The Dilettante's Dilemma

Being. In Paris.

Posted on September 9, 2015 by hessd

I understand there is a lot to see in Paris. I’m going to be there for a few days in the next week or so. I’ve looked at some guidebooks and listened to the enthusiasm of friends who have visited, some of them many times. No one talks about what I want most to do. I was to be in Paris.

Possibly a brief philosophical excursion will help. I make a distinction between “being” and “doing.” This isn’t the kind of distinction the philosophers who have written on this have in mind, I am sure, but it means a good deal to me and I use it carefully. In the “being” mode, I imagine that what I do proceeds from who I am. Being is first and doing proceeds from it. In the “doing” mode, the doing is really epiphenomenal. It provides the material from which my being is formed, over time, like so many layers of sediment. That’s what I mean by it, in any case. I’m a doing kind of person, normally. I employ what is sometimes called “the instrumental mode.”

But not in Paris. In the length of time we are going to be there—less than a week—the great temptation is going to be to “do” as much as we can. I want to do a little of that. But I really just want to “be” in Paris.

I want to look through the bookstores although I don’t read a lick of French. [1] I want to order dinner from a very tolerant Parisian waiter. [2] I want to go to the Left Bank where the American expatriates hung out. Maybe I can find the bookstore Sylvia Beach used to run in the 1920s. I want to walk in different kinds of neighborhoods, only the safe ones, but not only the rich ones. I want to go to a Starbucks coffee shop, just once, while I am there. The rest of the time, I want to try to get used to the way the French drink coffee.

I want to see the Louvre and, if possible, to go inside. I want to hear people speaking French without working hard at it. I want to see what kinds of things they laugh at. I want to ride the Metro trains and take taxis and not be hit by bicyclists. I hear les flics direct traffic in some intersections. Time magazine offers this little blurb:

To foreign tourists, the Paris cop seems a model of quiet courtesy. He directs them to American Express and Thomas Cook with a debonair salute; he guides gladiatorial traffic with a calm nonchalance. Frenchmen look on le flic quite differently.

I would like to see Frenchmen looking on them differently, but I would also like to see their “calm nonchalance” since I will be a tourist. I’d like to look around in a department store. Most of all, I want to spend some time sitting at a sidewalk café with Bette watching Parisians. I want Bette to be there because I am one of those, “Ooooh, did you see that?” kind of people-watchers. If I don’t have a chance to share it with someone—Bette would be my first choice—I hardly feel that I have seen it myself.

I want to find other English speakers and ask them how Paris seems to them. I want to hear people say arrondissment. I want to see Notre Dame—I mean actually see the inside of it. They say Paris is a friendly city for walking. I like that. I am friendly to walking too, especially if I get to sit down and rest every now and then. I know they sell the International Herald-Tribune in English in Paris.

I can’t imagine that I will be blogging in Paris, but you never know. Some posts, like this one, just happen and I watch them, paternal and bemused. We’ll be back on September 23 and by then, Bette will have successfully completed another year. Bon anniversaire, Bette.

[1] You never know where your help is going to come from. I was in Copenhagen during one of the EU referenda. It seemed that every wall I could see was hung with posters urging a No vote, but I couldn’t really read then because I couldn’t read Danish. So I stopped a young couple on the street, hoping for help. “Do you speak English,” I asked in English. “Of course,” they said. “Oh good,” I said, pointing to a very graphic poster, “What does that say?” They burst out laughing, but in a good natured way. “We don’t speak Danish,” they said in very good English. “We’re German.”
[2] I once ordered pizza from a little mon and pop shop in Milan. All the menu items were in Italian; no one there spoke any English. So I worked my way down, like Bill Cosby in his fernet branca skit, which you can see here if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2LntsPxUEU, until I found a word I recognized: pepperoni. “I’ll have that,” I said, pointing at the menu. Very shortly, my pizza came out: sliced grilled bell peppers. You know. Pepper-oni!

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged Muslim neighborhoods, Paris, sidewalk cafes, slow tourism | 2 Comments

Gay and Married in Kentucky

Posted on September 4, 2015 by hessd

I don’t want to be troublesome. Really I don’t. But this matter of the county clerk in Kentucky is just really interesting.

I’d like to look at several other instances of defiance of the law, just so we have a chance to get clear about what is at stake here. Kim Davis is, or was at the time this story appeared in the New York Times, the County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky. She is a member of a very conservative Christian church in a very conservative state. She believes that sinners go to Hell and that she is being asked, in her capacity as County Clerk, to commit a sin.

I am a liberal person, myself. More politically and economically liberal than culturally liberal. And most of my friends [1] are liberal as well and Mrs. Davis has been roundly condemned because of the subject matter that her action deals with. It deals with homosexuality.

But if you block out the subject matter—not for very long, just for a little bit—you get to see some other things. In America, “the law” is never given the highest allegiance by the citizens. There are lots of reasons for that, but it might just be good to note that Jefferson’s argument in the Declaration of Independence made his ultimate appeal to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” King George and his Parliament have control of “the law,” but there is no reason to obey the law unless it reiterates “the law of ….nature’s God.”

God comes first, with Jefferson, at least rhetorically and the civil law made by underlings—that would be the King and the Parliament for Jefferson, the Constitution for Mrs. Davis—comes second.

Then there is the question of what “the law” is. Is it “what the U. S. Supreme Court just decided the Constitution means?” Really? So the Constitution forbids sexual relations between gay men in Georgia from 1986 (see Bowers v. Hardwick) but the Constitution stops forbidding it in Texas in 2003 (see Lawrence v. Texas). So the U. S. Constitution said this particular thing for seventeen years. That’s “the law.”

Abraham Lincoln didn’t feel that way about the Supreme Court’s decisions. He was particularly offended by the Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1858) and to people who said that he should be bound to respect it, he said that it would be prudent to wait and see if the Court affirms that decision. If a series of cases considers the question and comes up with the same decision time after time, we probably ought to call it LAW. This Dred Scott thing might just be a blip; it might not mean anything by itself.

The Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015. By a 5-4 vote. [2] Two months later, a gay couple shows up at Mrs. Davis’s counter asking that “the Law” be honored. Mrs. Davis might have cited fellow Kentuckian Abraham Lincoln to the effect that we should all wait to see if this is a one-off like Bowers v. Hardwick or a genuine decision. But she didn’t.

Instead, she chose to “do the right thing.” Like, for instance, destroying draft board records in Catonsville, Maryland, an act for which the one or both of the Berrigans, Daniel and Phillip, served three and a half years in prison. The law said that selective service was the right thing to do and the Berrigans, priests, both of them, said it was not and refused to obey.

Edward Snowden violated the law and has not yet served three and a half days and may never serve any time at all. He said that the law was a bad law—in addition to being insidiously circumvented by people who claimed they were following it—and that the right thing to do was to refuse its claim on his loyalty.

In going on like this, I am not justifying what Mrs. Davis did. I am trying to look more closely at the “other things,” I called them, that I get to see when you suspend homophobe-phobia. [3] One thing I get to see is that America has from our birth—literally from our birth—appealed to a higher law than mundane (Constitutional) law. It’s easier to see it when the good guys are doing it, which is why it is worth while to add Mrs. Davis to the list that includes Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Lincoln, the Fathers Berrigan, and Mr. Snowden.

It is also worth noticing that Mrs. Davis is showing a very lively fear of going to Hell. It doesn’t seem very likely to me—liberal Protestant that I am—that there is a Hell of the sort the Solid Rock Apostolic Church teaches about and I am just a little uneasy when I see how cavalier my attitude is toward her worst nightmare. This is not just a life and death of the body matter to her; it is a life or death matter for her soul. I wonder if I would look at this whole matter differently if I had the nightmares she has [4]. It comes right up to the edge of saying out loud that I don’t mind all that much if Mrs. Davis goes to Hell, so long as it isn’t me. That is a sentiment so shorn of human feeling that I don’t even want to say it to myself, let alone to publish it in a blog.

Then there is the mockery of Mrs. Davis as a hypocrite. Why is she a hypocrite? Well, she is a hypocrite because she herself has married several times in direct contradiction of God’s word—as Mrs. Davis understands it—that we should marry only once.

To deal with this charge, I think we need to get back to understanding just what a hypocrite is. A hypocrite is someone who is acting a part that he or she doesn’t really affirm. I pretend to be more religious than I am because everyone respects people who are religious. That is hypocrisy. Or I pretend to be more patriotic than I really am or more world-weary or more dismissive of approval than I really am. All those are part-playing so all are hypocritical.

I don’t think Mrs. Davis is acting. I think her actions come directly from her commitments. She is not very consistent, I notice. She says this is right and does that instead. She fails to live up to what she thinks of as God’s standards, so she is a sinner. But I have read not one word of criticism of her as a sinner. I have read a good deal more about her violating God’s notion of what marriage is and then refusing to let these two Kentuckians also violate (her idea of )God’s notion of what marriage is.

On the other hand, I think she made a really bad decision. She is trying to use her public office to enforce her private notions of godliness on her neighbors. She really shouldn’t do that. If she can’t do what the office requires—and has required for nearly two months now—then she should turn the office over to someone who will and then she should go on a speaking tour as a Christian martyr and make millions of dollars from conservatives looking for an exemplar and then retire in genteel splendor in western Montana. None of that is against the law and it only costs conservatives money so I’m fine with it.

Mrs. Davis would not take advice from me, I am sure, and by refusing, she shows that she still has some sense. But if I were going to give advice, I would start with knowing just what God’s word—God’s breath, God’s teaching, God’s wisdom—are about this matter. She is confident that she knows that based on a few verses of scripture, whose siblings she rejects without consideration. If she were to cite the Bible, I would say that the Bible is a library and it offers all kinds of positions on all kinds of issues. And for every one of those issues, you must take the time and the situation and the kind of literature into account. It gets complicated. But if you are going to say what God says, “complicated” should not be too high a price to pay.

My second piece of advice is to witness to her faith in every way she can without depriving her neighbors of services to which they are entitled. There is no reason to think that Mrs. Davis hates gays, but gay or straight, they are entitled to equal treatment under the law and I would call her refusal to serve them as they deserve, theft. She has stolen from them a status to which they are—since June 26—entitled. The God who condemns multiple marriages also condemns theft. Or as James puts it in Chapter 2

10 For whoever keeps the whole Law but fails in one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11 For the one who said, “Never commit adultery,”[f] also said, “Never murder.”[g] Now if you do not commit adultery, but you murder, you become a violator of the Law.

So here’s what I would like. I would like for the Court’s judgment about the essential equality of gay marriage upheld and enforced throughout the land. It’s the right thing to do. I would like to see people who believe that their own notions of what God wills are superior to everyone else’s notions, be refuted both in public and in private. I would like to see those who are unwilling to do what the law requires to get out of the way and let someone do it who is willing. [5]

And I would like to see a little compassion for the tiny minority of people who are deeply conflicted about public v. private and sacred v. secular values. I don’t want any compassion for their position; I want to see the position condemned for the reasons I have given above.

But the actual person—maybe a little compassion wouldn’t cost us more than we could afford.

[1] Not all my friends. I still have a few conservative friends and I am very proud of having them.
[2] The same vote by which they elected George W. Bush as President of the United States, may I remind you.
[3] Certainly not a word, but if you hate homophobes, there needs to be a word for what you are doing.
[4] That’s a metaphor. I don’t actually know anything about Mrs. Davis’s nightmares. My own idea of a nightmare would be attending the Solid Rock Apostolic Church.
[5] That is, after all the way President Nixon got the Independent Special Prosecutor fired in what is now called “the Saturday Night Massacre.” He just kept firing people until he got down to someone who was willing to do what he was told.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Politics, ways of knowing | Tagged Daniel Berrigan, gay marriage, Kentucky, Kim Davis, Obeying God's Law, Obeying the Constitution | Leave a comment

A Poor Use of Good Hyssop

Posted on August 29, 2015 by hessd

There is a very helpful biblical resource called a “harmony of the gospels.” The idea is that the accounts given by the different gospels can be “harmonized.” It is clear, in fact, that the gospel accounts are not always harmonious. That has caused a great deal of ingenuity to be expended showing how well they can be made to fit together. The idea I pursue in this essay is that all that ingenuity would be put to better use by attending to the symbols each writer of a gospel uses to make his own account richer and more powerful even though they are not the same symbols another writer uses.
But I have another problem to address today. It is a much softer, kinder problem: what if the various accounts could be harmonized without doing violence to them? Would we be better off if we did that?

I’m going to argue that we would not be better off. I have an example in mind that will help us explore the question. Here are the accounts of the four gospels on whether Jesus was offered wine during his crucifixion and if so, how.

Mark: So someone ran and soaked a sponge in some sour wine. Then he put it on a stick and offered Jesus[ab] a drink, saying, “Wait! Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down!”
Matthew: When some of the people standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling for Elijah.”[ai] 48 So one of the men ran off at once, took a sponge, and soaked it in some sour wine. Then he put it on a stick and offered Jesus[aj] a drink.
Luke: The soldiers also made fun of Jesus[t] by coming up and offering him sour wine, 37 saying, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!”
John: A jar of sour wine was standing there, so they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.

So Mark and Matthew say there was a stick handy. They put a sponge on the stick and lifted it up to where Jesus could reach it. John says they put the sponge on “a branch of hyssop.” Hyssop doesn’t actually lend itself to a job like that: it is a fern-like plant, as you see.

What to do? One thing to do is to approach this the way a journalist might. You might note that neither Mark nor Matthew says what kind of stick it was, so there is no reason it couldn’t have been a stick made from a “branch” of a hyssop plant.
That’s not outrageous from a journalistic point of view. I’ve never seen a picture of a hyssop plant that looked like the branches were long enough to be of use in that way, but there certainly could be one. And then, you would either have to cut the fronds off the end so you could attach a sponge to it or you could try to hold it by the end with the fronds and use the thicker base of the branch to hold the sponge.

I think that if my principal concern were to harmonize the various accounts, that is what I would do. I might make a study of where in Jerusalem hyssop plants grew. I might ask for measurements of their length and their circumference at the base of each stem. I might check to be sure that there would be some growing in the area around the time of Passover.

I don’t think I would want to do that. What I would want to know is why John introduces the reference to hyssop at all. At this point, I might stop and remember that this is not the first reference to hyssop I have heard. I might remember that the blood of the slain lamb was to be applied to the lintel and the doorposts so that the Angel of Death would spare the homes of Hebrews whose houses were marked that way. The bushy fronds of hyssop would make a really good brush for applying the blood. (Exodus 12:22).

Hyssop is used to sprinkle blood on a person who has had a skin disease to show that he is now well (Leviticus 14:4). It is used to sprinkle water on a tent and its contents if a person has died in the tent. (Numbers 19: 17—19). The palmist prays, “Purge me with (I think “with” means “by using”) hyssop and I will be clean.” (Psalm 51:7)

It is not hard to see the hyssop + blood + purity elements in these passages. And John hasmade that connection before. In Chapter 1, verse 29, John the Baptist calls attention to Jesus by saying, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” That brings us to the question of whether it is that perspective, those associations, that made John decide to specify hyssop as the means by which wine was offered to Jesus. Does John want us to say, as I am saying, “Hyssop. Now that sounds familiar. Why hyssop?”

And if I find, in looking at the plant that hyssop is not really a natural choice for the job (not, as I noted above, an impossible choice), then my mind moves toward what John wants to tell us about the death of Jesus—not about how it happened, but about what it means. I think John would like that. The resonance of the Passover in Egypt and the rituals of purification make the imagery of the “Lamb of God” much more vivid.

Or, if you want to attribute some aggressiveness to John, we could have him saying, “That (the Passover) is not really a lamb; it is Jesus who is the lamb.” It would be entirely like John to do that. He did is about the water that was poured over the alter by having Jesus say, “You call that water? I am the living water.” And about the bread, “Your ancestors ate bread in the wilderness and they died. I am the true bread and whoever eats this bread will never die.” And about the lights at the festival, “You call those lights? I am the Light of the World.” So if we want to consider that John wants to exalt Jesus as THE Lamb, the association with hyssop is a very good symbolism.

Now we come to the best question of all. Is that really why John introduced the hyssop? Honestly, I don’t know. It seems plausible to me but “plausible” takes you only so far. What I am really sure of is that if the time that is spent harmonizing the gospel traditions is time taken away from the thought you would otherwise have given to the hyssop and the Blood of the Lamb, then it is time wasted.

John doesn’t care. Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t care. Each of them spends time building up a context of imagery within which to place the meaning of the lif and death of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s what they care about.

And I think that’s what we should care about as well.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged crucifixion, harmonizing the gospels, hyssop, jesus, symbolic resonance, symbolism in John | Leave a comment

Deathbed Confessions

Posted on August 26, 2015 by hessd

I want to think about “deathbed confessions” today. I am going to imagine for today’s purposes that they are fraudulent. The reasons for starting there will become clearer as we go.

In order to use that frame of reference with a clear conscience, I am going to try to imagine what a genuine deathbed confession might be like. There is nothing about the word that requires its most common current meaning. Confession simply means “to acknowledge” or “truly avow. [1] One may “truly avow” one’s deepest convictions, which is what “confession” means in the phrase “confession of faith,” or in the “confession of sins,” both of which are regular parts of the liturgy of my church.

The real power of the notion of “deathbed confession” comes from the idea that you are confessing them to someone who is able to forgive them, to absolve you from the guilt that belongs to you because you committed them. So let’s say that you have been terminally ill for awhile and you have been thinking long and hard about how guilty you are because of your misdeeds. Someone you believe can absolve you from that guilt, a Catholic priest, let’s say, comes to visit you on Fridays and on one Friday, not your last one, your remorse overflows and you confess sins you have been longing to confess for years. You confess them sincerely and the priest, who has the authority to remove the guilt of them (but not their consequences) does so and before the next Friday, you die—guiltless.

I think that is the best I can do. [2] I have nothing bad to say about such a scenario, however emotionally remote it may seem to me.

Beyond the scenario I just sketched, I’d have to say that I am not a fan of “deathbed confessions,” and particularly I am not a fan of postponing “confessions” until the last possible moment. Here’s why. Let’s imagine that I am thinking of my sins as the great pleasures of my life. They are wrong, of course, but hey, cheating on my wife, “borrowing” money from the pension fund, holding a grudge against my brother…what’s life about anyway? Those are just “human” things to do. [Editor’s note: They are indeed “just human.” The whole theology of grace takes that for granted.]

And I’d really like to keep doing them until right up to the moment of my death. This is like falsifying the books right up to the moment of the audit, I guess. God is the Great Auditor and you have milked the system for everything you can get out of it and now you are dying so now is the time to admit that you cheated a lot of people out of money that was rightfully theirs and you pay no price for it, being, you know, dead. Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

Or, since you might not have a deeply personal relationship with the accountant, let’s go back to the “cheating on your wife” part of the scenario. You know that your sexual misadventures are painful to your wife. The dilute the relationship. [3] They are violations of promises you both have made and which she has kept. Your wife is deeply in love with you—the neighbors all wonder why—and would forgive you anything. But…what would it mean to “confess” your infidelities of the previous week if you were still hoping to continue them next week. This brings us to how much more weight “confess” carries than a lighter word like “admit.”

Would such a man say to his wife, “I have every intention of making a deathbed confession of my many infidelities, but I don’t want to confess them before that because I still enjoy them and want to continue them.” That doesn’t sound quite right either. If “confess” carries the notion of “renounce” and of “desist,” then grieving his wife with a painful but meaningless confession every week is just brutal. On the other hand, how would the wife understand his assurance that her husband intended to fully renounce such behavior and to display sorrow for all those hurtful episodes…but only when there is no further opportunity of continuing to do them? A more grievous violation of relationship can scarcely be imagined.

Ordinarily, a deathbed confession is understood as a confession to God—mediated by a religious official in some traditions, not so mediated in others—and a plea for mercy. The plea for mercy doesn’t fit all that well with the intention to continue sinning as long as the opportunities continue to present themselves. We’re going to get to God momentarily, but let’s pause briefly to examine the differences between squaring things with the Auditor, who has your errors and eventually jail time in his armory and the Wife, with whom this man has had a relationship characterized by generosity and patience, and, on her side, complete trustworthiness.

This man has every reason to fear the sanctions the Auditor wields, but no other reason to take the impending audit into account. He has every reason to trust and honor his wife and to build on that foundation a relationship that will sustain them both for their whole lives. Postponing any change in his financial practices until he is forced to confess them to the Auditor might not be all that smart, but it is fully in keeping with the kind of relationship he has with the Auditor, which takes into account only the punishments the Auditor can inflict. Postponing any change in his life of recurrent infidelity in not in keeping with the kind of relationship he could have with his wife and which his wife deserves. [4]

The relationship with the person who is to be feared only because of the hell he can bring into your life is structural and narrowly defined. It is structural rather than personal; he doesn’t care who you are, only what your status is (responsible for finances) and whether he needs to report you. It is narrowly defined because it is only the condition of your books that concerns him

The relationship with your most intimate friend is another kind of thing. It is the most personal relationship you have. It is precisely “knowing who you are,” rather than anything about your status that gives the relationship meaning. It is not the hammer, divorce, let’s say, that she holds that makes the relationship one to be cherished, but the whole range of shared experiences and commitments. It is a relationship always to be cherished, always to be nourished, never to be abandoned.

Which brings us back to God and to the deathbed confession. If you understand your relationship with God by close analogy to your relationship to the Auditor, then continuing to “borrow” money from the pension fund until the last possible minute is a thinkable thought. People who think of God in terms of Hell and Heaven—God is the Ultimate Carrot as well as the Ultimate Stick—are thinking in the Auditor mode. “Doing it” until you get caught is a practice with a long history; moralists note it and shrug. This is not really a shrug. This is Michelangelo’s picture of a guy who is just getting it.

If you understand your relationship with God by close analogy to the relationship with the Wife—by the most common analogy, we are the wife and God the husband, but I’m not writing this from God’s point of view—continuing to violate the relationship as long as possible, hoping for a last minute reprieve, makes no sense at all. If the relationship is always to be cherished, the regular and casual violation of it, cannot be seen as part of that cherishing. You can imagine a God as forgiving as you like, nothing will square your casual violation of the relationship with an intimacy that makes sense and that makes sense of everything else.

No one who imagines his relationship with God as a relationship to be achieved by a final accounting coup is thinking of the relationship at all except in the crudest and most instrumental sense. And that is why the deathbed confession, conceived of as a strategy for avoiding punishment has always seems to me the profoundest sacrilege.

[1] The Latin prefix con- is often used to intensify the meaning of the verb. The prefix is attached here to fatari, part of the very large family of fari, which means only “to speak.” More serious notions like “truly avow” come from the effect of the prefix.
[2] Which, I have to say, is considerably better than Danny Devito does in David Mamet’s 2001 movie Heist. Joe Moore (Gene Hackman) has just shot Mickey Bergman (Danny DeVito) in an extended gun battle and goes over to finish him off with one last shot. Mickey says, “Don’t you want to hear my last words?” Joe responds, “I’ve just heard them.” and pulls the trigger.
[3] That is what the word “adultery” means. You can adulterate whiskey, too.
[4] Andrew Greeley mourns, in his wonderful book, Sexual Intimacy, that “sexual fidelity” is an expression saved for what people don’t do. That seems an unnecessarily pale use of the word to Father Greeley. He would mean by it, “failing to do everything within your power to give your marriage a powerful and gracious erotic relationship.” Failing to do what the relationship requires is what Greely thinks ought to be called “infidelity.” Good advice from a priest; from anybody, actually.

Posted in Society, Theology | Tagged contrite, deathbed confessions, guilt, life as a relationship, life as an audit | Leave a comment

Conflict in the Second Temple Period

Posted on August 23, 2015 by hessd

I’ve been listening to some lectures by Professor Isaiah Gafney [1] and I got to a place this morning that raises a broader question for me. Gafney offers a historical perspective on the early years of the Second Temple period of Israel (on which, more shortly) and this perspective permits him to comment on the relationship between the perspective we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the perspective found in the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

I’m going to ask the question that his lecture raised for me and then I’ll back up a little to lay in the context that makes it matter. The question is, “What kind of understanding of these texts is possible with the historical context?”

I should probably stop briefly to say that not everyone agrees that “understanding the Bible” is what Christians ought to be doing. Some say, for instance, that there are little fragments of text that, as you are reading along, suddenly seem powerful or relevant to you. The purpose of the reading is to expose yourself to such moments. That has never worked well for me and I have come, over the years, to think that “understanding” a passage means understanding what it means in its context.

When I say “in context,” I commonly think of both the historical and the theological contexts. I think both are worth knowing, but more and more, I have come to approach the theological meaning by means of the historical meaning. What if, for instance, the very pedestrian focus of Ezra and Nehemiah were a reaction to the most more expansive and messianic emphasis of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi? If the builders (Ezra and Nehemiah) are saying to the prophets (Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi), “Hold on! You are going too fast!” Or possibly, “Hold on! Your emphasis on God’s promise to Israel is going to bring Persians down here!”

That’s what Professor Gafney thinks, although I have simplified a much more detailed account in putting it that way. The contrast between these two commitments reminds me very much of Abraham Lincoln’s need to ward off the abolitionists so he could finish the war and restore the union. It also reminds me of the way Eleanor Roosevelt approached the difficult issues during World War II. She would seize on to an issue, frame it in moral terms, and then present it to her husband Franklin in language like “We HAVE to do something about this.”

In this way of looking at it Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Eleanor, and Horace (Greeley) are on one side of things. Ezra, Nehemiah, Abe, and Franklin are on the other side. The one is relatively simple and emotionally expansive; the other carries the kind of complexity that project management often does and has both weariness and wariness as characteristic emotions.

The historical period referred to as the Second Temple period, begins when Cyrus, the king of the Persian empire, adopts an entirely new way of managing religious minorities. For the Jews who had been deported to Babylon, it meant “going back home.” Of course, it was a “home” to only a few because the Jews had been living in Babylon for three generations. When the Jews got “home” they started rebuilding the temple, with had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BCE. The politics of the Second Temple period was difficult. Rebuilding the city walls and the temple took a lot of time and money. There was also a sense that the way of living in Jerusalem and its surroundings had become very “mixed” and Judaism is a religion that stresses separation and purity. More complexity.

The job of dealing with these very immediate issues fell to Ezra and Nehemiah. The vision of what it really meant, in the providence of God, for the Jews to have come back home fell to the prophets and they said some very expansive things. They spoke about the restoration of the royal line of David as if they had lost track of the fact that David was a king. Restoring religious freedom to Jewish outcasts in Babylon was what Cyrus had in mind. Supporting the resurgence of a hostile state on their southern border was NOT what Cyrus had in mind.

Similarly, the prophets spoke very confidently of God’s plans to restore to Israel the “lands of their fathers” which had been “stolen from them” by their enemies. It felt very religious to the prophets. And it was something that God would do, not something the rebuilders of the city would do. On the other hand, “reclaiming” the lands “stolen from us” sounds like a series of border wars to Cyrus. That is not what he had in mind by funding the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem.

If Professor Gaffney is right about all that, and I have no doubt at all that he is, then the language of the prophets should be read as the language of aspiration. Look what God is doing! And the language of the builders should be seen as the language of project management.

I am ready now to attempt an answer to the question with which I began: “What kind of understanding of these texts is possible with the historical context?” I can think of two kinds. I am going to fight my natural inclinations here and just not give them any names at all. I will just describe them. You can name them if you are so inclined.

The first is seeing how fully complementary the two emphases are. They don’t fit together very well, but “too much” and “not enough” have never fit together very well. The easiest thing to do is to identify with one group—with the prophets, let’s say—and condemn the builders for their lack of faith in God’s provision or for their giving priority to politics over prophetic certainties. You hear what the other group is saying as if it could be best understood within your own frame of reference. That’s easy, but it’s not smart.

The smart thing to do is to understand what the fundamental vision of the other group is and to understand what they say (the prophets) or what they do (the builders) within that context. Of course, opening yourself to “understanding” that other vision relativizes your own vision and who likes that? But if you are willing to grant that the two are complementary, that is what is required. Otherwise, it is like imagining what “walking” would be if you were a partisan of the left foot and resented the adjustments made by the right foot.

The second is to see oneself in a “time” of some sort. In the Bible, “time” often means “when the time is right” (kairos) rather than “the second Sabbath of a month (chronos).” That is hard because everyone agrees about the second Sabbath; very often, people argue with whoever says, “This is the time to strike” or “the time to disappear” or the time for diplomacy. If you are part of an organization for long enough, you get a sense for the tides of events. [2] You come to feel that we need to pull back now, to save ourselves the futile effort, to store up the resources we will need. Others will feel that now is the time to push harder, to make whatever effort is necessary, and to use the resources we have right now.

The value of this little snapshot of the Second Temple period for me is that I see these conflicts in a context. In two contexts, in fact. These stresses that are a part of my life—the us and not them stress and the now but not then stress—were crucial to the early parts of the Second Temple period and “understand” means both seeing those arguments in their setting and also knowing how to appreciate those same arguments in my own setting.

But most of all, it is a warning against cherry-picking, an insidious practice by which someone chooses “a verse” and says that it represents “God’s will” for us in our time. Someone needs to say, “Um…what about the other verses” and sometimes, that is me.

[1] The course is called The Beginnings of Judaism. It is one of many truly remarkable courses offered by The Teaching Company. The lecture that flipped my switch this morning is called “The End of Days—Messianic Eschatology.”
[2] Not everyone feels the tides the way you do, unfortunately. And the “time” that can be determined by the tide charts is (chronos) the other kind of time and “feeling the tide of events” is always the kairos kind. Oh well.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged Ezra and Malachi, Franklin and Eleanor, prophets and builders, Second Temple period | Leave a comment

Victim Blaming and Claire McCaskill

Posted on August 22, 2015 by hessd

This is going to look like a reflection about dress codes. It isn’t really. Or, on the other side, about sexual harassment. It isn’t that either. It is an extended plea for an understanding of communication as communication actually happens. It’s a denunciation of tag team flame-throwing.

In the account I found on politico-dot-com, Sen. Claire McCaskill “is not happy about reports that lawmakers in her state [Missouri] considered instituting a dress code for interns after a summer of sexual assault allegations.” I’m OK with that. Have a dress code; fine. But how does one argue that a dress code is a good idea or a bad idea—now THAT actually matters. The way the argument is shaped can be truly destructive of thoughtful discourse.

So let’s consider the role of how one dresses as it bears on sexual harassment. I have heard people say that women who dress as if they were eager to be approached sexually have only themselves to blame when things go wrong. The liberal crowd I hang out with finds that completely reprehensible. No one would mistake Sen. McCaskill for a liberal, certainly, but in this instance she says what liberals say. I’m going to separate her remarks into two parts because the two parts use different standards.

McCaskill, Part I

“Is your recommendation [the dress code] meant to suggest that the ability of adult men and women who have been elected to govern the state of Missouri to control themselves is contingent on the attire of the teenagers and young adults working in their offices?

The “ability…is contigent on…” language is rhetorical excess. In the context of a conversation that had even a basic understanding of how people work, it would be ridiculous. But this is an argument conducted with bullhorns, so subtlety isn’t really part of the mix. The picture Sen. McCaskill paints has two pieces to it. In the first, a female intern shows up to work in an outfit that shows, just guessing here, too much cleavage or too much leg. The picture suggests some ways of imaging the issue; they were not chosen from Missouri. I know there are other possibilities. The result of these wardrobe choices is that the male representatives lose the ability to control themselves and they sexually assault the intern. Those are the two pieces. The provocative intern and the incontinent legislator.[1] In the other picture, the intern is not provocative and therefore the legislator is…um…able to contain himself.

I don’t want to offend anyone unnecessarily by pointing out how ridiculous this is, but people don’t actually function like that. Rats do, not to disparage the sexual behavior of rats unnecessarily, but people don’t. The way one dresses is part of an immensely complicated tapestry of communications about who I think I am, what kind of an occasion I think this is, and what I hope or fear will happen in this setting. That complexity is a commonplace of culture. The two-valued parody that Senator McCaskill offers is not an attempt at analysis.

Then the Senator moves on to Part II:

“Is your recommendation meant to suggest that if an intern wears suggestive clothing, she or he will share partial responsibility for any potential sexual harassment or assault?”

More rhetorical extravagance. Sen. McCaskill wants to say that how the intern dresses cannot affect the way she is treated. I built a small model in the paragraph above that suggests that an intern might say everything about me, how I walk, what I wear, who I talk to and how I talk etc. is part of the normal everyday information by which people align their behavior with each other. Everyone bears partial responsibility for every part of the web of communication that allows societies, even legislatures, to function. To imply that each person does not bear such responsibility is to misconstrue how social communication works.

Everybody knows all this. Everyone who is discussing communication and considering the elements that make it work (to the extent it does work) and each person’s responsibility for getting it to work and for keeping the machinery of implication and inference in good working order, knows all this. But the charges we are considering today are not “discussions.” They are accusations. They are intended to score points. And in the service of scoring points, what is a little damage to the reality everyone knows about the communications process?

To give the sharpest point to this distortion, Sen. McCaskill calls the story that a dress code has been formulated, “blaming the victim.” The point of a word like “victim” is to absolve the legislative interns of any complicity if there is an episode of sexual harassment and to accuse anyone who wants to make the situation more complicated is “blaming” the interns. But really, who could blame interns like these?

My point so far has been that as analysis, the perspective Sen. McCaskill has adopted is the sheerest nonsense, but in fact, there is a reason she is so fired up. Let’s imagine that Sen. McCaskill is ordinarily careful with the way she uses language and shares the understanding of interpersonal communication that scholars have agreed upon. I don’t know whether any of that is actually true, but let’s posit it so that I can ask the next question. The next question is this: what could have so riled Sen. McCaskill that she blew right past all that she knows about how people communicate and went straight to stereotyped charges?

Well, here’s an idea.

“McCaskill, a Democrat, discusses being sexually harassed while she interned in the Missouri Legislature in her new book Plenty Ladylike.”

Oops. So Legislative Intern McCaskill was sexually harassed. And now Senator McCaskill—Democratic Senator McCaskill—hears that Republicans in her home state are sexually harassing interns and then passing a dress code, as if the lack of a dress code were the cause of the difficulty. If the question is, “What could have so riled Sen. McCaskill….?, here, I think, is the answer. She was mistreated as an intern herself and now this is happening to a new generation of interns and the same old “it’s their fault” accusations are being made. You can almost see the steam coming out of the microphone in this picture.

I get that. She’s upset. She is saying the kinds of things people say when they are upset. But she is saying them into a microphone. And she is being covered by the national press. And she is saying that what legislative interns wear to work is no part of the misbehavior of the legislators.

Now that makes me upset. Let me tell you why I hate her approach with such a passion. I hate it because it exposes people like me, (who say that communication is a complicated matter and that every part of the communicative world of each participant needs to be taken into account if fingers are to be pointed at anyone) to censure unfairly. To tell the truth, I don’t like being censured even when it is fair, but when it is unfair, it feels even worse.

If I were going to give advice to the legislators, I would say, “Behave toward the interns as if the Legislative Ethics committee were controlled by your worst political enemies and had the Kansas City Star on speed dial. You don’t make suggestive comments; you don’t have private meetings in private spaces; you don’t feature the sexual implications of male legislators and female interns. [3]

If I were going to give advice to the female interns, I would say, “Let the way you act and the way you dress indicate how you want to be treated.” Make sure that the way you see yourself is broadcast on all available channels.” That won’t solve all the problems, but it will solve all the problems that are caused by confused communications.

I think there ought to be people like me saying what I am saying in public. Sen. McCaskill makes people like me part of the “blaming the victim” crowd because it suits her political agenda to misconstrue what the process of interpersonal communication is like.

She makes me the victim of her intemperate outbursts and then blames me for objecting to it. Really, is that fair?

[]] I have such fun with words whose meaning has shrunk to some shred of the earlier range. George Washington uses the word “intercourse” to refer to our diplomatic and commercial interaction with other nations. Perfectly common 18th usage. My friend Bob Nightingale, with a firm grasp of an earlier meaning of the word “prophylactic” as “preventative” used to throw it into a discussion of how to “prevent” strikes by public employee unions. Continent is based on the Latin verb continere, “to contain.” At my age, the most common use of “incontinent” I hear has to do with the inability to contain urine. “Incontinent” and diaper are closely related terms. A continent like North America is said to “contain” a certain land mass as if the land would go out to sea if it were not contained. Sen. McCaskill has “containing” one’s sexual urges in mind.
[2] The failure of such signals to work is routinely played as comedy. In an episode of NCIS, Agent McGee is on the job at a bar frequented by men and women from the local military base. He is bringing drinks back for himself and his partner when an attractive young woman runs into him. He apologizes. She “apologizes” in an unnecessarily personal way. He still doesn’t get it. “I ran into you on purpose,” she says. He still doesn’t get it. Finally: “I’m flirting with you.”
As I say, they play these for comedy. The viewers are supposed to understand immediately what Agent McGee never catches at all until it is given to him is sentences which contain subjects and predicates.
[3] I know there are other kinds of potential scandals. Those are the ones in play in the Missouri legislature.

Posted in Politics, Words | Tagged blaming the victim, legislative interns, Sen. Claire McCaskill, sexual harassment | Leave a comment

Proud of Who I Am

Posted on August 18, 2015 by hessd

This could provoke a fevered search for “true identity,: I suppose. That’s not what I have in mind. I am thinking of being proud of “who I am—today” as opposed to “who I was—yesterday.”

To make this work right, we need two elements. We need a self of some sort. As everyone knows, there are legions of notions of how to say just what a “self” is. [1] All I will need to mean is “the person you have in mind when you say I.” And you need some kind of emotional palette which includes the emotion “pride.” [2]

That’s pretty much it.

The trick is not to identify I with a system of abilities you once had. It is common to refer to the self you used to be as “who I once was,” but I think it would be perfectly appropriate to refer to that previous version of the self as “him.” Or, of course, “her.” [3] This would enable a old man, struggling every day with the reduced capacities dementia has dealt him, to remember the self he was as CIO of a major company and say, “He really knew his stuff and he required competence from the whole staff.” Or, more briefly, he might say, “I am so proud of him,” referring to that CIO self, a role he had played himself. [3]

What do we gain from this little verbal shuffle? It saves I to refer to the person he is now. Being proud of this person is the task I would like to address. Referring to earlier versions as “he” or “she” will clarify just what the task is.

Is it really possible to be proud of keeping your sense of humor when you keep forgetting just where in the conversation you are or what your daughter’s name is, the one who is visiting you at the moment? Yes It is. Does that require that you never forget your daughter’s name? No. It doesn’t.
Is it really possible to be proud of going to some kind of physical exercise or physical therapy every day? Yes. It is. Does that require that you walk as far or stretch as expansively or swim as efficiently as you once did? No. It doesn’t.
Is it possible to be proud of an essay you have written when it represents the best thought and the most adroit expression you are capable of? [4] Yes. It is.
Is it possible to present yourself confidently—it’s the appearance of confidence I am referring to—to new people as if you thought it would be worth their while to get to know you? All the time you are doing that, you are aware that they might not find you as desirable as the image you are presenting, so there is a very real risk of being rejected. What you know about yourself is that you really hate to risk rejection, but that if you don’t run the risk from time to time, your world will get smaller and thinner. Is it possible to be proud of yourself for running that risk? Yes. It is. Does that require that you succeed all the time? No. It doesn’t.

Once you get over trying to be “that other person,” the person you once were, being the best possible version of the person you are today ought to seem less daunting. [5]

[1] My proposal for ending all the speculation by going to a Self Storage unit and looking inside has never been well received.
[2] The emotion is built on a self-assessment system that measures how nearly you have come to what you know to be “your A game.” It is understood that you are not going to be playing your A game all the time. Who of us does?
[3] This sets up a way of identifying persons which is common in drama. It is common to hear an actress, say Merle Streep, say about the character she plays, say Karen Silkwood, “Oh, she is deeply conflicted about the project.” Or a villain might say about the completely reprehensible character he plays, “He is really a good guy at heart.”
[3] It does sound odd, of course, but this is language that would be used with family and close friends, who know what he is doing and why.
[4] Someone is going to object that a person whose once good mind is failing is not going to be able to assess the writing in that way. I don’t think that’s true. I think that the assessment can be subjectively meaningful; I can know whether I settled for what seemed a clunky expression because I ran out of patience or whether I persevered through that frustration to find a cleaner and better expression. It may not be the quality that some earlier I could have produced and it will certainly not represent the ease of expression of that earlier I, but it is my best work as of today and I can know that and be proud of it.
[5] During my last several years as an adjunct professor at PSU, I suffered notable declines in my ability to remember my students’ names and would discover, in the middle of a lecture, that some very common expression, say “popular sovereignty,” would just disappear without a trace. I dealt with these difficulties in ways I am proud of. First, I told the classes it was going to happen from time to time and that I would appreciate their help in restoring the missing word or phrase so I could go on with the lecture. They did that with good humor. Second, I took pictures of everyone on the first day of class and reviewed the faces and names every class day just before going to class.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged failing mental abilities, failing physical abilities, old and proud, rising above decline | Leave a comment

Giving One To the Team

Posted on August 14, 2015 by hessd

I want to provide a rationale for paying some attention to how one looks to others. I will want to say there there are some contexts where looking “better” [to be defined soon] is a service people can provide to each other and that looking “worse” is a disservice in these circumstances.

Let me say up front that nearly everyone I know, who regularly reads this blog, is going to find it offensive. I wish they wouldn’t but I would like to make the case anyway and count more, in the long run, more on their forgiveness than on their agreement in the short term.

I’m picturing a group of people who live in the same senior center and who hang around together. Bette and I have not yet chosen our preferred senior center so I call it Paleo Acres. They go on trips together, often have dinner together, watch movies together, and so on. They are a group. Not a tight exclusive group, but more than a category like left-handed, bald former athletes.

Let me start somewhere easier and try to work my way up. Here’s a line from Dorothy Sayers marvelous mystery, Gaudy Night. I am pretty sure this is the seed that led to the several years of thought that led to this essay.

Harriet Vane and the Dean of Shrewsbury College are waiting in the Senior Common Room for Lord Peter Wimsey to show up. Then “…an elegant figure paraded towards them from the direction of the New Quadrangle.”

Miss Shaw’s got a new frock,” said Harriet

So she has, “said the Dean, “How posh of her.”

Then, a few lines later, as Wimsey is showing up.

“Looking at a bunch of students who happened to pass at the moment, Harriet wished she could have said the same of them [that they were appropriately attired] They were grubby and dishevelled and she felt unexpectedly obliged to Miss Shaw for having made an effort in the matter of dress.”

Why did Miss Vane feel obliged to Miss Shaw? Miss Shaw had honored the occasion by her dress. She gave the meeting a little class, we might say, and all the participants benefitted by her action. That was the new idea to me—or at least the seed of the idea.

Note a few things this is not. Miss Shaw is not, according to this description, calling attention to herself. She is not trying to win some undeclared competition with any of the other women by dressing more formally than they did. What she did makes a statement of some sort about the group and/or about the occasion. The statement would be something like, “We are a group of women academics who know how to present themselves appropriately to a famous visitor.” [1]

The expression “taking one for the team” is common now. It refers to a member of an group who has borne some burden that would otherwise have had to be borne by the group at large. In this essay, I’m thinking about something more like “giving one to the team.” [2] Miss Shaw took an action that reflected well on the whole group of women and on the nature of the meeting they were to have. That is what Miss Vane saw and liked. That is why she felt “obliged to Miss Shaw for having made an effort in the matter of dress.”

This is not really an odd idea. It makes perfect sense for anyone to arrive at a gathering of some sort and look around at the choices people have made about how to present themselves and to make a quick judgment about “what kind of an event this is.” A lobbyist who sits down at the witness table before a legislative committee automatically notices who is wearing what, who is putting in the effort to maintain the dignity of the hearing, and who is just killing time; whether the manner of interaction is correct and formal, friendly and informal, or cold and hostile. What you see, as you sit at the table, tells you how to present the argument you are there to make.

If you were a second term legislator (a sophomore, as they put it in Oregon) and were chairing your first committee, you might be eager to present to the public the appearance you had chosen for the committee, “what kind of committee we are,” you would say. Let’s say you had chosen “formal and businesslike” as the image you wanted to project. Wouldn’t you feel, as the chair, “obliged to Rep. Shaw in the matter of dress” if she showed up looking and acting in a businesslike manner? Of course you would.

I’m going to get to Paleo Acres very soon now. I have two small preemptive remarks to make and then a proposed master metaphor and then we’re there. The first remark is that this picture—Miss Shaw is “giving one to the team”—appears to deny that Miss Shaw has any notion of how she is presenting herself as a person. And that is, in fact, the use that Dorothy Sayers makes of this remark in Gaudy Night. But there is no reason why Miss Shaw cannot have in mind how good she is going to look and also have the intention of lifting the self-image of the group. The one exception to this would be if her showing up looking good were construed as making the other women look bad. That could (probably would) cost the group as much as Miss Shaw’s appearance benefitted it.

The second preemptive remark is that this little scene imagines that there is no difference of opinion between Miss Shaw’s judgments about “lookin’ good” and everyone else’s judgment. In another book, it might be that Miss Shaw was a white haired old lady of the “when I am old, I will wear purple” school. She would think, in this re-imagining of the scene, that it made her look daring; everyone else would think it made her look awful. Sayers bypasses all such considerations by focusing on Miss Shaw’s “effort,” as in “made an effort in the matter of dress,” and just assuming everything else.

The image I want to use now is group buoyancy. A group needs a certain amount of levity (I don’t mean humor, just “lightness”) if it is not going to sink. There is enough gravity (I don’t mean earth’s gravity, just “heaviness”) in any case, for reasons we will get to shortly. [3] So the group needs to remain at a certain level of buoyancy to be viable, i.e., to do for its members what the members need to have done for them. Let’s call that zero. [4] Certain things the members bring to the group—we are considering only their appearance in this piece—provide “levity” and lift the group above where it would otherwise be. They are uplifting, we might say. Miss Shaw did that for Dorothy Sayers’ Shrewsbury College group. Other things the members might bring provide “gravity;” they are onerous, burdensome.

Because this is a group, it needs a certain buoyancy to remain viable. That means a certain ratio of levity to gravity. But not everyone needs to take this into account all the time. The man who comes to be with the group having freshly showered and put on different clothes than he wore yesterday and the woman who comes to the group, having stopped at the mirror in her unit to be sure that her appearance will add a little uplift to the group, both help the group to stay buoyant. And given that they have done that, the group can manage the member who is having an off day and comes to the group wearing soiled clothes or messy hair or without his glasses or his hearing aids.

The two units of levity can handle the one unit of gravity. It’s easy to see that, especially with the illustration. But even this simple illustration requires that we attend to an unusual criterion of self-presentation. This “self-presentation” is not about me. It is about us. The appearance I bring to the group—and we are talking this time only of appearance, not of behavior—is my gift to the group; everyone benefits from it. Or, conversely, it’s a bad appearance day for me (for any one of a number of possible reasons, some beyond my ability to control; some not) but I come to sit with the group anyway, knowing that they can handle the stress of gravity my appearance imposes today.

TELEVISION PROGRAMMES… One Foot In The Grave; Richard Wilson pictured as Victor Meldrew.

So what is all this? It’s one way to think of one’s appearance in a setting where everyone is old. One way, that is, apart from the solution to the left. It’s not the only way. One’s appearance is not the most important thing a person could bring to the group. But I have spent this much of my time on it—and possibly even your time—because it is a new idea to me. I have thought of my appearance as my business. [5] And that’s all still true. But now I have the chance to think of my appearance as an additional stream of revenue for the group (levity) or as an additional tax on the group (gravity), and I am thinking that is a way of looking at the matter that is worth considering.

[1] The famous visitor is a man, visiting the faculty of a women’s college, but it is his status as an expert on crime, not his status as an available man, that is featured in this scene.
[2] It is TO the team and also FOR the team. It’s hard to choose one to the neglect of the other, but when you choose both, you really neglect both, so I’m staying with “to.”
[3] I see now that I am not actually going to get there. The reference is to psychologist Erik Erkison’s idea that “despair” is the trap that is always waiting to sabotage the older person. That is the gravity.
[4] I just barely fended off an urge to identify a sustainable social level with the letter C, indicating that A and B were submerged, while D and E were not. That would have led, in very short order to a “below C level” remark. I fended it off by promising myself I could always put it in a footnote.
[5]Well, Bette’s business too, since we often appear as a set and some responsibility for how I look will be attributed to her, whether she likes it or not.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged despair and its enemies, Erik Erikson, giving one to the team, individual and group notions of appearance, looking good, senior centers | Leave a comment

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

Posted on August 13, 2015 by hessd

“We know the Republicans are evil! We’ve known it for years.”

That line was not a slip of the tongue, nor was it fortuitously overheard by a passing graduate student. It was a frequently-used assessment by one of the professors in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oregon when I was there in the early 1970s. It was more like a tag line. Anyone could quote it and count on everyone else knowing who had said it. [1]

An assessment very much like it has been published recently by two long time congressional scholars, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. The title of the book is It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and it carries the less catchy subtitle, “How the American Constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism.” You can’t actually click to look inside unless you go to the Amazon.com website. This essay is not about the book, although I will begin with the authors’ assessment.

Here it is.

“The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But wait. Our situation is even worse than that.

“…many in the traditional media…took issue with our criticism of their even-handed treatment of the decidedly uneven behavior of the two major parties.

Here Mann and Ornstein are claiming that what the media understand as a commitment to professionalism is a major part of the problem. The parties behave “unevenly” and professional journalism would be required to report that unevenness. They would be required to report, borrowing from the language of the condemnation earlier, that the Republican party is extreme and the Democratic party is not. They use the term—in their defense, I will say they use it sparingly—“asymmetric polarization” to describe this reality. The Democratic party, is not extreme, this means, but the Republican party is.”

The media problem Mann and Ornstein point to is that the media don’t regard that as compatible with their professional responsibilities. Our job, the media professionals say, is to report the news “evenly;” sometimes they say “fairly.” That means that they are required to say both parties are, or neither party is, at fault even when they know that one party is at fault and the other is not. It is not (watch carefully here and don’t lose track of which shell the pea is under) “professional” for them to tell what they all know to be true. [2]

I don’t want to lose track of those two aspects of the issue, but neither of them is what I want to think about today. I want to try to imagine a small group of people some of whom are Democrats and some Republicans who could seriously consider the argument this book makes and then come back together the next day as friends.

I’m having trouble imagining it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends who used to be Republicans, back when Republicans were a policy-oriented party. They mourn the demise of the old moderate Republican party, with its progressive and conservative wings. They say they would join that party in a minute if it still existed, but add, sadly, that it does not.
Those aren’t the people I’m talking about.

I’ve had a lot of arguments of the “you’re as bad as we are” sort. Saying “Your party is extremist and irresponsible and mine is not” is like saying your daughter is ugly and mine is not. It gets a very predictable response from the aggrieved parent. As a parent, I am angry that you said that; I deny that it is true; I retaliate as I am able. In my anger, I entirely pass by the question of whether it is true. [3] The easy thing is for me to say something bad about your daughter and it doesn’t much matter what I choose. You hit me (by your attack on my child) so I will hit you (in whatever way I think will hurt the most.

So “Democrats are extreme too!” is the common and easy out. Here’s an example of that tactic as it was expressed in an online response to the book ten months ago.

If you believe there is only extremism on one side, then you have already lost the battle.

But Mann and Ornstein argue that the parties are not symmetrically extreme. One is and one isn’t. I am taking their observations as completely accurate just for the purposes of this essay. I am accepting the Mann/Ornstein thesis so I can ask this question. What will make a conversation possible which includes Republicans who want to continue being Republicans, but who want the current political gridlock stopped and who think that the Republican party is the agent of gridlock?

I can think of one way. It isn’t much. It requires drawing a line and saying that crossing the line means you are out of bounds. The line gets drawn so that House Speaker John Boehner is inside it and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate President Mitch McConnell are outside it. Cantor and McConnell are out of bounds. “Out of bounds” means that as a Republican, I withdraw my support from them. Being a Republican means being willing to go as far as Speaker Boehner goes, but not as far as Cantor and McConnell go.

Let me pause here and deal with another objection. The objection is that Cantor and McConnell are just the tip of the iceberg. The metaphor makes the point, of course, so I propose a different metaphor. This is a missile guidance metaphor. Mission Control needs for the thrusters on the left side and the right side of the craft to fire. All the ones on the right side that will fire will be left in place; the ones that won’t will be replaced for the good of the mission. That’ s my metaphor. [4] There’s nothing wrong with having thrusters on the right side. We need thrusters on the right side. But they need to fire when necessary to save the mission.

The difficulty facing any such resolution of the problem is HUGE! At the bottom, we see conservative candidates who are worried about extremely conservative challengers in the primary elections and not worried about moderate Democrats in the general election. Elections are supposed to keep the candidates moderate, which is “where most of the voters are.” But that is not where the voters are in Republican primaries. Conservative members of Congress can lose the primary election if they can be shown to have colluded with the enemy in Congress. What they call “colluding with the enemy” used to be called “bipartisan cooperation” or “the politics of legislation is the politics of compromise: or “half a loaf is better than none.” Now, in local politics in conservative districts, it’s more like treason.

There are media outlets that reflect and enforce that view. There are extremist millionaires who demand that view as a condition for campaign contributions. There is a substantial part of the Republican membership in Congress, larger in the House than in the Senate, which is hospitable to this “politics of purity.” That includes Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Eric Cantor in the House. By this analysis, it does not include John Boehner, the Speaker.

The national media perpetuate this by their “each party is equally wrong” coverage of outrageous acts against the viability of an American government—any American government. So the “hotheads” in Congress are one part of the problem and the cool and balanced news media are the other part.

Now, I have gotten down to my own project of trying to imagine a conversation including Republican friends that will accept the Mann/Ornstein argument and still keep the conversation going. How will this conversation go? Maybe like this.

I say the Republican Party has to be stopped before it destroys us all.

You say the “game” needs to be kept within bounds, certainly, but we need both parties to make good policy. I agree.

I say that the McConnell—Cantor axis [5] is out of bounds and that if only the Republican party could be mobilized to support Boehner, we would be OK.

You say you thought I didn’t like Boehner.

I say that I don’t like his policy values, but in terms of procedure, he makes a deal and does everything he can to do his part to fulfill it. I like that. I say that the other side, the out of bounds side, the McConnell—Cantor Axis make commitments and then reneged on them. That’s really bad. No one can govern that way. Furthermore, I say that a Boehner-led Republican party would be open to compromises that would be well within the public’s acceptance and that would solve real problems, such as, for instance, maintaining the country’s credit rating.

You say that you want it to be possible for the two parties to agree at least on avoiding disaster, even if they cannot agree on how to make progress.

You say you would like a program that would systematically repair federal highways and bridges. I say that would cost a lot of money. You say it is clearly money that needs to be spent.

I say the Republican party needs to be much more aggressive in taking on “Tea Party” and “outlier” candidates, so that it can control its own program and its caucus.

You say you want that too because only the Republican program offers any real long term hope for America.

I say that my view is that real hope for American lies in the direction of reducing the inequality of incomes.

You say that is a bunch of socialist nonsense and we part friends, agreeing to meet again next week.

It is discussions like this one that give me hope. It is well short of the political discussions I think we should be having, but it does pave the way for large scale compromises at the federal level—compromises between parties that can deliver their membership when they promise to do so.

If we can do that, I think it will be better than it looks.

[1] To provide a small element of context, the professor who used that line was also the chair of the Lane County Democratic Party. He was known to play both roles in class.
[2] I am highlighting the media issue by framing the issue this way. I am not claiming it is true (although I think it is) because there is something else I want to talk about.
[3] I am not proposing that if it were true, that it should be said out loud or said in asides to others. I am looking only at the unlikelihood of examining the truth of the question when it is put that way.
[4] Someone will point out that politics is run by majority voting, where Mission Control is a rigidly elitist system. True. That’s why the missiles get to where they are going and the policies do not. But elitism isn’t any way to run a country.
[5] Probably meaningful only to old audiences and historians. The bad guys in World War II were referred to by the American media as “The Axis Powers” and the use of “axis” in joining McConnell and Cantor would be the hope that the bad taste that word acquired in World War II would carry over.

Posted in Politics, sociability | Tagged civil politics, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, media professionalism, Mitch McConnell, policy gridlock, political extremism | Leave a comment

A Parent is a Teacher, not a Concierge

Posted on August 9, 2015 by hessd

I am going to look at that bold title through the lives of Walter Possum and Frances the Badger. Or, rather, through their parents, whom I admire almost more than I can say. These wonderful parents come to us from the mind of Russell Hoban. He published Bedtime for Frances in 1960; Nothing to Do, the only Walter Possum book I know of, in 1964, and A Birthday for Frances in 1968. I became acquainted with these books in the late 1970s. I love these parents because they are warm-hearted and nurturant, for one thing; also they keep a consistent focus on what the child needs to learn and how they might help that happen.

On the other hand, parenting is a little more demanding these days and different norms define what “doing it right” looks like. I have begun to see the term “concierge parent” in use, and the intended analogy with a hotel concierge makes my blood run cold.[1] The concierge’s job is to please the guests; the parents job is to grow human beings. Surely the same set of tricks wouldn’t work for both. They wouldn’t, would they?

I want to explore just how Mother and Father Badger (and Mother and Father Possum) are so successful. The gender stereotypes are not current. It’s kind of a “Leave it to Badger” social setting. The tactics of parenting, especially of the fathers, do not fit the concierge model well at all, but in these stories, everything works. [2]

I’m going to start with a quick description of some events from the three books. I have chosen three of the “where the rubber meets the road” moments. These are the moments at which crucial decisions are made by the parents. Then we’ll back up and try to place these events in a sort of “theory of parenting” model. There might be a drawing of morals after that.

Episode 1: In Nothing to Do, Walter Possum wakes up one Friday morning and discovers that he has nothing to do. He rouses his father, who, unaccountably, is still sleep when it’s almost 6:00 already. Father doesn’t say a word. He goes outside and gets Walter a rake and a basket and tells him to rake leaves.

Then, when Father is leaving for work, Walter approaches him again.

“Raking leaves is not really something to do,” says Walter.

“Well,” says Father, “ I am sorry to hear that, but I have something to do. I have to go to the office, and so I cannot talk about it any more right now.” [3]

The next morning is dedicated to housecleaning, so everyone needs to be somewhere else. [4]

Walter objects. “I have nothing to do and Charlotte [little sister who speaks in bold font only] follows me all the time.”

“I know all about that, says Father, “but you are going to play outside anyhow.” And he went out to the tool shed and hoped for the best.” [5]

The plot goes on from there. It is, in my reading of it, quite sophisticated, but what the stone actually does is not relevant here. and we have two more episodes to consider. This story is based on Father’s gift to Walter of a “something to do” stone. It’s magic. You keep it in your pocket and when you have nothing to do, you rub it and look around and then the stone gives you [!] something to do. [6]

Episode 2: In A Birthday for Frances, [7]we find Frances’s nose seriously out of joint because it is her sister Gloria’s birthday and Frances wants it to be HER birthday. Again. Frances is hiding in the broom closet with her imaginary friend, Alice. What she really wants is for Gloria not to have a birthday celebration at all.

Preparation for the party goes on. That’s the important part to me. We do not break off preparations for negotiations with a disgruntled child.

Mother: Frances, wouldn’t you and Alice like to come out of the broom closet and help us make place cards for the party?

Gloria is drawing rainbows and happy trees on her cards.

Frances is drawing “three-legged cats/and caterpillars with ugly hats.”

Preparation for the party goes on.

Frances is outside sulking and looking through the window at Mother wrapping a present for Gloria.

She says, “I am not going to give Gloria any present.”

“That is all right,” said Mother, and Frances began to cry.

“What is the matter?” said Mother, “Why are you crying?”

“Everybody is giving Gloria a present but me,” said Frances

Frances manages to buy a present for Gloria and then, after a tough struggle, manages to give her the present, rather than eating it herself; then after an even tougher struggle, manages to genuinely wish Gloria a happy birthday.

Frances is on the outs with everyone all the way through the story until the end. Everyone (all the adults) are very solicitous of Frances’s feelings, but the preparations for the party go on all day. The result is that Frances is confronted with an event that is going to happen no matter what. The event is guaranteed by people who are relentlessly nice to her. She is invited at every step to join in.

But…finally, at the very end, there is still a party; still an event for her to join. If they had removed her from the scene, which I would have been tempted to do, that would not have happened. Had the party been postponed until Frances had made her peace with it, that would not have happened.

Episode 3: In Bedtime for Frances, the question is all about facing nighttime fears. Frances does everything she can to get out of bed and do something else.

She thinks that maybe she can see a tiger in the corner of her room, so she goes to find her parents. The parents determine that the “tiger” did not bite or scratch Frances; they decree that it must be a friendly tiger, and direct Frances back to her room.

Next she sees what might be a giant over by the chair. This gets her to the living room and it gets her a piece of cake, but the advice she gets is to ask the giant what he wants, at which point she determines that it is her bathrobe on the back of the chair.

After that, there is a scary looking crack in the ceiling. This gets her to the bathroom where Father is brushing his teeth and she gets to brush her teeth too. But she is sent back with the suggestion that she enlist help in watching the crack for awhile. Her Teddy Bear helps.

Then the curtains at her window are moving so she goes in search of adult consolation, but finally, she has reached the end of the road. She wakes her father up to tell him about the wind. Here is what happens.

[It is the wind’s job] to go around and blow all the curtains.

How can the wind have a job? said Frances.

Everybody has a job, said Father. I have to go to my office every morning at nine o’clock. That is my job. You have to go to sleep so you can be wide awake for school tomorrow. That is your job….

If the wind does not blow the curtains, he will be out of a job. If I do not go to the office, I will be out of a job. And if you do not go to sleep now, do you know what will happen to you?

I will be out of a job? said Frances.

No, said Father.

I will get a spanking? said Frances.

Right!, said Father.

Good night! said Frances and she went back to her room.

Reflections

So there are the three episodes. Let me draw together what I think of as the essential elements. Walter Possum has boredom to confront. The job his father gives him isn’t really “something to do,” so the next day, Father gives Walter a “something to do” stone and with the aid of that stone, Walter plays actively and socially all day. “Socially” comes to include his obnoxious sister, Charlotte, for whom Walter invents a “play right here” stick because he has come to understand how a “something to do” stone really works and makes the necessary adaptations.

Frances comes to grips with a birthday party she does not want, but for which preparations go on all day. She is invited to join at every point and says No at nearly every point, but preparations continue. Eventually, it gets to be Yes or No time for Frances and because her parents have not made themselves the issue, Frances has to decide to do the right thing just because it is the right thing.

Frances comes to grips with her night time fears because she is given a rationale—everybody has a job—and a credible threat which returns her to the real issue. The threat comes from extraordinarily indulgent parents, but eventually Frances is forced to face the fear. The wind is doing his job, she decides, and the moth at the window his job, so she lies down in her bed and does her job.

These are three episodes of parental success. Having been a father and a stepfather and a grandfather, I have to say that my admiration for these parents has no limits. You will notice that there are no “concierge parents” in this hall of heroes. In each case, they herded the child back to what the issue is. In each case, they did not allow escape from what the issue is. In each case, they did not, allow themselves to become the issue.

The “something to do stone” and the repeated invitations to join in the birthday celebrations and the threat of a spanking all do the same thing. They wouldn’t in every family, but they do in these families. They are not “loving too much,” an expression I have written about recently, or too little. It is love that takes the needs of the young person into account and also their need to address the issue that confronts them.

Throwing a fit doesn’t help them. Sulking all day doesn’t help them. Relentless access to the parents is not permitted. It’s you and the issue, kid. I wish you well and I’m on your side. Win or lose, come and tel me about it.

[1] Here are a few phrases Rob Lazabnik’s piece in the Wall Street Journal from July 24, 2015. He says, “You see, these children are members of the Most-Loved Generation: They’ve grown up with their lives stage-managed by us, their college-acceptance-obsessed parents.” and “All those years being your kid’s concierge and coach have created a monster.” The cartoon comes from that article.
[2] He forgot to end with, “O-k-a-a-a-y?” as is done now, even at the end of commands. I am amazed.
[3] I’m going to include what I think of as the off-Broadway run of the Frances books and introduce Walter Possum and his baby sister, Charlotte. They are from the same world, the same writer so I’m going to just add them in.
[4] Mother is going to do the housecleaning. This is 1964. Who else is going to help with the housecleaning is not a topic for this book.
[5] “He hoped for the best” is striking in this context. I don’t recall any other authorial comment on what an adult thought—as opposed to what an adult did—in the whole Frances/Walter corpus.
[6] Provided that you don’t aren’t too close to the house when you do it (no playing inside) or standing too close to the pocket where Father keeps his money (a costs money thing to do). You have to be at the right place. Then the stone works.
[7] I just now noticed that although this is “a birthday for Frances,” it is not her birthday. It is “a birthday” she needs to come to grips with.

Posted in Books, Living My Life | Tagged boredom, concierge parents, helping children succeed, nighttime fears, parents, sibling rivalry | Leave a comment