be meaningfully identified as Iraq. This will come as a great surprise to Mohammed Ali Ahakim (below), who serves at the United Nations representing the Republic of Iraq. “Iraq” is just a bunch of tribes who spend their time killing each other, according to Trump. And if there is no legitimate entity called Iraq, then “Iraq” cannot own the oil and therefore there is no reason for us not to take it.

Second, if there were a nation of Iraq, they owe us for the security services we provided them. They didn’t pay us for all the money we spent there and all the lives we lost there, so we should just take the oil as our just payment.  So the event that I always saw as an invasion–President Bush called it that at the time and gave some democratic cover for it–is now recast as “security services.”

Are there, in these remarks, any evidence of the traits Sandy Hotchkiss saw as associatednarcissism-2 with narcissism? It seems to me that we can find three there at least. Shamelessess is the first. We have done grievous harm to the nation of Iraq and to the Iraqi people. Some U. S. President some day will apologize for what we have done. We have been aggressive beyond any modern precedent in a great power democracy in our behavior toward other nations. Some Americans are ashamed of what we have done. I am one of those. My President is not.

Exploitation, clearly, if it is defined as behaving toward other nations without any recognition of their legitimate interests. If the weakness of a nation whose defenses are not adequate to defend itself against our military is seen as no more than the ripeness of a banana that is ready to be picked, then “exploitation” seem a fair charge.

I think what I called “poorly defined boundaries” (and Hotchkiss or her editor called “bad boundaries”) is indicated as well. What can be taken militarily and what can be purchased financially and what can be negotiated diplomatically seem all to flow into each other. “Why is it,” the narcissist asks, “that you persist in saying that you have legitimate needs when they clearly oppose my wishes? Why is that?”

narcissism-3I need to find a way to get off this horse before I disappear over the far horizon and I have an idea. There is hardly a more innocuous movie that The Wedding Date, starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney. Messing takes Mulroney to the wedding of her sister, pretending that he is her fiancé when in fact he is a professional escort. Messing is concerned that the proceedings will go well, but they start going badly as soon as she and her “wedding date “ arrive.

The house is crowded with guests and over the speaker system comes the voice of Messing’s mother, a woman with no social sense whatever. “Oh sweet Jesus,” says Messing, “Who gave that woman an amp?”

Now the mother, the person herself, is who she is. And if she were that person in a receiving line or huddling quietly in a corner with long-time friends, that would be one thing. Giving her the tools to dominate the auditory space of all the guests at the same time is another thing entirely.

And that’s what I’m talking about. President Trump isn’t newly narcissistic. But he is newly President.

[1] Men more than women, according to a recent study. I doubt that, myself. I haven’t done any studies and I don’t know the literature, but I am quite certain that as interest in this topic proceeds, we disc”over that there are “different kinds of narcissim (depending on the trait being measured) and that men are more commonly afflicted by some kinds, women by other kinds. Watch and see.
[2] That is the first line or so of Wikipedia’s very chaste account of the condition.
[3] I am referring here the the full-blown personality disorder now being called NPD, which probably does not please the German political party (Nationaldemokratische Deutschland) with shares the acronym.
[4] That is, in fact, the subtitle of her 2008 book, “Why is always about you?”
[5] For the record, I deny the charge that I chose these particular traits because they spell SMEEP and are, therefore, easy to remember.
[6] Rachel Maddow is a commentator/new anchor of the far left, a proponent of what I called in my most recent post “niche journalism.” I am not relying on her judgment about the merits of the news clips, only that they are, in fact, circulating on social media in the middle east and that they are subtitled in Arabic, as shown.

 

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Fools, Friends, and the Media

Posted on January 28, 2017 by hessd

I was in a discussion recently where the ability of comics who use politics as their medium was celebrated. There were kind memories of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, of Stephen Colbert, and of the current cast of characters on Saturday Night Live.

We celebrated their freedom to tell the truth everyone already knows—both the liberals who like to see conservatives ridiculed and those young people (40% was the last figure I saw)  who don’t know the difference between satire and news. They were contrasted to journalists, whose commitment to “covering” the conventional events of “news stories” required them to serve as the tools of media manipulators.

Until recently, I would have said those were our options—just the fools and the media. The fools, the jesters, get to tell the truth so long as it is presented as humor. The press gets to tell the facts, but are precluded from telling any larger truth. Recently, I have seen the tentative opening up of a middle ground and that’s what I want to think about today.

The Fools and the Journalists

As in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, the fool gets to tell the truth everyone knows, but he is the only person in the room who wouldn’t be punished for it. Here are some examples.

Touchstone says in As You Like It, “By my troth, we that have good wits have much to answer for.” Act 5, scene 1.

And the Fool in King Lear smirks, “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.” Act 1, scene 4.

fool-4And Stephen Colbert blusters, “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Season 3, Episode 2

We could modernize any of those–except, of course, the last one–and run them on the late night comedy shows. So we already have our supply of Fools, who dare to tell the truth.

The major news media, by contrast are shackled by their notion of what is”professional.” It is “professional,” for instance to say what the candidate said. It is not professional to opine about whether it was true. It is “professional” to pair a speaker representing one side [1] of an issue with a speaker from the other side, so an eminent climatologist is paired with a creationist from Feathertown, Tennessee. [2] It’s one “opinion” against another.

A New Center Option?

I’m wondering, though, if that isn’t changing. It may be that the New York Times, my principal news source, is breaking some new ground. On January 23, the Times headlined: “Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers.”

Then, on January 24th, I saw this headline in the Times: “Trump Won’t Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are the Facts.”

These are not the headlines of opinion columns. They are not even headlines of newspaper fool-1articles called “analysis.” These are “news stories.” In a long life of reading the New York Times, I have never seen anything like it.

And this is not, by my reading, just a retaliation against a President that the Times doesn’t like. They didn’t like George W. Bush either and I don’t remember any headlines calling him a liar. No, this is something more important. This is—it might be—a change is what “professionalism” allows the press to say.

If it were that kind of change, that would be a really big deal.

Papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (and back in the old days, ABC, CBS, and NBC) are not niche sources for news. Fox news is a niche source; MSNBC is a niche source. They are the friends that we go to for the selection of stories you want with the spin we like best. So it would not be “a really big deal” for  Fox to be pushing the notion of “alternative facts” or for MSNBC to call President Trump our Liar-in-Chief.

The freedom of those niche sources to say what we want them to say represents what the newspapers of record, like the three I gave as examples, have rejected as “not professional.”  Real journalism means not only:

  • checking allegations to make sure they are factual and
  • checking quotations to make sure they are accurate;
  •  It means appearing “evenhanded.” (Evenhandedness means citing one source for one side of a political issue and one from the other.)
  • Above all, it means not taking editorial positions in the news articles.

That made them easy to manipulate in the recent presidential election. What does “real journalism” do with Donald Trump’s continued assertion that Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Do you say, “Some say this and others say that; conclusive evidence has not been presented?” Do you keep saying that after conclusive evidence has been presented?

What do you say about the denial of global warming and the volatile climatic changes that are happening before our eyes? Do you keep saying, “Most climate scientists are persuaded that the warming hypothesis is solidly supported, although some disagree?” Is there a point at which you say, “These politicians are denying facts for their own political advantage?” Is that professional journalism?

Here’s what I think the short answer is.

The media have realized that when the lies are big enough and when they are repeated fool-2often enough, there is simply no way for the media to deal with them while staying within the boundaries of “professional journalism” as previously defined. I think they have decided that the pallid responses to which they have limited themselves have made them tools of some of the worst elements of American politics and they have decided that if that is what “professional” means, it is time to give it up. (This is Sean Spicer, by the way, President Trump’s Press Secretary.  For fans of The West Wing, he is standing where C. J. Craig used to stand.)

If they have, in fact, decided to do that, I  find it encouraging. If this is what is really happening—it is very early in the process, after all—then the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal are creating a new center for political journalism. They would, in doing this, have shoved the Fools, who are entitled to tell the truth as long as it is on the Comedy channel, to one side. They would have shoved the ardent partisanship of the niche organizations, the Friends,  to the other side. That is, after all, how you create a center.

And in that center, you would have respected papers of record using words that fool-3communicate the truth in plain language. “He knows it isn’t true and he keeps on saying it is true. If that isn’t lying, what is?” And these bald confrontational questions wind up in the headlines, not buried in the text.  And not countered by someone representing “the other side.

The Trump administration will, of course, retaliate. But in the past, the media have been pretty capable of defending themselves, and, when it comes right down to it, defending their sources as well. [3] Mark Twain’s advice still seems good to me.

[1] The whole notion that there is “another side” imagines issues with only one axis of concern. Ordinarily, there are at least three or four axes (so 6 or eight “positions” to be covered) along which the issue may be understood. If there really are 6 or 8 “other sides,”then the notion of getting a spokesman to represent it (them) no longer works.
[2] Feathertown, Tennessee is the fictional setting of Barbara Kingsolver’s superb novel, Flight Behavior, in which local climate change deniers come into contact with scientists studying the changed migration of Monarch butterflies.

[3] When there is a very large swing in the style of administrations, usually a lot of people a moved to become whistleblowers. They will need to talk to the press and they will need for the press to protect them.

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Did Jesus pick fights he could have avoided?

Posted on January 24, 2017 by hessd

I think so. Let me review three instances where I see that happening and then I’ll come back so we can revisit the question together. The three concern: a) Jesus’s healing of a paralyzed man, b) his partying with sinners, and c) his justification of his disciples’ violation of the Sabbath.  These are all stories that Luke passes along to us.

Healing a Paralyzed Man

Jesus heals a paralyzed man and declares that his sins have been forgiven. [1] The scribes argument-6and Pharisees accuse Jesus of blasphemy, interpreting his statement as something he, himself, was doing. It would have been easy for Jesus to have said that God had obviously forgiven this man, so it was not something Jesus was doing, but only something Jesus recognized.  Then they could argue about whether God had done that or not, citing various interpretations against each other.

That’s not what Jesus did. Here is the account in Luke 5.

21 The scribes and the Pharisees began to think this over. ‘Who is this man, talking blasphemy? Who but God alone can forgive sins?’ 22 But Jesus, aware of their thoughts, made them this reply, ‘What are these thoughts you have in your hearts? 23Which of these is easier: to say, “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Get up and walk”? 24 But to prove to you that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’—he said to the paralyzed man—‘I order you: get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home.

In this episode, Jesus accepts his opponents’ understanding of what he had done and offered a “proof” that he had not exceeded his authority. He said, “I will continue to debate this matter with you if you have the power, as I do, to heal this man. Oh, you don’t have the power? I guess the discussion is over then.”

Partying with sinners

In Luke’s account (5:29—32), Jesus attends a party in the home of his newest disciple, a tax collector named Levi. The Pharisees noted the Jesus was associating with people whom the Law told him to avoid. Jesus took the whole basket of undesirables and recategorized them.

The Pharisees saw these people as an affront to God. God demands purity and purityargument-5 requires that you forego association with violators of the law. Jesus did not dispute that the other people at the party were sinners and he did not dispute that he would become ceremonially impure by association with them. He said, as I hear it, “They may be impure, but they are also spiritually sick. It is my mission to heal as many as I can. Why would God send me to people—like you—who are not sick and who, therefore, have no need of my special gift?”

Overseeing God’s Sabbath

Let’s take one more. At the beginning of chapter 6, Luke gives an account of a controversy about the Sabbath.

It happened that one Sabbath he was walking through the cornfields, and his disciples were picking ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands and eating them. 2 Some of the Pharisees said, ‘Why are you doing something that is forbidden on the Sabbath day?’ 3 Jesus answered them, ‘So you have not read what David did * when he and his followers were hungry— 4 how he went into the house of God and took the loaves of the offering and ate them and gave them to his followers, loaves which the priests alone are allowed to eat?’ 5 And he said to them, ‘The Son of man is master of the Sabbath.’

Jesus was challenged about the Sabbath-breaking of his disciples. [2] He gave an answer entirely within the narrative of Judaism using a kind of debate that was common among the rabbis. And then he claimed an unheard of status for himself—he attacked the entire structure of “holiness as separation” by declaring that he, himself, was master over God’s sabbath.

OK, there are three instances where, it seems to me, Jesus picked a fight he need not have picked. So this Jesus, the Jesus Luke gives us, [3] apparently wanted to make a point of some kind by picking these fights. Nothing Luke ever says about Jesus suggests that Jesus was not in control of his words and his actions. These events that Luke describes are not slip-ups; they are tactics. And tactics are intended to accomplish something. That brings us to the question of just why Jesus was picking these particular fights with these particular people.

Why Jesus Picked Fights

In this section, we move from material that is clearly part of Luke’s tradition. In recounting them, I am not speculating about anything; I’m just telling you what Jesus did and said. And we are moving to raw speculation. Luke has no interest at all in telling us why Jesus was doing these things, so we are really on our own here. [4]

argument-1Let’s begin with Jesus as a chooser of what issues are going to be salient.  Etymologically, and issue is “salient” when it jumps out at you. [5] Each of the events I have chosen as examples brings some new aspect of Judaism front and center. In the case of the paralytic, the question of God’s forgiveness is raised. At the party, the question of holiness as separation from the needy is raised.  In the “cornfield,” the question of the applicability of the Law to Jesus and his mission is raised.

There was, in each of these areas, the normal way of looking at a question and then there were other elements at the margins. In each of these, Jesus took one of these “marginal” issues and made it central. Something about the message Jesus wanted to bring required new ways of looking at old things, so I think the general answer to the question I raised (Why did Jesus pick fights?) is just that–it offers a chance to look at things in a new way.

How does that idea work out in these three episodes?

In the case of the paralytic, Jesus does two things that, together, have powerful implications. He accepts the Pharisees understanding that he had forgiven the sins of the paralyzed man and links it to his power to heal. Either one of those would set him against the Pharisees, but together they make a very strong claim—they attach this claim to a title Jesus uses of himself—“Son of Man.” Jesus comes very close to saying to the Pharisees that whoever has the power has the authority.

The Pharisees claimed the authority of Moses, which is perfectly fair, but the authority they had did not enable them to cure this man. If power and authority are linked, then the Pharisees have neither. If they are not linked, Jesus has power, but the Pharisees have authority.

My argument here is that Jesus did not correct the misunderstanding of the Pharisees because accepting their accusation enabled him to clarify something about his ministry—that God had endowed him particularly with the power to heal and the authority to forgive sins—and that this relationship with God he was claiming put him outside the reach of the Pharisees.

In the case of Levi and his friends, the argument Jesus is looking for is unexpectedly fundamental. The whole Jewish notion of “holiness” is related to “separation from.” When Yahweh says He is holy, the meaning is that He is “other” and “separate” and “not mixed in” and when God asks His people to be holy, the meaning is the same. See Isaiah 52:11b for the original context). The way to stay holy is to avoid sources of contamination and the Pharisees were very serious about avoiding contamination.

When Jesus changes “contaminated” to “sick,” he changes the other role from “separated Israelite” to “engaged physician.” What kind of a physician would avoid people who were sick? Now, in the most literal and most narrow view, Jesus identified “tending to the sick” as his own role, not one that “sons of Israel” should play. He could be understood as saying, “I know this is not your role, but I want you to know that it is the role I was sent here to play.” But in context, there is a very good chance that Jesus’s rejoinder will be taken to mean: “And why are you Pharisees refusing to attend to the sick?” It would be a strong accusation at that level of meaning and that seems to be the way the Pharisees took it.

So the answer to the question “Why did Jesus pick fights?” as it appears in this story is, “So he could upend the Pharisees concern with purity and replace it with a concern for healing.”

In the final episode, the “Lord of the Sabbath” episode, the contrast is clearest and the attachment of the argument to Jesus himself is most prominent. Here’s the way Joseph Fitzmyer  (see footnote 1) puts it.

Without formally abolishing the Sabbath regulations, Jesus subordinates them to his person and mission.

argument-3Jesus picked this fight, it seems to me, in order to establish that he dare not subordinate his mission to the ordinary constraints of Judaism. That’s why he didn’t stop with the rabbinic justification of his disciples’ actions, but went on to make a claim about himself.
The point could be phrased this way. “I am a loyal law-observing Jew, but I have also been set apart by God for a particular mission and I must be loyal to that mission above everything. So when the two are in conflict, as they are here [6] I must be loyal to God’s call and not to the Law.” This is not different from the conflict just before this one and which I had to skip over. (Luke 5:36—39) in which Jesus identifies his movement as being like “new wine” and the Jewish institutional commitments as “old wineskins.”

Summary

I am amazed that I read these stories during the whole of my youth without noticing how Jesus sought these conflicts. It seems so plain to me now. I suppose that I was taught that “Jesus was a nice person” and therefore that he would not seek out and provoke conflicts unnecessarily. And if one begins with that interpretative filter, these stories can be understood—not very well—in another way.  Clearly, Jesus is baiting his opponents in these stories.  It isn’t that they were stupid, in Luke’s account, but that they were led into an ambush.

But if Jesus did seek out and exacerbate these conflicts, as I am arguing here, then we get to ask the next question, which is “Why did he do that?” My answer in this essay is that he did it in order to change the question from the ones that were being asked to the ones that needed to be asked if he was to clarify who he was and what his mission was. [6] Everyone is forced into speculation when the question “why did Jesus do that?” is asked. For “what Jesus did” we rely on the several gospel accounts. For “why did he do that,” we are, I regret to say, on our own.

My view is that Jesus had an answer he needed to give and that he did what he needed to do to provoke the question that required that answer.

[1] There is some debate about what Jesus actually said here and what it meant. Joseph Fitzmyer, my authority on Luke (see the Yale Anchor Bible Commentary), translates Jesus’s remark as “Your sins have been forgiven you” and suggests that the theological passive used here is meant to suggest that it is God who has done the forgiving.
[2] This was one of the most puzzling stories for me when I was young. What the disciples were doing with “corn” made no sense to me at all. I had had a lot of experience with “ears of corn” and I know you can’t do with them what the disciples did. It took me a long time to realize that the text has grain in mind, not maize. And then there was the matter of the disciples stealing from the farmer through whose fields they were walking. So that looked like trespassing to me and then theft on top of it. I was bewildered.
[3] Perhaps it is worth saying here that we and dependent on Luke’s view of what Jesus did and what he was trying to do. My argument that Jesus’s intentions can be reasonably read right off the page could more carefully be phrased as “the Jesus tradition Luke draws on presents him in this way.” So it may be that the contrasts that I find so compelling are the ones Luke wants us to see rather than the ones Jesus would have wanted us to see. There is no resolution to that problem. Luke (and the other synoptic accounts) is the source of our information and there isn’t any way to peek around the account to the events that lay behind it.
[4] I am not entirely on my own. I have benefitted a good deal from the work of Sidney Tarrow’s Power in Movement:Social Movements and Contentious Politics., particularly his idea of the “repertoire of contention” and Charles Tilly’s idea of “claims as performances” in his Contentious Performances.
[5] Salire, “to leap” is the root of quite a few English words, including, oddly enough, “salacious.”
[6] Of course they were not fundamentally in conflict here. That is established by Jesus’s defense of his disciples’ action through an interpretation of the scriptures. Jesus went on—unnecessarily, in the view of this essay—to redefine the conflict as fundamental. “I am the Lord of the Sabbath” is a fundamental conflict.

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Some Rhetorical Similarities in Trump and Hitler Speeches

Posted on January 22, 2017 by hessd

I want to write about Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler today. I know no one is going to like what I have to say, but I feel, nonetheless, some urgency about saying it now.

Here is the whole message of this essay. If you are willing to read this sentence, you will have done everything I have asked you to do. [1]

There are amazing and disconcerting similarities between Donald Trump’s inaugural address on January 20, 2017 and Adolf Hitler’s first address as Chancellor—his Regierungserklaerung—on February 10, 1933.

No one will like this.

rhetoric-1I have taught in public schools and universities nearly all my life, so I can tell you that comparing anyone to Adolf Hitler is taken as a serious insult. If you say to a politician who is five feet and nine inches tall that he is as tall as Hitler, he will take it as a mortal insult. He will say, incredulously, “Are you comparing me to Hitler?” If I say that Hitler was a marvelously gifted tactician, deploying a largely unwilling bureaucracy with great skill, I will be accused of “justifying Hitler.”

On the other hand, I will, in this essay, point out some disquieting similarities between Hitler’s first speech as Chancellor and Trump’s first speech as President. These will be pale comparisons; largely rhetorical comparisons. Here is one example, just to illustrate the kind of thing you will run into if you decide to read on. Trump’s use of “the American people” is remarkably similar to Hitler’s use of “das Deutche Volk.”

And my other readers, not the ones who will be scandalized that I am comparing Trump and Hitler, will be scandalized that I am limiting myself to the comparison of a few phrases chosen by the President and by the Chancellor. It will seem to them that I am justifying the expected horrors of the Trump administration by complaining only about some words that appeared in his first speech as President.

That is why I said that no one is going to like what I am going to say today. The pro-Trump faction will be angry that I have made the comparison at all. The anti-Trump faction will be angry that I have made such a pale and academic comparison.

Rhetorical Similarities

rhetoric-2Noting these similarities is not a charge against Trump. You can go down the two speeches and just substitute a German expression for an English one and just doing that is scary.[2] It is true, however, that Trump sees many more similarities than I do between the time of his assuming power and the time of Hitler’s assuming power. And because Trump sees these similarities, he chooses words that highlight them.  Any good speaker would do that.  Abraham Lincoln did the same thing; he was a superb speaker as a result.

Let’s pick a four examples just to establish the category. First, there is absolutely no difference between “America First” and “Deutchland Über Alles.” [3] The rest of the world would take that for granted, but it sounds odd to American ears, especially after eight years of Obama’s very inclusive internationalism.

Second, I think “peasants” in Hitler’s speech is very closely analogous to Trump’s “forgotten men and women.” Hitler was quite clear about who he saw as the victims of the previous regime.

Then the peasantry starts to become impoverished, the most industrious class in the entire Volk is driven to ruin, can no longer exist, and then this process spreads back to the cities, and the army of unemployed begins to grow…

In President Trump’s speech, the direct reference is “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”And it is not hard to hear the triumph in the following sentence: “Everyone is listening to you now.” [4]

Third, as a candidate, Trump was very general about the programs he favored. He was interested in building a movement, not in proposing some way to achieve particular goals. And the movement was built by what he often referred to as “the status quo.” Hitler used Systemzeit in the same way.

Hitler, as an outsider to the political process and as the leader of a rapidly growing movement had the same rhetorical challenge that President Trump (not candidate Trump) has and met it in a very similar way. Here is Hitler’s rejection of the status quo.

Our opponents are asking about our program. My national comrades, I could now pose the question to these same opponents: “Where was your program?” Did you actually intend to have happen what did happen to Germany?

Fourth, you can have a “program” by establishing goals and giving control over their rhetoric-4achievement to the appropriate agencies, funding them adequately, and then holding them accountable for their work. That’s not how you build a movement. A movement needs a leader. The leader needs to focus the movement on himself and to give indications that he, personally, is bound to the success of the movement.

Here is what that personal characteristic, that quality of attachment looked like in Hitler’s speech. Again, some such device is crucially important if you are setting a movement against a status quo.

Just as I myself have now worked for fourteen years, untiringly and without ever wavering, to build this Movement; and just as I have succeeded in turning seven men into a force of twelve million, in the same way I want and we all want to build and work on giving new heart to our German Volk.

President Trump achieved that same identity of self and movement this way.

I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down.

That’s probably enough by way of examples. You will have to take my word for it that I skipped over a lot of similarities because my goal was not to be comprehensive, but only to illustrate the category. Both Chancellor Hitler and President Trump saw themselves as bringing a new and hopeful (“stop the carnage”) era and as bringing a fresh and powerful new movement to sweep away the inept politicians that preceded him.

Given that similarity of historical settings, it is not at all surprising that the two speakers employed similar rhetorical devices. They are the devices that the situations really require when you see them the way the President and the Chancellor saw them. [5]  And of course, for political outsiders, comparing anyone to Hitler can be seen as an act of rejection.

As I turn from simple rhetorical analysis, I note with real encouragement that in the rhetoric-3United States of our time (by contrast with the Germany of Hitler’s time) there are many social and political institutions, including a robust federal system, in place. They can’t simply be set aside. They will have to be bargained with.

And historically, when insurgent movements begin to bargain with their opponents, they start to slow down and then they begin to unravel. That’s what I hope will happen here.

[1] If you would like to do more, I recommend reading Hitler’s first address as Chancellor of Germany along with Donald Trump’s Inaugural address. Both are readily available. In fact, you can see either of them on YouTube if you like.
[2] As I am writing this, the electronic version of today’s New York Times is featuring a headline, “Trump Renounces Nation’s Political Class.” All you have to do is substitute Systemzeit, referring to the “wasted years of the Weimar Republic, and you have the same sentiment. It just sounds scarier in German. I know that is parochial of me, but that is just how it sounds to my ear.
[3] Historically, it meant “Germany the new nation” over “any one of the component parts.” In the American context, that would mean an appeal to nationalism, such as we find in the Federalist Papers, over states’ rights. So “America First” in the domestic context would mean, “Not you, South Carolina.” President Trump meant it in an international context, which is much closer to the mistranslation “Germany Above Everyone Else,” the meaning I grew up with during World War II.
[4] And just in case there was any doubt about who he was talking about, he adds this clarification. “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
[5] President Obama, facing a similar situation, appealed to a very inclusive patriotism and although his approach was broadly admired, it never really took hold. President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, appealed to “the better angels of our nature”by the secessionist states in 1861 and by the radical Republicans who controlled the Congress in 1865.  I guess that has always been a hard sell.

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Attending the Inauguration

Posted on January 19, 2017 by hessd

Spoiler alert: I’m not going to attend. Of course, I wasn’t invited. But my Congressman, Earl Blumenauer of the 3rd Congressional District of Oregon, isn’t going to attend either and he actually was invited.

The Daily Kos said today that the count of Democratic Representatives pointedly staying away from the swearing in of our new President has reached sixty. It seems to me that they are responding to the wrong cues and choosing the wrong actions.

And it’s not because I am unsympathetic to their point. They think that Donald Trump exemplifies the very worst elements of our political process. I agree. They think that Trump is very poorly qualified to be President and that he is a blusterer, a bully, and and liar. I agree. You can say nearly anything bad you want to about the man and find a ready listener in me.

OK, now let’s start the discussion at a different place. Do you agree, or do you not, that in these highly partisan times, we need institutions, symbols, and ceremonies that will allow us just to be Americans for an afternoon, not Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives? Probably you do agree. [1]

inauguration-2OK, how are we going to have such ceremonies if people say that the ceremony is about the person who is being honored? We will not have them. If the ceremony is about the person rather than the office, then the ceremonies that are supposed to celebrate our unity as Americans and the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another, will have no power at all. Everything is politics—the pursuit of power. Nothing is government—things like providing for a common defense and protecting domestic tranquility.

I think the congressmen know this. Look at the way these two wiggle like a worm on a hook. Rep. Joaquin Castro, representing the 20th Congressional District of Texas, put it this way. [2]

“Every American should respect the office of the presidency and the fact that Donald inauguration-3Trump will be the 45th President of the United States. But winning an election does not mean a man can show contempt for millions of Americans and then expect those very people to celebrate him.

Notice the prominent “but.” Castro thinks every American should respect the office, but the man himself is unworthy. So what does he propose to do to respect the office?

Rep. Grace Meng of the 3rd Congressional District of New York, has the same problem. She says:

I respect the office of the President and our nation’s peaceful transfer of power.But the President-elect must get the message that his antagonistic and divisive comments are unacceptable. We cannot tolerate attacks on women, minorities or a civil rights icon.

inauguration-4It takes her a little longer to get to the “but;” still, when she gets there, she wiggles the same way Rep. Castro did. I respect the office. Good. I respect the peaceful transfer of power. Good. But the man who will take the office is a jerk and the man to whom power is transferred is offensive…and therefore we cannot participate in this celebration of peaceful democracy in America.

So…who will honor our ceremonies? Who will actually honor the office? Let’s imagine that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is elected in 2020. Who should attend the ceremony? Should we really have inaugurations attended only by the partisans of the winning candidate? Would that help us in these fractured times?

I don’t think so. Congressman Castro, Congresswoman Meng, suck it up and go do your job. Lament the man all you want. He is truly lamentable, but honor the office and the process by which it casts its spell on each new incumbent.

I disagree with Castro and Meng but I don’t think they are stupid. Taking highly visible stands on partisan issues will surely help them. Spending their political capital to support the few institutions that represent the nation, will probably hurt them. But it has to be done. Maybe an appeal to good manners would be enough.

The question really can’t be just, “Should we boycott the Republican winner?” You know that if we boycott theirs, they will boycott ours. So the question really is, “Is it vital to have institutions that represent the nation and not just the parties? I think it is. Everyone thinks it is.  Some parts of the inauguration process are, by the way, fully bipartisan.  Here are a few.

inauguration-day-1I think that President Trump’s actions, proposed and executed, should be opposed by everything we have. He is going to want to cozy up to Russia with predictable consequences for Germany and France. Make him pay. He is going to want to gut the health protections President Obama put in place and that the Supreme Court declared to be constitutional. Make him pay. He is going to continue to engage in business practices that are wholly out of line with the office of the President. Make him pay. He is responsible for his actions and when he does wrong, he should pay the consequences.

But we are responsible for the presidency, the office itself, and I think it is worth preserving. And if we are to have a president, we must have an inauguration.

[1] Nearly everyone I have talked to agrees when they let me get that far. Are symbols of our unity (not denials of our diversity) especially important right now? Yes, my friends say, they are. But left alone, they don’t get to that question at all.
[2] I almost said that he put it “these ways,” which is true, but a little too cute to put up in the body of the text. Down here, no one will care.

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The Evangelical Playboy

Posted on January 16, 2017 by hessd

Exit polls show white evangelical voters voted in high numbers for Donald Trump, 80-16 percent, according to exit poll results. That’s the most they have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004, when they overwhelmingly chose President George W. Bush by a margin of 78-21 percent.

So said the Washington Post on November 9.

playboy-1

That’s this guy. This is the choice of the most conservative Christians in America. These are the people responsible for the “abstinence only” curricula in the public schools in, just to pick one example, Texas. [1] That must mean that they think people should abstain from sex apart from marriage. And they voted overwhelmingly for Trump?

One of the standard rants among evangelical Christians includes how awful Hollywood is. Hollywood is perverting our values, is justifying immoral behavior, is—in particular—cheapening the value of marriage and family. How is it, exactly, that Playboy is not an integral part of the “Hollywood values” that Trump exemplifies better than any candidate of either party before him?  Ronald Reagan, by contrast, actually was from Hollywood, but he didn’t advocate or live a “Hollywood-style” life. Trump?  The evangelical choice?  Really?

A lot of evangelicals admitted that they were uncomfortable with “some aspects of Trump’s past.” They dealt with that in different ways. Some preached forgiveness, citing some crucial admonitions, complete with the bible verses that establish them.  But these admonitions, as general as they were, ought to have applied to Hillary as well.  For some reason, they did not.

Some relegated his obnoxious behavior [2] to his past—ignoring the fact that he continued to flaunt it in the present—or made it into a bad habit, like Uncle Irving, who chews with his mouth open.

I have not yet understood why the man himself was not a deal-breaker for conservative Christians. Apart from the politics with which the evangelicals have now saddled themselves, there is the question of their own ministry. There are a lot of radio and television evangelists among the conservative right. What will they do now with their sermons on the worldly lifestyle? Will they look right into the camera and wave their bibles and warn against “the sins of the flesh,” the sins on which President-elect Trump has built his empire?

When Jefferson wrote to the Baptist pastors about the “wall of separation” between religion and government, he believed that it would be bad for government, but disastrous for religion. [3] I think we are about to see if he was right.

[1] One of the best moments in Michael Moore’s otherwise sober film Where to Invade Next shows Texas Governor Rick Perry responding to a reporter who is pushing him on the very high rate of out of wedlock births in Texas. The reporter wondered how Gov. Perry could continue to support an “abstinence only” curriculum when its record was so dismal. Perry’s response was that abstinence works. He know that, he said, from personal experience.
[2] That’s not an editorial on my part. It was obnoxious to them, too.
[3] Letter to the Danbury Baptists, January 1, 1802

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A “Resolution” in the new year

Posted on January 14, 2017 by hessd

That really ought to be the same as “new year’s resolution,” shouldn’t it? But the meaning of “new year’s resolution” turns out to be every bit as puzzling as why we make them and why we, mostly, fail to keep them.

It occurred to me this year that I could come at the whole process from the other side. resolution-5Let’s look at what the word itself—as opposed to our use of it—would like to be or what it would like to do. It’s a little like agreeing to recognize gravity or inertia. I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that the word’s intentions have been frustrating our intentions. There are quite a few things wrong with that formulation. [1] But I do want to start with the word.

Note: I am going to put words in bold when I mean to refer to the word itself, rather than to the meaning of the word, and in italics if it is a precursor of an English word.  I know that “precursor” sounds ethnocentric, but all my readers will read this in English.

I want to start with the Greek verb, luein, “to loosen.” I’m going to step away slowly, with my hands always in plain sight. No need to panic. The Latin version of luein is luere, also “to loose.” [2] We see it in soluere, “to detach, set loose, or free” and we get there very easily by adding se- to the root. That is what they call a privative, meaning that it is a prefix that marks the absence of something or the distortion of something. [3] This gets us as far as the Middle Latin solvere, which is as close to solve as we need to get in order to appreciate resolve.

Resolve, as we all know, does not mean “to solve again.” The function of the prefix re- is “again” sometimes (repeat) but it is often an intensive, where it means “really, really,” and that is what it means here.

Obviously, when we have gotten as far as resolve, the verb, we are at the threshold of resolution, the noun, which is the form we use for a “new year’s resolution.”

Resolution is the noun form of the verb resolve. When I “resolve” something, I have “made a resolution.” One of the meanings the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives is:

IV. To determine or fix upon a course of action.
26.
a. trans. To determine or decide upon (a course of action, something to be achieved or brought about, etc.); to make (something) one’s firm intention.

An early example of this meaning can be seen in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

1594   Shakespeare Titus Andronicus ii. i. 106   So must you resolue, That..You must perforce accomplish as you may.

A later, and more familiar, example comes from Abraham Lincoln:

That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

So a resolution is a “resolving-ness” of a sort. An earlier English would have offered us “a new year’s resolve” and even today, people would likely understand what you meant by that expression. But we now know—this is the main argument of the essay down to this point—that the word wants to mean “a loosening of something.”

We may be able to see “solve a problem” as a sort of bridge usage. The meaning of “solve” in the problem usage and of “solve” in the untying of something are close enough that we can see that they could both mean the same thing. You could “untie” a problem in the sense of “loosening” a knot.

I call that usage a bridge because it connects the early “to release something from its bonds” meaning and the later meaning.  This is the OED again:

to solve (a problem) (1564; 1690 with specific reference to a mathematical problem, 1765 with specific reference to an equation),

January 1, 2017

So it’s a bright Sunday morning and I want to “make some resolutions.” This year, because I have given some thought to what the word “resolution” really wants to be, I am led to think about things that I should untie, things I should “undo” in the way I undo the knot in my shoelaces.

resolution-2These are not things I am going to decide to do, as if they were foreign countries I had not yet invaded or competitors I had not yet eliminated. These are not decisions that I have been struggling with—a di-lemma is a common kind of struggle [4]—what with the two lemmas to deal with.

  • Imagine a woman who is trying to decide whether to continue to be married to her husband or whether to deal with “the bonds of marriage” by loosening them.
  • Imagine a man who has gotten himself involved in overlapping and incompatible committee assignments and who has decided to “un-tie” that knot by a resolution of it.
  • Imagine a caregiver who has both a child who needs special care [5] and whose elderly mother also needs special care. She has been unwilling or unable to engage other members of the family in providing the needed care and also unwilling or unable to share the duties with trained professionals. This knot is tied so tight that sometimes it feels to her as if it is tied around her neck. I say the new year is a great time for un-tying.

The word resolution, based as it is—fundamentally, but distantly, on the Greek verb luein, “to loosen”—has a natural tendency to suggest meanings of untying; of un-doing, rather than more doing. We should treat this word like a horse that knows where the barn is, even if we do not, and just give it it’s head. That will require a little loosening of the reins, of course, but what could be more appropriate?

[1] You always roll the dice a little when you attribute agency to something that cannot resolution-4intend anything and then act on that intention. On the other hand, sometimes it is the easiest way to say something and if you stay vigilant, it doesn’t do any harm. Take Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, for instance. Dawkins does not think that genes “intend;” his contention is that imagining that they do helps us make sense of the pattern of their actions.
[2] If you were thinking of a Toulouse-Lautrec joke, this would be the place for it. It’s not a joke I would want to make, myself.
[3] I think my favorite example is the se- in seduce. The -duce part just means “to lead.” The privative se- here means, “away” or, commonly “astray.”
[4] A lemma is a proposition proved or just assumed to be true. Having two irreconcilable lemmas is a dilemma.
[5] What child doesn’t need special care? Still, you know what I mean.

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Don’t Become the Issue

Posted on January 9, 2017 by hessd

This is an essay directed at my fellow liberals. We can, in the coming months, shift the attention of deeply conflicted Trump voters, from President Trump’s behavior to ours. We can turn them into Trump supporters (not just protest voters) if we fix their attention on our responses rather than the actions and statements of the new president.

Doing what comes naturally

That would be a really stupid thing to do, but we’re probably going to do it. Donald Trump is a pathological liar. [1] He is going to continue to say outrageous things and take rash and thoughtless actions. He is going to make a lot of Trump voters wish they had not voted for him and he is going to do it very quickly.

At that point, these Trump voters—not yet Trump supporters—are going to have really bad feelings about their chtrump-1ampion. So far as it is possible, they are going to deny that he really did what all the papers say he did. Failing that, they are going to say that it was an understandable mistake by a new president or that it was well-intentioned by the president but mishandled by his supporters. They are going to say that huge errors are mere foibles.

None of those things are going to work for them for long. When all those defense mechanisms fail, they are going to have to face the fact that they have elected an idiot (a private person) to public office and that it was a mistake. I say “they are going to have to,” but what I really mean is that they are going to have to unless we rescue them.

We can rescue them—and probably will—be turning their attention from the actions of the Trump administration to ourselves. We can make our response to Trump the compelling story. We can be vindictive. We can dismiss Trump voters in a block as “haters” and “racists.” We can act like condescending snobs. We can make ourselves into the story that matters most to them.

And if we do that, they will respond by doing whatever it takes to hit back at us. We are now the story that matters to them. Whatever irks us is “good public policy.” Anything that makes us angry is “the return of values to public life.” The systematic devastation of long-term relationships with our allies is “bold new approaches to foreign policy.”
Please note, in this difficulty I am setting up, that they don’t need to believe any of these things. They just need to calculate what will feel like a slap in the face to people like us and do that. We are now the feedback loop. They aren’t paying any attention to Trump at all any more except to gather enough “facts” to justify his behavior.

In this process, we will have turned a lot of Americans who were deeply divided about their decision to vote for Trump into actual supporters and defenders of Trump. I think that is the wrong thing to do. I think we can do better. [2]

Doing Better

At the risk of making my proposal sound like a therapy session, let me begin by noting that many counselors find it useful to begin with the presupposition that the client is doing as well as he can. The counselor doesn’t blame the client for doing what he has been doing. She just establishes that he doesn’t really want the life that his choices are producing and then she provides him with new ideas and new actions and new feelings to try out. “These will work better,” she says, “but you will need to practice them and you will need to be patient.”

trump-2I am not proposing that these conflicted Trump voters need therapy. I am saying that way down inside their resentments and angers, there are values that are not all that different from ours. If we can find a way to engage those values, we can find a way to affirm them together.

In this article, Wes Jackson rages at the credulity of the farmers of Salina, Kansas in refusing to believe in global warming. [3] He sounds like I want to sound. But his daughter-in-law, Nancy Jackson, sounds the way I am proposing that we all sound. She says this:

 Why does it have to be about climate change? Why not identify issues that motivate them instead of getting stuck on something that does not?

Nancy Jackson is my hero. And if I recall the article correctly (you can check it out and be sure), she got amazing program results that no one else had gotten and I have no trouble believing that at all.

I am not trying to urge my fellow liberals to do what Nancy Jackson has done. It’s too hard. I am only asking that we refuse to get in the road of the reconsideration that events will force on Trump voters, unless we bail them out. We can make “how unfair we are to President Trump” the story that matters to them. We can make our disdain for them—and their current champion—into the story that matters. Or, we can give them a chance to back away gracefully and if we do that, I think many will back away.

trump-3By our generosity, we would be saying that in voting for Trump, they were doing the best they could do. But now that the daily outrages and embarrassments (that resulted from their choice) are too hard to swallow, we can begin to work at finding common values and begin to treat them as potential allies.  No one, for instance, really prefers decaying highways and bridges to safe ones.

In closing, let me just say that we are not obligated to do this. An outrage has been perpetrated on our nation and a lot of poor and angry white people have smacked us in the mouth. We are perfectly within our rights to shove their noses in the mess Trump will make and yell, “See! See what you did!” And that would feel really good.

But it won’t do anything good for America and I think we can do better.

[1] And by using a term that was once truly a medical term, I want to call attention to the pathology. “Pathological” has come to mean “really, really” as if it were just an intensive adjective. That’s not what I am talking about. I think that the man’s awareness of the facts is thin and paltry and that it is often overcome by his commitment to having the effect he wants. He will say the things that get him the effect he is looking for with no awareness at the moment that the “facts” he is citing are generated on the spot. I call that a pathology, although I don’t have a clinical name for it, and that is why I referred to our future president as a pathological liar.
[2] By “we,” I am referring to liberal/progressive citizens. I am not referring to the officeholders we chose to represent us. I think they should respond to the anticipated evil deeds of the Trump administration with “an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.” I think they should be vindictive and effective. That’s their job. It is not our job.
[3] This comes from an essay I posted on October 20, 2010. I called it “Want to save the world? Get out of the way.”

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