Long Pauses

Category: Debris

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • Edward Said

    Edward Said, who seemed to devote his life to the greying of a world that many would like to keep black and white, has passed away at the age of 67 from pancreatic cancer. From one of his last published editorials:

    Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery — and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because “that’s the way the Arabs are.” That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

    We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

    I haven’t studied Said seriously enough to draw any but the most superficial of conclusions about his lasting value to literary or political criticism, but I do know that his fundamental ideas — those found in Orientalism — opened up minority, colonial, and post-colonial literature for me in practical and profound ways — a rare feat amid the pomp and pedantry of contemporary “theory.” As an aside, the first and, as far as I know, only book-length study of Said was written by Abdirahman A. Hussein, a fairly recent product of UT’s doctoral program.

  • God and the Machine

    Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and the humanities at M.I.T. Lightman recently edited a collection of essays, Living With the Genie, in which various authors examine the effects of technology (both good and bad) on our lives. Because it’s only available by subscription, I’ve excerpted a sizeable chunk of the interview.

    Q. You remark early in the essay that technology is making life faster and pushing out opportunities for quiet contemplation. What’s the effect of this on our culture?

    A. We have our spiritual lives compromised. We have become a nation without values and without a centeredness, without a belief system. If we have a belief system, it’s money and power. I think the lack of that centeredness is one of the consequences. It is part of our poor relationship with other nations in the world. Other countries sense our lack of values. Before you can understand other countries, you need to understand yourself. We don’t have such a foundation. We just have a blind pursuit of money.

    Q. And technology pushes that?

    A. The blame is on human beings, but technology has pushed that.

    Q. Some of the things you talk about in this essay have been felt in the arts for some time — everything from Brave New World to The Matrix. Do you think that your involvement with literature has given you a sensitivity to these things?

    A. Yes. It’s good that you mention those other media, because certainly there are other people who are saying the same thing. The more of us who say this, the better chance we have of being heard.

    I think a lot of these ideas are old. In my essay, I refer to Henry David Thoreau’s comments in Walden. In those days, the high technology was the railroad, and that was changing American thinking. Thoreau made this witty comment: “We don’t ride on the railroad; the railroad rides upon us.” Of course, I like that, but I would amend that by saying that technology is just a tool, and we created the railroad, after all.

    These ideas have been around for a while, but the pace of the world has accelerated. All of the problems that Thoreau saw 150 years ago are much more acute and have much more devastating consequences.

    I would love to push Dr. Lightman on some of these comments, particularly the first one. That relationship between technology and our spiritual lives is tricky and under-theorized, I think. Tools like blogging can actually encourage the sort of contemplation that he is lamenting, but they too seldom do. He’s right. The blame is on human beings, who seem to be sacrificing something of their humanity to these machines. Interesting stuff.

  • Unexpected Vacation

    I’m writing from sunny south Alabama, where we’re spending a few days after an expected, but still sad, death in the family. Funerals are such strange ceremonies. So sterile and composed. Sometimes I think we’d all benefit from a little more wailing and dirt.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life. Reynolds’s talk was informal but familiar, leading me to assume that, during his two-year climb to the top of the blogging heap, he has participated in countless such presentations. The biggest surprises to me were learning that his daily audience outnumbers that of Phil Donahue’s failed return to television (and for less than $40/month in overhead) and that UT’s administration is downright supportive of his efforts. I figured that someone would be troubled by his partisan editorializing on university time. Apparently not.

    We reached little consensus during our post-presentation discussions. There was much interest in the potential of blogging — particularly as a tool to foster critical thinking and cognitive development in our students — but finding a real-world application is tricky. In practical terms, there is little that can be done on a blog that can’t be done using, say, a class discussion forum or an email list. The big perk, it seemed to most of us there, was the very public nature of the blog. Glenn recounted the thrill of receiving his first emails from readers in Thailand, for instance, a thrill to which I can testify from personal experience. Feedback validates the blogger’s efforts, while also raising the bar. Or, in a nutshell: This thing has made me a better writer and a better thinker; I’m sure that some students would undergo a similar process.

    If I were teaching right now, I think I would set up free Blogger accounts for all of my students, host them (again, for free) on Blogspot, then require each student to “journal” on the Web. For some in the class, it would, of course, be busy work. (But, for those particular students, everything is busy work, so who cares?) I bet a certain percentage of the class would really get into it, though, and would continue blogging even after getting a final grade. Imagine that: students coming out of a class with a desire to continue that critical thought process.

    Anyway, here are some notes from the colloquy and our student paper’s write-up.

  • Incompatible with Morality?

    A few weeks ago, on our return trip from Florida, I tuned the radio to a local talk radio station. We were driving through Birmingham at the time, so the debates of the moment centered on two topics: Judge Moore’s fight to save the Ten Commandments and Governor Bob Riley’s proposal to radically transform the state’s tax structure. In the days since, both issues have been put to bed. Moore’s monument was whisked away in a matter of minutes while his supporters were having a prayer meeting; Riley’s proposal was soundly defeated in a state-wide referendum. Prominent portions of the evangelical church are decrying the former and cheering the latter.

    Which brings me back to that talk radio show. Though not explicitly Christian (from what I could tell, at least), the show did feature a pastor as one of its two hosts, and it clearly attracted listeners and callers of a fairly conservative bent. No problems there. Or surprises, really. I was disappointed, though, to hear caller after caller after caller fawn over Judge Moore and his call to “keep God in America,” while simultaneously denouncing Riley’s progressive tax plan, particularly because Riley seemed to be acting for all the right reasons. A friend put it something like this: “The Church is getting mobilized behind a symbol, but, once again, we’ve failed to act on an opportunity for real social justice.” And the people of Alabama are already suffering for it.

    As far as religion-bashing, pro-war, ex-liberal pundits go, Christopher Hitchens is probably my favorite — a guy whose stubborn reason pisses me off as often as it forces me to stop and re-consider my opinions (which is quite often, actually). Here’s Hitchens on the Ten Commandments flap. (It will help the reading if you picture him standing awkwardly at a podium, slightly drunk and very bitter.)

    It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

    That last sentence is one of those that I’m talking about — absolutely maddening, but impossible to ignore. Hitchens, a man obviously capable of higher-order thinking, looks at the Church and denounces it as incompatible with morality. I disagree completely, of course, but, watching events as they unfolded in Alabama, I can’t say that I blame him.

  • New and Improved?

    After a year of stubborn resistance, I finally knocked the HTML chip off of my shoulder and joined the Blogger world. Management of the blog itself — and of the archive, in particular — was becoming too great a burden and was detracting from my actual writing and posting. Plus, with Blogger’s recent announcement of enhanced free services, the timing seemed perfect.

    I think I’ve worked out all of the kinks, but please let me know if you run into any bugs.

  • Shut Up, Already

    Note to self: Stop whining about the dearth of cultural events in Knoxville. I was just flipping through this week’s issue of The Metro Pulse, and I noticed the following:

    That’s not a bad week. And I haven’t even mentioned the Tennessee Valley Fair, which opens this weekend, featuring Tone-Loc, Young MC, Cledus T. Judd, The Marshall Tucker Band, Loverboy, and lots of other people who might, in fact, also be pseudo-celebrities. (Judging by the publicity shots, I would guess that they’re all famous cowboy hat models.) Just try to read that lineup out loud without breaking into a big ol’ grin. I love fair season. Hatching chicks, funnel cakes, people-watching, and that mysterious fair stank. Gotta love it. (More on this in the coming days — hopefully with pictures.)

  • I Just Don’t Know

    I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a few days now. Last Friday, Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the Times, “Freedom’s in 2nd Place?” raised some questions that need to be raised right about now, especially given the growing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kristof and his wife, both from immigrant families, recently visited their ancestral homes, the former in Ukraine, the latter in China. For Kristof, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

    Since 1989, when the Soviet Union opened fire on Communism and China opened fire on its citizens, China’s economy has tripled in size — and Ukraine’s has shrunk by half. Even in Russia, according to Izvestia, 40 percent of the people can’t afford toothpaste; in Karapchiv, many can’t afford toilet paper and make do with newspapers (which to me seems sacrilegious). Meanwhile, prospering China has become a global center for cosmetic surgery.

    I was as outraged as anyone that Chinese troops massacred hundreds of protesters to destroy the Tiananmen democracy movement. But China’s long economic boom has cut child mortality rates so much since 1990 that an additional 195,000 children under the age of 5 survive each year. Does this mean that the Chinese are better off for having had their students shot? No, of course not. But it does mean that authoritarian orderliness is sometimes more conducive to economic growth than democratic chaos.

    With another bombing today in Iraq, and with growing numbers of American casualties, those occasional soundbites from Iraqi civilians who claim that life was actually better under Saddam — that they at least had clean water and electricity under his dictatorship — are becoming louder and more difficult to ignore. Can Kristof’s conclusion about “authoritarian orderliness” and “democratic chaos” be applied to Iraq, despite the drastically different social, political, historical, religious, and economic conditions in Ukraine/China and the Middle East? I’m beginning to think, with great regret, that it can.

    None of this should come as a big surprise, of course. Many of us who protested the war did so not because we are anti-American (insert witty Toby Keith quip here), but because we are students of history, because we are willing to learn from the British Empire’s and Soviet Union’s mistakes. The $64,000 question is: Given current conditions, what the hell do we do about it? Some are already arguing that we should admit defeat and cut our losses. I’m not so sure.

    A dear friend of mine is now in parts unknown, doing the type of work that must be done if this war ever really will lead to greater peace and safety in the world. This is the last note I received from him:

    I consider it a privilege to be able to serve the people of Iraq. Please pray that they will find true shalom in the coming months and years.

    Quite an antidote to the cynicism, eh? Here’s what I want to see. I want President Bush to stand before a nationally televised audience, and I want him to commit a trillion (with a T) dollars to Iraq’s economic recovery. Oh yeah, and he should tell those military families who stood united behind him in February and March that their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers will be serving mandatory one-year deployments, because that is what it will take to do the right thing here. Then, I want him to humbly seek the guidance of the United Nations, and I want him to hand over administrative authority to a multilateral coalition. And then I want Bush and Congress to pay for the whole damn thing with a radically progressive tax restructuring. Because, you know what? War is costly, peace will cost a helluva lot more, and America is the only country capable of footing the bill.

    Will it happen? Nope. None of it. But it’s the only thing resembling a solution that I can come up with.

  • Fulfilling Contractual Obligations

    As a Knoxville resident and UT employee/student, I’m required to make the following statement. (It’s actually a bylaw of the state constitution — listed right there under the mandatory regressive tax structure and last-in-the-nation per/pupil spending.)

    It’s football time in Tennessee!

    What can I say? A friend offered a free ticket, and I was more than willing to take him up on the offer. UT won easily, beating Fresno State 24-6 and proving once again that the Volunteers are the most boring football team in the country. I was at Florida State during the Charlie Ward, Warrick Dunn years, when it was not unusual to see my team outscore its opponent by six or seven touchdowns. I remember sitting in the stands at one game, rooting not for a victory over the then-lowly Maryland Terrapins — the victory was inevitable, after all — but rooting for 1,000 yards of total offense. As I recall, we fell only about 200 yards short that day.

    You can call it running up the score, you can call it show-boating and unsportsmanlike, but here’s the thing: When, later in the season, FSU needed to put together a quick drive down the field — for instance in the Orange Bowl, when Nebraska took a 16-15 lead with two minutes left to play — that offense knew how to score because they had done it a lot that season. They were confident, they were sharp, and they won the national championship (finally).

    I just don’t get the Fulmer/Sanders offense at UT. Against a clearly outmatched opponent, they put up only 24 points and seemed to spend the last three quarters waiting for the game to end. Fulmer’s apologists call it “classic, conservative, hard-nosed football.” I call it boring, counter-productive, and just a little bit embarrassing. The only reason, as far as I can tell, to put a Fresno State or a Marshall (next week) on your schedule is to give your offense an opportunity to learn how to score — to turn a game day into a practice session. Yesterday was another wasted opportunity.

    Oh yeah, and UT’s defense was amazing. By my count, they allowed only one first down in the first three quarters, and it came on a circus-act catch from one of Fresno State’s receivers. Simon, Peace, and Burnett are about as impressive as a trio of linebackers will get this season.

    The highlight of the game for me actually came up in the stands. Because my friend had gotten our tickets via his job in the athletic tutoring center, we were surrounded by other folks who were at the game compliments of the team, including several families of players. Sitting right in front of us was a proud father, mother, and sister, who floated above their seats for several seconds when their son/brother, a freshman, stepped onto the field for his first (and only, so far) play. Pretty cool. You’ve just got to love college football.

  • Dreaming of a 28 Hour Day

    I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting. Well, there’s that and the freelance writing projects, reading assignments, and Jack, the four-week old kitten we’re fostering, whose cuteness doesn’t quite make up for his refusal to be weaned or his tendency to pee on walls, clothes, carpets, towels, blankets, couches, and people.

    Universities Left Behind

    The Times published two interesting pieces yesterday. In the first, “Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?” Elisabeth Bumiller argues that Bush’s broken promises might just catch up with him. The pattern should be familiar by now: Bush stands before a supportive crowd, drapes himself in the simple symbols of patriotism and Christian charity, then stumps for legislation that, if enacted, would demonstrate his “compassion.” But, of course, he never gets around to the actual politicking necessary to see that legislation through Congress. Instead, we’re left with frustrated people like Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal and a former Bush supporter.

    Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and appealed to him for help by calling himself “a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” Now, Mr. Wallis said, “his policy has not come even close to matching his words.”

    Add to that such highly-touted planks as AIDS funding, faith-based initiatives, child tax credits, and his No Child Left Behind act, and you get a whole mess of sound and fury but nothing much of significance. Well, that’s not entirely true. You also get great sound bites and photo-ops.

    Only tangentially related is “Universities in Decline” from the Times editors. It’s a simple, four-paragraph statement of a disturbing fact: “Public colleges and universities, which grant more than three-quarters of this country’s degrees, have been steadily undermined by state budget cuts and a mood of legislative indifference.” No kidding. Last summer, thousands of my colleagues and I were deemed “non-essential” employees and given a week off when the Tennessee legislature was unable to balance its budget. (Unable, even, after reallocating its tobacco settlement money.) During my five years in Knoxville, three tuition hikes have placed a greater and greater burden on students, who are receiving fewer and fewer services in return. It’s sad.

    And only tangentially related to that is this bit from the latest issue of Harper’s. A co-worker transcribed and forwarded this to me, and I’m now very curious to read the whole piece, “What’s Wrong with Public Education”:

    Public education is not intended to help the individual but to create a populace that is easy to control, says John Taylor Gatto, the author of four books on education and a former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. The real purpose of mandatory public education, he says, is to train young people to be reflexively obedient to authority and to fill social roles that benefit government and commerce. “It is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform,” he writes.

    The problem is not that public education is failing to reach its goals, but that it is succeeding in producing a culture of childishness and consumption, he says. “If we wanted to, we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids ‘take’ an education rather than merely ‘receive’ a schooling,” he writes.

    Perhaps if President Bush had, at some point, learned to “take” his education he would better understand the consequences of his actions (including his frustrating refusals to act).

    And Some Final Thoughts

    From June Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict: Insight for the Ages:

    A Zen story tells of two monks walking down a muddy, rain-logged road on the way back to their monastery after a morning of begging who saw a beautiful young girl standing beside a large deep puddle unable to get across without ruining her clothes. The first monk, seeing the situation, offered to carry the girl to the other side, though monks had nothing whatsoever to do with women. The second monk was astonished by the act but said nothing about it for hours. Finally, at the end of the day, he said to his companion, “I want to talk to you about that girl.” And the first monk said, “Dear brother, are you still carrying that girl. I put her down hours ago.”

    The things we ruminate on, the things we insist on carrying in our minds and heart, the things we refuse to put down, the Rule warns us, are really the things that poison us and erode our souls. We dull our senses with television and wonder why we cannot see the beauty that is around us. We hold on to things outside of us instead of concentrating on what is within that keeps us noisy and agitated. We run from experience to experience like children in a candy store and wonder how serenity has eluded us. It is walking through life with a relaxed grasp and a focused eye that gets us to where we’re going. Dwelling on unessentials and, worse, filling the minds of others with them distracts from the great theme of our lives. We must learn to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

  • New to Long Pauses?

    A hearty welcome to all new visitors here at Long Pauses. My traffic spiked a few days ago thanks to a link from South Knox Bubba, who officially announced my enlistment in the Rocky Top Brigade. More on this tomorrow.

    Now to a more pressing concern. To anyone who may have heard me on the radio this afternoon, let me apologize: I can’t believe that, when asked in the final seconds leading up to a commercial break to recommend a single film to listeners, I spat out Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane! I don’t even like Citizen Kane. I mean, it’s an important film — a great film, even — but it’s not a film that I’ve ever particularly enjoyed. Given a few minutes to think about it, I can now confidently say: If you want to experience Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in a single film, get yourself a copy of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. It’s available on a fantastic DVD from Criterion, and it can also be rented on VHS from the downtown Knox County library. Some other sources for film recommendations:

    Also, if you’re at all interested in the topic of my and T.M.’s discussion today, read this article that I wrote for Findings. It fleshes out many of the issues that we rambled through today.

    Oh yeah, and a word of warning: this is my blog page, where I rant on a variety of subjects, including politics. Politics is always a sensitive subject, but even more so given recent circumstances. Be prepared to be offended by some/much of what I say. I also like to write about films and books. To learn more about me read the, um, about page, and to get a better sense of the purpose of Long Pauses, read my responses to the two books that most inspired it: Thomas Merton’s life-altering New Seeds of Contemplation and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. The Denise Levertov poem that I mentioned on-air can be found here.

  • F— Off, Old Europe

    The arrogance of this bunch is just staggering. Tell me — is there any legitimate justification for our continued snubbing of the U.N.? I mean, other than a general, “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do” stupidity?

    “The administration is not willing to confront going to the Security Council and saying, ‘We really need to make Iraq an international operation,’ ” said an administration official. “You can make a case that it would be better to do that, but right now the situation in Iraq is not that dire.”

    I really wish Bush would just come out and tell the truth: “Of course we knew there weren’t any WMD. Of course we knew that democracy in Iraq was a pipedream. Don’t you get it yet? We want 100,000+ heavily-armed American troops stationed smack dab in the center of the Middle East. And for as long as (is politically) possible. It’s the only way we can show ’em who’s boss.”

    Another Really Short Take. After more than a year of waiting, I was finally able to see Sokurov’s Russian Ark today. What a beautiful, beautiful film. I knew that I would be impressed by the craft of it all, but I hadn’t expected to be greeted by such a compelling narrative. The last twenty minutes are the best cinema I’ve seen all year. So much history and tragedy and nostalgia and sorrow — and all from a ballroom dance sequence, a steadicam shot through a sea of self-conscious extras, and Sergei Dreiden’s remarkable face. I doubt I’ll see a better film in 2003.

  • Grief Sucks

    In the last week, several friends have been forced, suddenly — and even if it’s expected, it’s still always suddenly — to deal with death. Here’s the thing, though: there’s really nothing you can say to someone in that situation — nothing, at least, that doesn’t come off as cliched or awkward or reeking of empty social ritual. You say “I’m so sorry” or “I’ve been there” or (if it’s your thing) “I’m praying for you.” And you mean it. You really do. And, sure, it helps. Of course it helps. It’s certainly better than not saying anything. But the other person — the person who is really suffering — is still left with that overwhelming, inarticulate grief. And there’s really nothing you can do about that either. Which also sucks.

    I happen to be reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies this week (which, coincidentally, should really be read by everyone, but especially by Christians who read this blog and worry about my soul because I’ve obviously become too liberal). A friend gave us this book a few weeks ago, and I’m now glad that I put off reading it for a while because doing so allowed me to read Lamott’s essay, “Ladders,” this week. This particular week. So this blurb is for my friends, who I hope will appreciate it.

    Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t work for me, but I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood altering.

    But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

    Gorgeous, isn’t it? You may remember that I recently became obsessed with Six Feet Under, watching the first season on DVD over the course of two weeks or so. If you don’t know this already, the show is set in a family-run funeral home, and so death is obviously one of its more prominent concerns. In the last episode, a young woman who has served as comic relief throughout the season loses her aunt — the only person in the world who really loves her — to a freak accident, and she’s left absolutely paralyzed with grief. Finally, she asks Nate, the prodigal son returned to join the family trade, the question that has lingered over so much of the season: “Why do people have to die?” The whole season builds to that moment. And Nate’s response? “To make life important.”

    I know what you’re thinking. How Hallmark card, right? Sure. It is. And it rubs against the grain of so many of my core beliefs. But there’s also something unmistakably comforting and — I’m not sure yet why I’m drawn to this word — holy there. Can’t explain it. Maybe I’ll just go watch What Time Is It There? again.

    I really am so sorry, friends, and I really am praying for you.

  • What Am I Doing Here?

    I found today’s featured link while digging around the homepage of Dr. David Reidy, a member of UT’s philosophy department. If all goes according to plan, I hope to sit in on his political philosophy seminar this fall — a course on John Rawls and His Critics. If things don’t go according to plan, I’ll just crib his reading list and learn something about liberalism on my own.

    But back to today’s featured link . . .

    I was thrilled to find on Dr. Reidy’s site a link to Tony Kushner’s May 26, 2002 commencement address at Vassar, which I’d never read before. His speech is built upon the simplest of conceits, and one that I’m sure must have plagued every speaker who has ever faced the task of sitting down behind a computer or over a pad of paper and writing words that will inspire, amuse, and inform college graduates (and their debt-ridden families) on this strangely ceremonial day. His conceit? Why Me? and What am I doing here?

    As usual, Kushner is worth reading if for no other reason than the awesome playfulness of his language. Here, in one of the address’s many rambling, paragraph-long sentences, he gets really damn close to describing that confusing mess, life:

    You could ask your parents WHY ME, if in asking you mean how did I come to be like this; they, after all, made you, at least some of you, no one will ask them to take responsibility for the whole of you, but if in asking WHY ME you are inquiring after the specifics of your specificity, WHY AM I ME AND NOT SOMEONE ELSE, you could begin by looking into your origins; some of the answers can be found in your home, and by setting the answers you glean through observation, coercion and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a dialectical spin with the facts of your place in history, in time, your place in the world at large, in the culture which is your larger context, in the ideology you have inherited and I hope transformed by living and which with your psyche is the prism through which your self or your soul is refracted, the light and air baffle which your flame or the smoke from your smouldering traverses to reach the exterior world, by setting the inner and the outer up as combatants on the epic dramatic stage in your head, you will arrive, maybe by the time you’re 80, maybe earlier if you work hard at it, at some understanding of yourself, if you don’t fear the dark night of the soul you will; and you won’t fear it so much as long as you remember that no one is happy, only Bush is happy; the best you can hope for is to be happy-ish; remember too that the real value of a dark night of the soul is that it’s maybe the surest way of ascertaining that you have one, a soul that is.

    The “What am I doing here?” part is where Kushner gets to talk politics, and, as usual, he takes full advantage of the opportunity, tearing into Bush, Cheney, Andrew Sullivan (though subtly here), the Greens, and the ideologies of individualism and consumerism.

    one of the answers to the WHAT question ought to be: I am here to organize. I am here to be political. I am here to be a citizen in a pluralist democracy. I am here to be effective, to have agency, to make a claim on power, to spread it around, to rearrange it, to democratize it, to legislate it into justice. Why you? Because the world will end if you don’t act. You are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy. Citizens are not actually capable of not acting, it is not given to a citizen that she doesn’t act, this is the price you pay for being a citizen of a democracy, your life is married to the political beyond the possibility of divorcement. You are always an agent.

    And then he gives advice and quotes a beautiful poem by Czeslaw Milosz and reminds us of something that we should all know anyway — that we could all stand to read more Emerson, but especially the “Divinity School Address” — and then, as if that weren’t already more than any graduating class could ever deserve (even if it is a graduating class at Vassar), he sends us off with words that sound like they could be spoken by a character in a Tony Kushner play:

    It’s time to stop talking. Oh it always goes like this, I start out not knowing what to say and before I know it I can’t shut up. So commence already! A million billion mazels to you and your parents and your teachers and Vassar for having done so self-evidently magnificent a job. I am certain you are aflame. Hurry hurry hurry, now now now, damn the critics and the bad reviews: the world is waiting for you! Organize. Speak the truth.

    Amen!

  • Theology of Empire

    This weekend I received the latest issue of Sojourners, in which editor-in-chief Jim Wallis discusses the neocon move toward empire and the bad theology that Bush uses to promote it. The article isn’t available online yet — all the more reason to subscribe — so here’s a quick preview:

    The much-touted Religious Right is now a declining political factor in American life. The New York Times’ Bill Keller recently observed, “Bombastic evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have aged into irrelevance, and now exist mainly as ludicrous foils.” The real theological problem in America today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalistic religion of the Bush administration — one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American empire.

    America’s foreign policy is more than pre-emptive, it is theologically presumptuous: not only unilateral, but dangerously messianic; not just arrogant, but bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous. George Bush’s personal faith has prompted a profound self-confidence in his “mission” to fight the “axis of evil,” his “call” to be commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism, and his definition of America’s “responsibility” to “defend the . . . hopes of all mankind.” This is a dangerous mix of bad foreign policy and bad theology.

    But the answer to bad theology is not secularism; it is, rather, good theology. It is not always wrong to invoke the name of God and the claims of religion in the public life of a nation, as some secularists say. Where would we be without the prophetic moral leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Oscar Romero?

    Wallis’s piece doesn’t offer any particularly revelatory insights into Bush’s agenda, but it’s a great read because it synthesizes so much material and reexamines it through his (Wallis’s) humble perspective. And on a day that I discovered this, it seemed that a little humility was in order.

    A couple of fun factoids from the same issue:

    • CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors increased 79 percent from 2001 to 2002. The average defense industry CEO in 2002 made $11.3 million — 577 times as much as the average U.S. army private on the ground in Iraq.
    • In 1999 the average wait for public housing in Miami was 9 months; in 2002 it is 84 months.

  • Vigorous Democracy

    I don’t know whether suddenly I’m hearing more talk about democracy because I’m listening better, or prompting it. But if the clearest essential for a vigorous democracy is a citizenry that cares, I’d rather think that my conversations are signs of a nation rousing itself in defense of democratic traditions and institutions.
    — Margaret Krome

    I’ve been thinking the same thing lately, though that might be more a reflection of the company I keep than anything like a national trend. During Clinton’s first campaign, I was a typical 20 year old undergrad — a kid who considered himself a “registered apathetic.” (I used those exact words to describe my political leanings then.) Over the next decade I became increasingly aware politically, and increasingly interested. And then came Bush/Gore . . .

    George W. Bush has turned me into a political animal, and I’m not the only one. Everywhere I go now, I find myself stepping into political discussions. Wars, dead soldiers, and budget deficits will do that to a country, I guess. Hopefully, history is a good indicator here. Johnson’s an interesting example. So’s Bush 41. And instead of announcing the golden age of neo-conservative hegemony that many had predicted, Newt’s Contract with America in ’94 helped to set the stage for Clinton’s landslide re-election. I’m beginning to think that Dubya’s club-’em-and-smirk-while-you-do-it agenda might just be inspiring the same kind of counter-movement across the left-of-center. Hell, if he keeps it up, Bush might just lose the center, too. Surely Margaret Krome and I aren’t the only people who are noticing this.

  • Calling Howard Roark

    Both the Times and the Post ran cover stories on construction projects today. The subject at the Times is the new Trade Center design, which is finally beginning to build some sort of consensus among politicians, developers, and architects. Hopefully New Yorkers will come along soon. Of the many articles included in the “Rebuilding Lower Manhattan” feature, the most interesting, I think, is a short editorial by Joel Meyerowitz, who spent nine months taking more than 8,000 photographs of ground zero during the recovery and clean-up. For Meyerowitz, the “inanimate hero of the disaster” is the “bathtub” of steel and concrete that surrounds the site, holding back the waters of the Hudson River.

    Now the bathtub has been exposed to daylight, and walking into it reveals a power similar to that of the pyramids. Every day I spent down there I felt the majesty of those walls, with the city soaring into the sky above. This is a new perspective for a city to offer in its midst — a sacred space below sea level yet open to the sky.

    With the choice of the design by Studio Daniel Libeskind for the World Trade Center site, this space has a chance of being preserved. Mr. Libeskind centered his memorial on the bathtub, keeping it uncovered, allowing sunlight to grace it. Of course, his design is only the beginning, and in the days ahead it will be subject to constant pressures and alterations. For this reason, New Yorkers need to stand watch to ensure that the final plans sanctify this space deep in the earth. Although unasked for, it is our Parthenon, our Stonehenge. Purified by loss, it is ours to shape and renew.

    The piece in the Post is much closer to my heart (and my ass, as anyone who has sat motionless in beltway traffic can testify). The new Woodrow Wilson bridge is inching closer and closer to becoming a reality, and it sounds as though it will be quite an engineering marvel once completed. A twelve-lane drawbridge (!), it will be powered by “motors with no more power than a Dodge Neon engine.” Unbelievable.

    The piers must be strong enough to hold up under the daily strain of more than 300,000 cars and trucks — and possibly train traffic someday. They also were designed to withstand warping and sagging through sizzling summers and freezing winters, not to mention the possibility of a ship collision or earthquake. The piers must keep the draw spans rigid enough to open and close almost 5,000 times during the next 75 years and still line up within that one-eighth of an inch every time — so closely that a bottle cap could barely fit between them.

    Engineers have even accounted for the way the sun passes through the Washington sky. Because the sun will bake the bridge’s southern side more than its northern side, the concrete and steel on different parts of the bridge will expand and contract at different rates, Healy said. Unless compensated for during construction, that difference alone could cause the draw spans to warp enough to throw off the alignment. How do they account for so many possible calamities? “A lot of math,” Jim Ruddell, head construction manager, said with a chuckle.

    Speaking of Howard Roark, if you’re ever up for a night of good, campy fun, rent King Vidor’s 1949 version of The Fountainhead, starring (Knoxville’s own) Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon and Gary Cooper (!!) as Roark. You just haven’t lived until you’ve heard Cooper chunk his way through pages and pages of Rand’s ridiculous dialogue. Oh, it’s so bad.

  • The Precision of Words

    Anyone who caught the Blair/Bush press conference a few days ago might sympathize with Philip Roth. Those two leaders, now joined at the hip politically, make for such an interesting juxtaposition — one a well-read academic and well-spoken debater; the other a shoot-from the hip, “just like one of us,” rambling wreck. After watching his companion casually slip the word “compunction” into an off-the-cuff remark, Bush got that wild-eyed look again and began spewing stuff like:

    As I understand, there’s been a lot of speculation over in Great Britain, we got a little bit of it here, about whether or not the — whether or not the actions were based upon valid information.

    We can debate that all day long until the truth shows up. And that’s what’s going to happen. And we based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the — our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence; there’s no doubt in my mind.

    I mention Roth because in his recent fiction he seems to have become preoccupied by the degradation, sensationalizing, and politicization of language. In The Human Stain, for instance, (soon to find larger public acclaim, by the way, when the film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins is released in the fall), the main character is undone by a single word, spoken innocently but exploded by an agenda. At one point, he returns to Athena college, the site of his tragedy, and overhears a conversation between two young professors, who are debating the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Using the young intern as a personification of her generation’s intellectual vacancy, one says to the other:

    Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious , must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says “closure” I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.

    This passage caught my attention this morning as I was typing up notes because of three words: ambiguous, knotty, and mysterious. I worry when politicians denounce ambiguity, when they normalize and conventionalize concepts as mysterious as democracy and history. People die unnecessarily as a result. Families are destroyed and resources are wasted. Someone should flunk ’em.

  • Head Trip

    I woke up this morning dreaming of Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. The details are sketchy. I know that I was in a mall of some sort and that one or both of them were there for a bookstore signing. Other than that, I just remember being really excited to see those two curmudgeons sitting together, sharing lunch, and then being equally horrified when both ran away from me rather than answer my few, simple questions about the American Left and the Problems of History in Cold War Literature. Rereading four Roth novels in two weeks will do that to a guy, I guess. And writing a dissertation. I think I need a vacation.

    A Joyous Occasion. In a household where human reproduction is highly unlikely, announcements just don’t get any bigger than this: Long Pauses is proud to welcome Elessar (“Ace”) into the fold. (Bonus points if you can identify the source of his name.)

  • Wear and Tear

    After running casually, but pretty regularly, for the last two or three years, I’ve finally instituted an actual training program. If all goes according to plan, I’ll run a half-marathon in November and follow it up in the spring with the real thing. I’m a bit terrified by the prospect, but mostly I’m excited and curious — curious, especially, to know what this level of physical and emotional discipline will do to my body and mind.

    I’m already feeling the first effects. On Sunday I finished my first ten-mile run — did it in just under 90 minutes. I felt good at the end of it — good enough to go another mile or two, even. But that night, after crawling into bed around the usual time, I lay there wide awake for another hour or so, my mind and feet still racing. Burning so many calories each week is doing strange things to my metabolism. I seem to eat constantly and drink even more. For the first time in my life I know the difference (sort of) between simple and complex carbohydrates, and my refrigerator is stocked with PowerAde. Not only have I become the guy who bitches at Meet the Press, but I’m also now a “runner.” Lord help me.

  • Looking Back

    The latest polls are in, and Mr. Bush can’t be pleased. A quick run-down:

    • Bush’s overall approval rating has dropped to 59%, well below Bush 41’s numbers at this point twelve years ago.
    • 52% of those polled believe there has been an “unacceptable” level of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
    • 57% still consider the war with Iraq to have been worth the sacrifice, down from 70% ten weeks ago.
    • 50% said Bush intentionally exaggerated evidence suggesting Iraq had WMD.
    • 80% fear the United States will become bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.

    The good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that, with the American population growing increasingly concerned over our military occupation, Bush will be less likely to instigate that conflict with Iran or Syria that I have been predicting would come some time in the weeks leading up to primary season. Also, with Dean’s campaign in much better shape than was Clinton’s in ’91, and with Congressional Democrats finally finding some backbone, things are looking better for 2004.

    What I find more interesting, though, are the comments from the “man on the street” that always accompany the findings of polls like this. In the linked article, Betty Stillwell, 71, says, “We were supposed to be in there and out. By now I thought they would have set up a government, and they haven’t done that yet. . . . I think the whole thing was poorly planned, no thought to the aftermath.” Similar sentiments were expressed by interviewees on the Friday edition of ABC Nightly News. One woman, the mother of a 20-year-old serviceman, said that she had stood confidently behind President Bush in February and March (as was her patriotic duty), but that she was surprised and saddened to discover, four months later, that her son was still in the desert, still at risk.

    Huh?

    I totally sympathize with this woman’s frustration (believe me), but to act as though the “untidiness” of post-war Iraq is a big surprise only proves your ignorance. Today I discovered one of the perks of writing a blog. Blogging acts as a record of sorts — a map of texts and happenings through which I can now plot the course of my changing passions and opinions. Or, in other, more self-congratulatory words, it’s like a big We Told You So. (I never said I wouldn’t be petty if it served my needs.) So for those two well-intentioned women (and others like them) who are surprised by how messy things have become, here’s a quick look back through Long Pauses:

    On a Saturday morning in February, millions of people stood up against this war. And just a few days earlier, I warned about what would happen if we made foreign policy decisions based on irrational fear rather than on historical analysis. That post echoes the comments I made on January 30 when, in response to the now much-discussed State of the Union, I wrote: “The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.”

    On January 2nd there was Robert Scheer in The Nation, writing:

    we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks. What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies. This is an Administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.

    And speaking of those links between Iraq and Al-Quaeda. . . . I was writing about Bush’s rhetorical strategies nine months ago, two weeks into the life of this blog. Responding to his September 12 speech, I wrote:

    After being pressed for several weeks to provide evidence that links Iraq to Al-Quaeda, and after failing repeatedly to do so, the President has instead linked them rhetorically, which, to be honest, is all that he really needs to do in order to sway public opinion back to his favor. Suddenly Hussein has been transformed into a new Osama, a figurehead and weapons broker.

    And it was in the same speech that President Bush first began promising a future in which the people of Iraq would “join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.” My response:

    Man, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Again, I applaud his spoken motivations, but I just don’t see this administration or the American voters being willing to put forth the long term efforts necessary for such a radical change. Let me be clear here: I have complete faith in the abilities of our armed services, and I have no doubt that we could quickly destabilize Iraq and oust its leadership (though doing so will come at the cost of thousands of lives, some ours, most theirs). But what happens next? That’s the answer that I most wanted to hear yesterday and the one that I knew he would carefully sidestep.

    Downright prescient, eh?

    Now, finally, a majority of Americans are beginning to ask the questions that so many of us wanted answered nearly a year ago. These in my very first blog entry, for instance. Norman Mailer and George Kennan warned us. Reverend Fritz Rich warned us. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and Republican Representative John Duncan warned us. Countless church leaders warned us. Chris Hedges warned us. And Shane Claiborne certainly warned us.

    In October Pete Stark stood on the floor of the House and asked a question that his less courageous peers only now have the balls to ask:

    What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?

    I wonder how that mother interviewed by ABC last night would respond?

  • It Smells Like . . . Victory

    One of the most iconic and ironic lines in all of American film. Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore — a name straight out of Dickens — is framed in one of those low-angle, “Hollywood Hero” shots. Mortars explode around him, but he moves confidently, oblivious to or unshaken by (I’m not sure which) the danger and destruction that threatens to end him. Kilgore is an anachronism — an archetypal war hero stripped from a WWII service film and dropped into chaos. His attempts to impose discipline and order on the situation are both absurd and strangely fascinating. Ask anyone what they remember about Apocalypse Now and most will mention Kilgore. Most will even remember his most famous line.

    I was reminded of that scene today when I read The Progressive‘s recent interview with Martin Sheen, in which he discusses the potential of civil disobedience, the pitfalls of being an outspoken liberal, and the wellspring of his resilient faith. I was aware of Sheen’s activism, of course — it’s near impossible not to be when he is so often demonized by the conservative media — but I’d never heard him explain so rationally and passionately his motivations. Who knew that he would come off sounding like a modern Dorothy Day? Sheen’s answer to the final question is damn near inspiring:

    Q: Do you despair, or do you have hope?

    Sheen: No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart. A higher power is yet to be heard in this regard, and I’m not so sure that we haven’t already heard, we just haven’t been listening. I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.

    If all of the issues that I have worked on were depending on some measure of success, it would be a total failure. I don’t anticipate success. We’re not asked to be successful, we are only asked to be faithful. I couldn’t even tell you what success is.

  • Independence Day

    You’d think that seven years of marriage would have done the trick. Or the five years of mortgage payments. Nope. It wasn’t until last night at about 7:30 that I finally became a real adult. What did it was the fifty or sixty pairs of eyeballs all fixated on me, waiting expectantly for their 4th of July burgers and dogs. Somehow I had been entrusted with grill duty.

    There were additional pressures. I was tending the grill for a gathering of English as a Second Language students — a community of students, refugees, and wanderers from China, Ethiopia, Korea, Belgium, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Poland, Morocco, and all parts in between. For most, this would be their first and perhaps only experience of an American Independence Day celebration. I did my best, and everyone seemed delighted, which is the best you can ask for, I guess.

    I’ll admit that I haven’t been feeling particularly patriotic lately. But there was something indescribably beautiful about sharing this particularly American experience with this particular group of friends. Near the end of the evening — after the eating and the frisbee-tossing and the boat trip down Lake Loudon — one of the Americans, a missionary home on sabbatical, grabbed her guitar and began singing “This Land is Your Land.” Always the cynic, I chuckled to myself. Woody Guthrie. Unbelievable.

    But then the song ended and another one began. And the group closed in around this woman with her guitar, and when they knew the words they began to sing along. She worked through an impressive repertoire, including songs in Spanish and Arabic, building gradually the chorus of voices around her. She regretted only that she knew no songs from China. But our students from China were having too much fun. They circled up, argued and laughed among themselves, then turned toward the rest of us and broke into a song whose origins I can only imagine.

    I was startled by one woman’s face in particular. She looked, in a word, ecstatic. When the first Chinese song ended, she began another, sailing into one of those lilting melodic lines that so mesmerized Debussy a century ago. We in the West would probably classify it as “atonal” because it doesn’t conform to our strict harmonic structures. It was so natural for my Chinese friends, though. They listened silently for a few seconds as the ecstatic woman sang solo, then they joined in. Just beautiful. Woody would’ve loved it.

  • Happy Anniversary

    While sweating my way through a section of my dissertation (in which I’m attempting to say something intelligent about Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg and failing utterly), I got an e-mail from my dad, who passed along this article:

    Today, or, more precisely, a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight, marks the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs, who maintained their innocence to the end, were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, a crime the judge declared “worse than murder.” It now seems clear the Rosenbergs were neither as innocent as they claimed nor as guilty as the government alleged.

    I had to read the article twice before I noticed that throwaway phrase in the first sentence —”a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight.” I’d forgotten that the execution was delayed by several hours because Eisenhower and his cronies thought it unseemly to execute Jews on the Sabbath. Apparently they weren’t as troubled by the other quirky problem posed by the date: Julius and Ethel died on their fourteenth wedding anniversary.

    If you’re looking for a fun summer read — something equal parts spy thriller, courtroom drama, and political history — check out The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton. I’m hoping that they will publish a revised version soon, incorporating the newly available KGB documents. It really is a fascinating story.

  • Take Me With You, Alec

    I’m not even sure how to wrap my ahead around stuff like this. According to a recent poll, a third of the American public believes that we have already discovered WMD in Iraq. And nearly a fourth believes that Iraq actually used chemical and biological weapons during the war. As the article mentions, this is the same American public who believed — or, at least half of them believed, and half is way too many — that Iraqis were flying the planes on 9/11. Read this next line in that David Letterman dumb guy voice, the one he makes while curling up his top lip: “Saudi Arabia, huh? Never heard of it.”

    Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

    “That really bothers me, because it shows a lack of understanding about other countries – that maybe many Americans don’t know one Arab from another,” said Sam Popkin, a polling expert at the University of California-San Diego who has advised Democratic candidates. “Maybe because Saudis are seen as rich and friendly, people have a hard time dealing with them as hijackers.”

    No wonder Toby Keith and that “Have You Forgotten” guy are still leading us all to war. If I lived in terrified ignorance, I’d probably want to drop some bombs, too. (By the way, the AP has now officially put the estimated civilian death toll in Iraq at over 3,240, which means, of course, that our Christian democracy is now responsible for nearly 500 more civilian deaths than the 9/11 hijackers.)

  • Give ‘Em Hell, Bill

    A few days ago I read John Nichols’s report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech “that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most ‘amazing and spellbinding’ addresses he had ever heard.” Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America’s Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: “This is your story – the progressive story of America,” he concludes. “Pass it on.”

    It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.

    In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our time” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.

    And a not-so-random snippet from “The Trouble with ‘Being Left in This Country’: Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology” (a work in progress, all rights reserved):

    In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams.”

    “Sleep the sleep of the just” is my favorite line from Moyers’s speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?

  • A Dangerous Admission

    “You are a living mockery of your own ideals: either that, or your ideals are too low.”
    — Charles Ludlam, The Theater of the Ridiculous

    I’m slowly waking to the realization that I’m a socialist. Talk about a word that carries some impressive baggage. Tony Kushner has said in a number of interviews that he has found the label “gay playwright” to be less confrontational for most Americans than “socialist playwright.” In America today, alternative sexualities are less transgressive, less unthinkable than alternative economics. How odd.

    I say I’m a “socialist” fully aware of the problems, both practical and theoretical, inherent in the term. Not to mention the problems of the term itself: In our murky, ideologically informed, sound-bite political discourse, socialism is Communism is Stalinism is (someone explain this last one to me) liberalism. So, with apologies to any political scientists who might be reading (doubtful), here is what I mean when I say that I’m a socialist (in 90 words or less):

    • Although many of his specific predictions have yet to materialize (and likely won’t), Marx was absolutely correct when he demanded that our current situation always be understood in hard historical and economic terms.
    • Capitalism is, by necessity and by design, exploitive. (I say that with the realization that market competition has resulted in obvious and radical societal benefits as well.)
    • The championing of individualism over collective action and social justice is (in a word that I use with some trepidation) anti-Christian.

    An example. Today Nike announced that the shoemaker will be paying LeBron James — the teen phenom who has yet to play a single basketball game in either college or the NBA — $90 million over the next seven years. We’ve become deadened to figures like this, learning to expect that top athletes are entitled to top salaries. It’s capitalism at its finest. James is, after all, only exploiting an existing, highly competitive market. That he is able to do so is, in a very real and very sad sense, the American Dream. But read coverage of the story and you’ll stumble upon passages like this:

    The “marquee” basketball category — hoops shoes that sell for more than $100 at retail — is home to perhaps the sexiest battle in all of footwear. It brings massive margins, approaching 50 percent, as these cheaply made shoes fetch prices up to $140. (Nike tried to get $200 for a recent Air Jordan model, but kids balked at forking out that much.) Nike has traditionally owned this category, due in large part to the phenomenal sales of Air Jordans, but with MJ retiring this year there seems to be a chink in the armor.

    So competitors have lined up young guns. Reebok has Allen Iverson; Adidas has Tracy McGrady (and, until last year, Kobe). And Nike has tried to turn Toronto Raptors guard Vince Carter into its new Michael Jordan. Carter at first seemed the real deal, but he’s lost luster over the years as he has been felled by numerous injuries, and it doesn’t help that he plays up in Canada. Right now, Iverson, McGrady, and Jordan are the only guys who really move product, and Jordan’s on the way out. In short, Nike’s desperately searching for a new Michael.

    Is LeBron James the one? That’s up to the market, but Nike clearly thinks that LeBron is its cup of tea. Marquee shoes are aimed at black, inner-city kids who are willing to spend huge amounts of money every time the new, hot shoe hits shelves. An Adidas exec once told me that “the day after payday” is the biggest sales day in this category (the way he said it, you could tell that exploitation was not really an issue for him). To ring these kids’ consumer bells, endorsers need to be just a little bit flashy and a little bit dangerous. Iverson fits the bill, with his tats and his slightly sketchy past; Kobe does not, with his squeaky clean demeanor (he speaks fluent Italian, for goodness’ sake). McGrady’s athletic, street-ball moves on the court do the trick; Shaq’s oafish approach to the game, though perhaps the most dominant in the NBA, doesn’t sell shoes. What about LeBron? Already put under investigation for receiving “throwback jerseys” (stylish, vintage team wear) and a Hummer SUV while still an amateur, he has the controversy angle sewn up, and anyone who’s seen him dunk knows he’s got all the moves.

    There’s so much to marvel at here — that a single product will routinely return a 50% margin (at whose expense and to whose benefit?); that having a “slightly sketchy past” is now an asset to a company spokesperson (what cultural and economic forces are responsible for this change?); that executives deliberately target already impoverished “demographics” (how are profit motives complicit in the maintenance of that poverty?); and, most damning of all, that we’ve come to accept this as not only the “best we can do” but as the only system imaginable (even waging wars so that we might impose the “freedoms” of capitalism on other cultures).

    The deep, deep cynicism that marks my generation is, I think, the inevitable by-product of this distorted value system. Here’s a haunting snippet from an interview with Susan Sontag. Leading into this paragraph, she had been talking about the value of art, whose job, she feels, is “keeping alive people’s capacity for feeling, feeling in a responsible rather than a facile way.” Sound familiar? It reminds me of a certain poem: “The poets must give us / imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar / imagination of disaster.” Anyway, here’s the snippet:

    After all, if advertising works, and it does, then so does art, and in the same way. These images and stories influence us; they create legitimacy and credibility. They make things which used to be central marginal, difficult to defend. I’d go back to an earlier point I was making: That though many people I know actually are capable of acting on principle, most of them could not defend what they’re doing as acting on principle. They no longer have a language of ethical action. It’s collapsed, it’s dropped away. Whereas new forms of cynicism and cruelty, of indifference to violence, have become central in the culture. And that’s a change. I think that’s a big change.

    “They no longer have a language of ethical action.” That line has lingered with me for more than a month now. I think of it whenever I hear good people (good Christians, in particular) talking about money or taxes or politics, in general. And good Christians talk about these things a lot, often in Wall Street’s terms. Is it any wonder that a growing number of us are feeling increasingly alienated from a church that is, by most measures, indistinguishable from the culture in which it exists and from which it adopts so many of its values? As I told my parents last week, the question that plagues me is: How much of my worldview is shaped by Christ’s radical theology, and how much of it is simply a reflection and reinforcement of middle class America’s chief values — the worship of comfort, conspicuous consumption, and prosperity? Imagine for a moment what it might look like if America and its churches “stood united” behind something that matters instead of something like this.

    Along those lines, I’ve recently begun studying the Rule of the Order of Saint Benedict — this rich, 1,500 year old tradition that is so remarkably and beautifully counter to our culture. Elevating selfless community over individualism, sacrifice over comfort, contemplation over distraction, the Rule captures something of the grace of the Sermon on the Mount, reminding us that a “language of ethical action” certainly exists and must be reclaimed. My friend Karen describes it like this:

    I know what your saying about the Benedictines. My first book was The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, which was like a breath of fresh air after the hype of evangelicalism. For once, my attraction to learning about them didn’t seem to be a reactionary swing…you know, I was charismatic and I hated it so now I’m Anglican, or vice-versa. And it wasn’t nostalgic because one recognizes the very human side in the rule – the warnings against authoritarianism and laziness and such. Of course, it is also inspired by Scripture so it was another way of breaking crusts off of verses I had been overexposed to. It was just something that seemed to land home for me and still does.

    I’m working my way through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages and can’t recommend it highly enough.

  • Simple Design

    When I was hired nearly three years ago as an “Instructional Designer and Multimedia Developer,” it was with the promise that our online learning venture would be “cutting edge” and “outside the box” — that it would contribute to the on-going democratization of higher education by making college degrees available to underserved and isolated student populations and by appealing to the broad spectrum of individual learning styles via new media previously unavailable to distance educators. Ah, the beautifully naive, halcyon days of 2000. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

    So I did like most educational designers: I broke open Flash and began building unnecessarily shiny, happy learning objects, some more interesting and effective than others. Nearly fifty online courses later, I don’t remember the last time I built anything with a bell or a whistle or a motion tween. You know why? Nobody cares.

    Last month, Jakob Nielsen posted a better than average Alertbox. In “Low-End Media for User Empowerment,” he offers common sense wisdom that should come as little surprise to most designers, but it bears repeating:

    Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users’ feeling of control and thus support the Web’s mission as an instant gratification environment.

    After cataloging the standard gripes — bandwidth remains an issue (witness my dial-up), Webcasts almost always suck, and complex media do a number on navigation — Nielsen focuses on the strengths of simple design, particularly the importance of readable, relevant, and quality content. I especially like this point:

    On average, low-end media has a higher percentage of information-rich content, while high-end media has a higher percentage of show-off content. Low-end media is certainly not fluff-free; witness the pictures of “smiling ladies” where product photos should be. High-end media, however, positively revels in embellishments and irrelevancy. Getting to the point seems to be beside the point when you invest a fortune in fat media. After all, you’ve got to have something elaborate to show for your money.

    He also adds:

    Think of Googlebot as your most important user — and one that is blind to high-end media.

    For a site that has only been around for a little over a year and that gets relatively little traffic, Long Pauses shows up with surprising frequency on the first page of Google searches. That’s partly because my reading and film responses fill a small niche — like, apparently not many Websites devote an entire page to Ordet or July’s People. But I’d like to think that it’s also because content is king, and the sharing of content is the only reason that the Internet continues to excite me.

  • Christian Nation

    “A man cannot be a perfect Christian . . . unless he is also a communist.”
    — Thomas Merton

    “God helps those who help themselves.” When you teach freshman composition at a southern public university, you get used to hearing that expression. It’s usually prefaced with, “Like the Bible says . . .” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, mostly because I’ve also been thinking about the words “Christian nation” and how I have no idea what they mean.

    My students’ favorite proverb, of course, isn’t in the Bible. (You won’t find it there because it’s a base degradation of Christ’s teachings and sacrifice.) The exact source of the phrase is a bit murky, but variants appear in the literatures of many cultures, including Aesop’s fables, a play by Aeschylus, and — most significantly for us Americans — a 1736 edition of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Which is just perfect.

    I’m no Colonial-era scholar, but I’ve read most of the significant founding documents — enough of them, at least, to know that, contrary to much of public opinion, America has never been a “Christian nation,” or, not the one reimagined by contemporary American evangelicals. (Googling “Christian Nation” and America turns up no shortage of opinions on this question and from a variety of, um, interesting perspectives that span the political and theological spectra.) Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine, like so many of their compatriots, were typical Enlightenment intellectuals. Which means that they were Deists whose faith was reserved largely for Reason rather than God. It also explains why they so deliberately eschewed dogma in their noble pursuit of democracy.

    I say all of that to say this: there’s something in this expression — “God helps those who help themselves” — that offers us, I think, a usable model for understanding the Right and the evangelical church’s devotion to it. It’s Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, and vaguely-Biblical-sounding rhetoric all rolled into one. It’s pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps jingoism stripped of all historical, political, and economic context. It’s nostalgic and proud and intellectually lazy. It is decidedly not, in any shape or form, Christian.

    Jordon Cooper recently posted a blog along somewhat similar lines. He’s done us all a favor by transcribing a passage from a book by Tony Campolo (which I’m totally stealing, by the way, so go visit Jordon’s site):

    While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I became good friends with a young Jewish student who eventually made a commitment to Christ. As I tried to mentor him and give him a direction as to how to live the Christian life, I advised him to go to a particular church that was well known for its biblically based preaching, to help him get a better handle on what the Bible is all about.

    When I met my friend several weeks later, he said to me, “You know, if you put together a committee and asked them to take the Beatitudes and create a religion that contradicted every one of them, you could come pretty close to what I’m hearing down there at that church.

    “Whereas Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor,’ down there they make it clear it is the rich who are blessed. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ but the people at that church have a religion that promises happiness with no crucifixions. Whereas Jesus talked about the meek being blessed, they talk as if they took assertiveness-training courses. Jesus may have talked about the merciful and peacemakers, but those people are the most enthusiastic supporters of American militarism and capital punishment I have ever met. Jesus may have lifted up those who endured persecution because they dared to embrace a radical gospel, but that church declares a gospel that espouses middle-class success and affirms a lifestyle marked by social prestige.”

    As I listened to my friend’s accusing words about the church, I realized it could just as well be aimed at me. Since that conversation, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on whether or not my lifestyle is really Christian. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “If you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says about being a Christian, then in any given time in history, there might be four or five such persons who would have the right to call themselves Christians.”

    And I say all of that to say this: Kierkegaard was right. “Christian” — if you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says — is a weighty word, and it’s serious, and, most remarkable of all, it’s full of grace. Please don’t affix that word to this country, which, for some reason, has been blessed with the delicate gift of democracy but will never deserve it. That, also, is grace.