The Dilettante's Dilemma

I’d like to share with you a few lines from political writers and a comment I heard last night from a local pollster. Then I would like to push them around on my plate for a little while, like green beans I am not yet ready to commit to eating.

If I don’t like where they wind up, I might just shove them under the mashed potatoes, the way I used to. If you don’t like where they wind up, you can shove them anywhere you like. What could be more fair than that?

I got this recently from Jeremy Bird, who runs a sort of activation network for President Obama.

If you’re anything like me, you’re still sorting through the events of the past week and a half. It’s hard — there’s no way to sugarcoat that. Vulnerable communities are feeling like this country has turned its back on them.

That sounds right to me. On the other hand, I have been reading messages just like this from Obama’s organization for so long that maybe it just sounds familiar.

But his expression “vulnerable communities” lit up for me on this reading because I had just read Frank Bruni in the New York Times. Bruni said.

From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.

The Democratic party, according to Bruni, has ignored a lot of vulnerable communities, particularly poor white working class communities. That sounds right to me too.

Bruni points to many in these working class communities who are “hurt” and “confused.” They are also poor and, to a great extent, without hope. And sexist and racist.

So if I am the Democratic party, trying to lodge Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, these communities present a problem for me. If I say that “poor” is the part of their life I want to bring into focus, I face the difficulty that there is nothing I can do about it. The jobs that once made them solidly middle class are gone and they are not coming back.

If I say that “sexist and racist” is the part I want to focus on, I am solidifying my hold on some very important other voting blocs—feminist women and men and LGBTQs. No one says these “vulnerable communities” are hurt or confused. They are just victims.

So of these two kinds of “vulnerable communities”—vulnerable in different ways, granted—we declare one to be victims and offer our support and the other to be victimizers and offer only blame. I would think that strategy would be very popular among the victims and deeply resented among the people who are called victimizers.

There might be a short way to say this. As a Democrat, I care deeply about the welfare of my vulnerable communities, but not very much about the welfare of yours.

Add to this collection of thoughts the remarks of Tim Hibbitts, a widely respected local pollster. In reflecting on all the white working class votes that Bill Clinton had won and that Barack Obama had won, but that Hillary Clinton lost, he remembered that Hillary had gone to coal country in West Virginia and told the miners and former miners that coal was gone and wasn’t coming back. She was right, said Hibbitts, about the coal jobs. But saying it there to them made her seem callous.

That caught my attention. Tim didn’t say anything else about coal, but my mind went on and imagined that Trump had visited the same setting and had promised to bring coal production and use back to full strength. And then I thought how that would make him seem to these vulnerable “coal communities.”

If he did that, it was all flim-flam, like so much else he has done. But people don’t know for sure about the future of coal. [1] Maybe they don’t care much about long term economic projections. But they know how to care that one of the candidates seemed not to care about them and the other seemed to care a great deal.

I began by talking about “vulnerable communities.” These are communities of several kinds. Then I added the notion that whether a candidate seemed to care about me—about the particular way I am vulnerable. Hillary, in telling them the truth about coal, told them also that she didn’t care about them. Trump, in lying to them about coal, told them also that he did care about them. A sophisticated electorate would have chosen the teller of truth over the liar.

My father used to tell a story that seems to have stayed with me. He imagined a boy who said about his mother, “The old lady don’t bitch like she used to.” Then a boy who said, “My mother doesn’t complain as much as she once did.” [2] “Each boy, “my father would say, “is conveying the same information about the mother. He is conveying very different information about himself.”

This is a hard place for Democrats to be. No one wants to say “my vulnerable communities but not yours.” Not out loud, at least. And it is a hard thing to ask of a voter. You have to say that the problem is poverty and I have no idea how to help you. Or you can say you are terrible people, being both sexist and racist, and I am going to try to protect the people you are abusing.

It has been awhile since I have run a political campaign and as I look at this dilemma, I am glad I don’t have to design a campaign or find a candidate to solve it.

[1] If you go to cleancoaltechnologiesinc.com, you will see amazing possibilities. I have no idea whether they would work, but I am confident they will not be tried.
[2] Note: Dad had four sons and no daughters and he cared a great deal about the social setting of language.

There are so many ways for Christians to be unhappy about the way “Christmas” [1] is celebrated today. I have given it up, myself, in favor of Advent. It saves me so much grief. And why, really, should I expect anyone to celebrate my holiday when I don’t celebrate theirs? Really.

I remember when I first heard that line-Jesus is the reason for the season— and when I first saw it on a billboard. It must have been some time in the 1950s. Surely it was somewhere around the time that Stan Freberg wrote and performed Green Chri$tma$. [2] I was in my teens in the 1950s and America’s culture was in the middle of a post-WWII rebound. [3]

Obviously, I did not accept the messages my culture sent to me as characteristic of a post-war up-tick in conservative positions and sentiments. I took it as “what America is like,” or, really, “how things work” in the broadest sense of the term.

Clearly “Jesus” in the slogan is the alternative to the pervasive commercialism that Scrooge represents. So…Jesus, not shopping, is the reason we celebrate Christmas.

It is not, however, why we celebrate “the season.” Our forebears, Christian and pagan, worried that the sun, traveling further and further south in the winter, might not decide to come back this year. And when the sun “stands”—which is what the -stice part of solstice means—we could breathe a collective sigh of relief and begin to anticipate the sun’s northward journey. [4] And we would celebrate the anticipation that the present cold and dreariness will not be how the world ends, but that warmth and hope will return again.

That is “the season.” As Christians moved up into Europe, they very sensibly weighed the difficulties of cranking up a brand new festival as opposed to just hijacking a festival already in place. They decided that the celebrations of the winter solstice were a good time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, so they dumped Advent right on top of what Ursula LeGuin (in her Earthsea writings) calls “the festival of sun-return.”

So in Christian countries in traditional times, Christ was “the reason for the season” by virtue of the church’s mandate. No reason, after all, to turn away from figgy pudding if you don’t need to.

But then, starting early in the 20th Century, economies in Europe and North America began to rely heavily on consumer demand. The more occasions there are to sell things, the more things we can sell and the better off the economy will be. And after all, in Matthew’s account, the “Wise Men” did bring gifts to the Christ child, so why shouldn’t we give Barbies and Tonka Trucks to our own children? It may not be “the reason for the season,” but it is one of the things we do on Christmas day.

I still remember when “the season” meant “the Christmas season” and good taste required stores to hold off on the paraphernalia of Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I remember active opposition to stores who broke that taboo and “jumped the gun.” But more and more, “the season” has been defined as the time of commercial excess beginning shortly after the back-to-school sales are over.

That’s what “the season” now means. It means Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. And “beginning early” now means beginning that season—roughly the days before Halloween —early. There can be no coherent “reason” for a “season” that begins in October and runs until January. It can be an extended time of appeals to customers, but there is no cultural coherence in that.

And when we have travelled that far, we are in a position to stop and notice the most outrageous word in the slogan. It is “the.” The definite article notoriously requires a single object. A polygynous husband may not introduce any of his wives as “the wife”—only as “a wife.” That’s just how English works.

And it works the same way, silently and imperiously, in “the reason.” There is, the logic demands, only one reason for this season and we are here to tell you what it is. This will be a revelation and a disappointment to the Druids who celebrated the return of the sun long before Christian missionaries arrived. It will sadden and impoverish a whole swath of merchants who see “the season” shrunk back to the days just before and just after Christmas. Both parties—the Druids and the Retailers—have a lot of reasons to reject the demand that the article “the” places on their reasons.

On the other hand, they have every reason to continue to pretend that there is such a season. A “let’s spend money” season would not be broadly appealing as a cultural meme, but “let’s celebrate THE SEASON by spending money” works just fine.

Last year, for instance, my Starbucks put a banner on the pastry case that said “Tiding so Delicious.” The only word in that banner that has a historical connection to the old celebrations of Christmas is “tidings,” as in the King James Version’s ringing, “good tidings of great joy.” This year there are red cups—they are being used now, still two weeks before Thanksgiving—that say “Share the joy.”

I would love to share the joy. How about I treat you to a grande egg nog latté?

So there is no “reason for the season.” Why would we ever have imagined there would be? There are lots of reasons why we celebrate the October to January period the way we do. And I still get my Advent to celebrate so I’m not complaining.

[1] “Xmas” in C. S. Lewis’s sarcastic account of how the winter solstice is celebrated in countries where commercial secularism is the basic assumption of society.
[2] Although he was a preacher’s kid, Freberg takes the religious argument in this parody only halfway. “But don’t you realize,” he has Bob Cratchit say to Mr. Scrooge, “Christmas has a significance, a meaning.” Freberg doesn’t go so far as to suggest what it is, but he does suggest that there is only one. Still, his little skit was banned on a lot of radio stations as impious.
[3] The role of women, the meaning of work, and the significance of “religion,” largely main stream Protestantism where I lived, were all explicit repudiations of the pre-war hedonism.
[4] When I say forebears, I am thinking of people living in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, the solstice marking the shortest day comes in June.

This election day was tough for a lot of Democrats—myself included—but I am proud of how I spent the afternoon of election day. I went to a theater and saw director Mel Gibson’s new movie, Hacksaw Ridge. It is a very life-and-death movie and extremely gory. On that day, the contrast between all that violence and suffering, on the one hand, and “losing an election” on the other, helped me through the day–and through the night.

I’ve had a chance now to give my attention to what the movie was actually about and it turns out that I value it for more than its immediately analgesic properties.  I want to tell you a little about the story. I am confident I can do that. Then I want to tell you about the look on Desmond Doss’s face (Doss is portrayed by Andrew Garfield), his face at one special point in the film. At that job, I am pretty sure I will fail, but I’m OK with that. If I could go back and pay full price to see a five second segment of the movie—and I’m not really sure I won’t—that is the five seconds I would want to see.  It is the five seconds I would recommend to you.

Desmond Doss was the first conscientious objector ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. [1] That makes him stand out, even as we look back at his career from our present time. But, of course, he stood out even more dramatically at basic training where fusing a bunch of individuals into a team is the job to be done. Doss didn’t look like a team member. “Belonging to the team” was defined in basic training as being willing to kill to protect your buddies. Doss’s commitment that he would be willing to die to protect his buddies didn’t have much traction during basic training. It seemed abstract, somehow.

His commander tried to get rid of him in any number of ways. The Drill Instructor invited the other men to beat Doss up and they did. The psychologist tried to make a case that Doss was crazy. [2] They court-martialed him for refusing to obey a direct order and had he been convicted, he would have spent the remainder of the war in prison instead of saving the lives of the people who has beaten him.

Part of the psychological exam comes back later in the story, so I want to note it here. The psychologist, learning that Doss prays, asks whether Doss hears voices.  He doesn’t. But, pursues the psychologist, you do pray, you have conversations with God. Well, Doss says, a little ruefully I thought, they are kind of one way conversations. From the movie’s standpoint, this early in the story, we know that God hears Doss and that Doss does not hear God. [3]

As part of the campaign to control Okinawa, the American troops had assaulted Hacksaw Ridge several times before  In the movie version, it was Doss’s first time in battle as a medic. The fighting was horrible and as director, Mel Gibson, makes the most of it. But it establishes the setting for the five seconds I would like to see again. The immediate landscape is a waste of blasted trees and scorched rocks. The sound of war is unbearably loud. The suffering of Doss’s company is awful and personal. We know these people who are in such agony and so does Doss.  And in that setting, Doss loses touch with God.

For the first time in the film, we see him confused. He looks wildly around, trying to see something in the smoke and flame and says, “God, I can’t hear you.” Doss has lost touch with the mission that had, up until then, sustained him.

Then, from off in the smoke somewhere, but not too far away, a soldier moans, “Can anyone help me?” We see the meanings of that call—all the meanings—register on Doss’s face.

Those are the five seconds I want to see again and invite you to see if you are able to get through the gore.

Doss knows immediately what to do and knows, at the same time, that he has heard God. You could say he has heard God “through” or “in” the voice of the wounded soldier. [4] Actually, you could say that all he actually heard was the soldier. I think that is an entirely plausible way to describe the event from the outside. But the story gives us how it seemed to Doss from the inside. We can see, as we look at the change in his face, what that voice meant to him.

So he went back into the battle.  “Lord,” he prayer over and over throughout that night, “Help me get just one more.”  He got 72.

[1] There have been two since, both from the Vietnam war.
[2] At that point, I have to say, my mind flashed back to the wonderful psychiatric exam of an actor in Montreal who was hired to play Jesus in a passion play put together by the local Catholic diocese. The psychiatrist examined “Jesus” along several lines, but it was clear that she liked him and the note she sent to the judge—and which we see the judge reading from the bench—said, “This is one of the sanest men I have ever met. He is in a lot better shape than a lot of the judges in this system.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close. The movie is called Jesus of Montreal.
[3] That turns out to be important because once the troops land at Okinawa, the movie turns wildly visual. “Seeing” in nearly all there is, apart from the artillery shellings, for the next hour. But the story turns on “hearing.”
[4] Doss heard that same voice, we may imagine, in the Japanese soldiers he treated.

So…President Trump?  I find it hard to type the words, but if I had had a blog in 1980, I would have found it hard to type “President Reagan.”  I don’t pretend to have begun, yet, to come to grips with last night’s disaster, but in this morning’s brief reflection–it has to be short because I have work to do today [1], I want to talk about some things that will help me.  Maybe they will help you.

Reflection 1

Whoever is having success at the national level begins to neglect the importance of politics and government at the state level.  The other side of that same coin is that the people in the states get accustomed to shifting their attention to the other side of whatever initiative is being taken at the national level.  For today, that means that the left edge of the politically possible in each state is going to start receiving more attention.

States shrug, it seems, and say, “Well then, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.”  A great deal of good work at the state level is just about to begin.  If it weren’t for the punniness of it, I would say we are just beginning an era of “states-manship.”

Reflection 2

The expression “politics and government” is common in our language, but an appreciation of the different realities they point to is not so common.  “Politics,” as it is normally thought of is the partisan contest for the offices where power can be exercised.  “Government” is the process if identifying national needs and aspirations and collecting the will and the resources to meet them successfully.  Politics is about collecting votes.  Government is about keeping the country safe and the bridges in good repair. [2]

Reflection 3

I don’t fill my days with TV watching and hand-wringing.  There are things I have chosen to spend my time on.  Out of force of habit, I call these things “my work,” and some of them “my ministry.”  (Overlapping categories.)  They matter immediately.  The success or failure of these things is immediate; it is something I experience.  In a few hours, some dear friends and I will be leading a Bible study class, for instance.  Today, we will be considering the early failures of the Israelites after they were rescued from Egypt by a God they had only recently heard of. [3]  They had been slaves for many generations and that turned out not to be the background that led easily to becoming a covenant people, a people who honored the God who chose them and freed them.  Then, God willing, we will discuss what our own preparation to be free and responsible has been like.  It is good work to have available on such a cataclysmic day and I will very probably work it harder than I would have otherwise.

Reflection 4

And last (and briefly) I cannot imagine a better scenario leading to the victory speech of President-elect Elizabeth Warren.  I don’t think she could have followed four years or eight years of Hillary’s presidency and I don’t know if she will be willing to run, but the ball has just been teed up perfectly for her and I like her very much.

[1]  I am indebted to my brother Mark for having, many years ago, passed along a prayer he had found somewhere.  The man has a mind like a vacuum cleaner.  The prayer goes, “Thank you, God, for giving me work to do that is so important that it doesn’t matter very much whether I want to do it at the time.”

[2]  The progressives of the late 1800s used to campaign against urban political machines and their use of contracts for friends by saying that there is no Democratic way or Republican way of paving the streets.  (There are, of course, political donors who are Republicans and some who are Democrats.)  This bridge needs to be fixed.  The people who live there need for it to be fixed.  That’s government.

[3]  Pharoah said, “Who is this Yahweh that I should obey him?”  Oddly, the Hebrew slaves said the same thing.  Neither they nor the Pharoah had ever heard of this “YHWH.”  When you face the prospect of a tough sell, remember Moses with compassion.

Where would a phrase like that come from? A shoe salesman? Possible, especially if there were a more comfortable and more expensive pair of shoes available. A podiatrist? You can see that, although in my experience, podiatrists are more likely to be interested in structural anomalies than what your feet feel like to you.

And what would be paired with an expression like that? Maybe “an ugly suit” or “an ill-fitting dress?” Those would work.

Neither of those speculations is anywhere near the mark. Here is the paragraph that contains the expression.

I, myself, was everything the date of a prominent psychotherapist should be: unobtrusive in a dark blue suit, pale blue silk tie and a pair of sapphire cufflinks Susan had given me to celebrate my virility. Susan was amazing in red silk and painful shoes.

This is told in the first person, so the “I” sentences all refer to a detective named “Spenser,” whose first name is never revealed. It is set in Robert B. Parker’s mystery, Back Story (see page 106). This essay is just an appreciation. I was entirely unprepared for this juxtaposition of worlds and I laughed out loud before I remembered where I was and recovered my good manners.

Juxtaposition

As I have often said in these essays, the funniest book about humor I have ever read is Max Eastman’s The Enjoyment of Laughter and Eastman emphasizes that one of the things that makes us laugh is to have our minds guided in one direction and then suddenly see that we have been led astray. And the longer the journey in the wrong direction and the more sudden the realization that we have been duped, the funnier it is.

The words I chose for the title are, as you see in the quote, the last three words. Everything before that, including the previous paragraph, which describes his buddy Hawk in terms that belong to the same genre, is about fashion. He pretends to be talking about how he blends in. That’s why he starts off with “unobtrusive.” But nothing else he describes is unobtrusive: the suit is not, the tie is not, and the cufflinks are not—particularly not when tied to his “virility”—so Parker is playing with “unobtrusive” already.

Then there is the now familiar joke about the wedding in which the groom’s attire is described in excruciating detail—as if it mattered—and the bride’s is summarized as “the bride wore white.” I think Parker wants us to have that joke in mind too.

But my favorite part of this joke is that everything is visual…until we get to the shoes. The shoes are described from the standpoint of the wearer. Everything else is described from the standpoint of the viewer. Besides, “how women feel about what they are wearing” has never been a major focus of murder mysteries. In murder mysteries, the important thing about women is how they look, not the price they have to pay to look like that.

And this description follows that standard (Susan was amazing) down to the last three words. The conjunction “and” promises that the thought will be continued. “And” isn’t like “but,” after all. Parker doesn’t say “even though the shoes must have been painful.” Nothing funny about that.

No…he promises a continuation of the theme with “and” and then violates that promise in three ways in three words. That’s why it’s funny.

Every losing candidate for the presidency in recent years has conceded defeat in the election and wished his opponent well. I don’t think that is going to happen this time. This time, it looks like the Trump-led Republicans (that isn’t all the Republicans by any means) are preparing to continue the war.

Here is what struck me that way.

If that doesn’t work for you, try “cartoon trump ad moving to the white house” or go directly to https://www.ispot.tv/ad/AFBj/future45-the-clintons.  It’s worth 30 seconds of your time.

I was struck by the line, “When America sent Hillary back to the White House…” That is the first line in a cartoon Trump ad that I saw yesterday, on the weekend before the election. It looked like a concession speech—everything but the wishing his opponent well. Instead, it was, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that.” or, more briefly, “I told you so.”

“I told you so” is interesting to me in two ways. First, it presupposes that Trump will lose the election. There isn’t any other way to understand “When America sent Hillary back…” Second, it presupposes that Hillary has done something that will make “America,” or at least the Trump-leaning part of America, ashamed of her. In the dim background, I keep hearing the beginnings of a call for impeachment [1]

America, she has not yet taken the oath of office. This is like a groom accusing the bride of being unfaithful to the marriage vows before they get to the alter. Hello? She can’t have been a bad president yet.

The ad is nearly as much anti-Bill Clinton as it is anti-Hillary. There is a reference to Bill’s foreign policy speeches. I can scarcely imagine who that is aimed at. I really think it is just filler. The “report” of the Clinton moving day is given by a cartoon reporter named Robyn Lewis. At the end of the ad, Bill Clinton moves over to her and does something inappropriate—I can’t quite see what it is—and then winks at the “camera.”

That is why Bill is there. A lot of people have not forgiven “Slick Willy” for getting away with something. He was accused, but he denied. He was impeached but not convicted. The moralists who keep score so rigorously and those who are as guilty as Bill but who couldn’t evade conviction, are equally angry and that is a splash of resentment that gets on the bystanders. It cost Al Gore the 2000 election, in my judgment. It will cost Hillary every day of her presidency.

So this Trump ad, presupposing that they will lose “the main battle,” seem to be calling for years of guerrilla war as the next step. Even if the Democrats regain control of the Senate for two years—that would be the maximum, as I see it—the House will still be firmly Republican and ready to stymie anything President Hillary wants to do. More states will break out the pre-Civil War doctrine of “interposition,” interposing themselves between the federal government and “their” citizens. [2] There will be targeted budget shortages. Roads, rails, and bridges will continue to deteriorate.  The U. S. will continue to flirt with bankruptcy. “The interim is just the election carried on by other means”—that is my adaptation of the famous Clauswitz quote about war and politics. [3]

That is a very bleak picture of our future and I hope very much that it does not turn out to be true. I do think that this Trump ad is a call for exactly that future.

[1] Just a moment for a little clarification of language. “Impeachment” is something the House of Representatives does. It is a charge which is then “tried” in the Senate. By my reading, the House will still be solidly Republican after the election. Is there a downside to inaugurating impeachment proceedings at once? I can’t think what it would be.
[2] The conclusion reached by the Civil War was that they are all “our” citizens. The states have the constitutional right to control some areas of politics, but all citizens are citizens of the United States first and of…oh…Texas…second.
[3] “War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.”