Culture

God Bless Us Everyone!

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For those not already convinced of my hopeless sentimentality, here’s the most damning evidence yet: I’m a lifelong Charles Dickens fan.  My defense is that – especially at Christmas – we historicize Dickens as this smarmy old chap like something from a painting of dogs playing billiards.  In fact, he was the Bernie Sanders of his age.

So on this unquiet solstice, let me conjure three of Scrooge’s ghosts that Dickens might select, were he alive to consider our world at the turning of this year.  For the ghost of Christmas Past, a President laid out for his state funeral; for Christmas Present, a child starved to a leathered skeleton in a Yemeni hospital; and for Christmas Future, the blue-gloved hand of a rescue worker protruding from a charred sedan in Paradise, clutching fragments of bone.

Even in death, Dickens wouldn’t romanticize the presidential policies of Bush the Elder.   George the First would get the sharp end of a merciless caricature no Dana Carvey could touch.  But in old age Bush’s personal decency would be sticking out like the knobby elbows and kneecaps of an old man in a nightshirt.   As a ghost, he’d rise from his coffin, an Uncle Sam from the old recruiting poster, his long bony finger pointing, pointing, pointing everywhere, so many things askew to point at, so many missions overlooked, unstarted, bickered to a useless draw.

As Bush’s coffin is drawn off on a caisson hauled by a spectral team of black horses, the Yemeni child limps into view, her skeletal fingers reaching up to take my fleshy hand.  “Where are you leading me?” I ask, as we walk into a featureless horizon filled with blinding white light.  “This is the place of no more choices,” she responds.  “Every choice is the cancellation of another choice.  Every road has been traveled. They all lead here.”  I look around.  Everything is sunlight, but there is no sun, no shadow, no direction.  Only more and more children, starving, looking at me.  They are whispering the words “never again”, over and over, in many languages, Yiddish, Khmer, Spanish, Rwandese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and a hundred thousand dialects lost to time, syllables blending like a breeze, then a wind, screaming at the top of their voiceless lungs the single word forever. Then silence, and dark.

Out of which comes a blackness, of which Dickens himself wrote: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, as one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”  Dickens roamed London by night, and if he were to walk the streets of Paradise he would smell its ghosts rising from the sooty mud.  And a thousand other smells: collections of 1970s LPs, burned; dashboards of old cars, burned; bookshelves filled with “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Atlas Shrugged,” burned; leveraged home equity and inadequate 401Ks, burned; a generation raised to believe its works would be the flower of civilization, burned.

Because the real point of “A Christmas Carol” is to force us — the Scrooges of the ruling class — to stare on Christmas Eve into our own graves.

And for what? At the pealing of bells, Scrooge rises from his bed to send the largest turkey to the home of the Cratchits and then walk out to greet his neighbors on a bright Christmas morning.  And here’s where the book makes its delicate pirouette, so often confused with smarm.  The thing that saves Scrooge’s soul is the mere delight that he is alive — the pleasure in life itself.  And realizing this, his gratitude overflows, and he cannot stop laughing.  “For he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset; and knowing such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.”

You could say that, having conjured up this horror, to conclude with laughter is an offense, if not a sacrilege.  But laughter, honestly found and felt, is the orgasmic eruption of a deeper human love.  And that’s my best hope and wish for you, at the turning of this year.

What Divides Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

This bloody week, like too many bloody weeks before it, we face the dread that Americans are descending into a state of deepening, unresolved conflict, and wonder how we can pull back from it.  It is entirely appropriate to line the streets in condemnation of presidential hate speech.  But we can do more.  We can cut our consumption of fear and ditch the word “they”.

The focus on Trump as one driver of our polarized society is readily understandable.  The president has positioned himself as a cyclone at the center of our politics, spinning off epithets and labeling opponents with heedless force, in an obvious – and highly successful – electoral strategy of divide and conquer.  We know from social science that fear makes people more conservative, so Trump sells fear.

But we should also acknowledge that progressives sell fear too, because for both sides, fear sells so well.  And progressives also sell division, both for honest reasons and for cynical ones.  As to the former, by ideology and by custom, progressives have practiced the politics of difference, as a way of honoring and making space for the diversity of human experience.  But now that Trump is successfully portraying this as the politics of division, and using it as a point of leverage to unify his own base, progressives have defended themselves by ramping up efforts to stereotype Trump’s cultural center and identifying religious conservatives with their racist fringe, in order to magnify the threat from the right.

How can this dynamic be de-escalated?  How can a broad array of Americans reclaim the discourse of democracy?

First, we have to start taking the belief systems of Trump’s base seriously, to understand what unites them.  According to Pew, fully half of Trump’s supporters call themselves “highly religious.” The Biblical worldview that God created Man in His image, that Woman was created from Man, and that Earth is God’s creation for Man’s bounty, is deeply and honestly held by millions of Americans.  It also has profound political ramifications.  One is that men and women are intrinsically different creatures.  Another is that the planet does not have an existence independent from the connection between God and Man.  From these precepts flow other, essentially political, conclusions.  One is that men are intrinsically prone to sinful behavior, for which they must be periodically punished, and more often forgiven, but it is utterly unrealistic to think that men can ever be fundamentally changed.  Another is that the planet’s degraded condition is fundamentally God’s will, and if the planet is to be consumed in fire, then that is a sign that the Apocalypse is at hand.  Polls indicate most evangelicals hold such “End Times” beliefs.

Opposed to this is the strictly scientific worldview, sometimes identified as atheism, which accounts for up to 25% of Americans, according to Gallup. It holds that humans are a biological species of animals on a planet that came into being by the evolutionary process of natural selection, that our genders are one of our many traits, and that we inhabit a planet which is alive insofar as it is a vast interconnected web of living things of which we are one small, but increasingly troublesome, part.  Among the political implications of these beliefs are that gender is not subject to political fiat, and that the moral claims of the other life forms on the planet, both now and in future generations, vastly outweigh any human claim  to short-term enjoyment of planetary resources.

In between these two is the ecumenical worldview, informed by both scientific knowledge and religious belief, and characterized by humility in the face of the mysteries of that which we do not understand; by the experience of a divine presence that science cannot explain, but the broadminded intelligence that accepts and engages with scientific inquiry and discovery.  This view swallows the biological pill that we’re animals, but chases it down with the moral liquor that we also possess souls.  It speaks from various demoninations, various faiths.  The political implications of these beliefs can be all over the map, depending on how that mixture goes down for each of us.

This spectrum of belief, and its corresponding political hues, have populated our country since at least the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in schools.  We will not ever dismantle it, any more than the Sunni will eradicate the Shia or the Bosnians will exterminate the Serbs. We should stop trying.  For better or worse, this is the American political family, the “pluribus” from which we must make an “unum” if our democracy is to survive.

What is new about our current political moment is that our president has encouraged – and many of the rest of us have succumbed to – an addictive cycle of fear, igniting dark impulses and awakening latent tendencies that cut across the spectrum described above, tearing old scars of race, gender and national origin into open wounds, and increasingly, open violence.  This confounding overlay turns fear into terror, and risks pushing polarization into war.

The antidote is to remember bravely who we are.   George Washington wrote that the first principle of democracy is “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.”   In every one of our spiritual traditions described above is a common belief in the equal worth, dignity, divinity, or salvation – depending on the vocabulary each group might choose – of the individual person.  Rising from that bedrock of belief is the edifice of personal independence which differentiates America from other nations and attracts immigrants to our shores.  When conservatives call for the rights of religious freedom, and progressives champion the rights of gender diversity, aren’t they both proclaiming the basic rights of individuals to exercise liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

FDR, famous for the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” confronted a racist threat far more powerful than anything we face today.  His last public speech, undelivered because he died before he could speak it, contained the following:

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”

A monumental task — far greater than anything we would conceive today — which he knew would require both the “science of human relationships” and “strong and active faith.”  What FDR had no use for is the word “they.”

The Words that Are Not There

~ John ~ Leave a comment

In Boulder, Colorado, we are learning to read the words that are not there.

I recently read Anthony Marra’s brilliant volume of linked stories, “The Tsar of Love and Techno.”  It chronicles three generations of Chechnya over the past half-century.  It’s a world of ordinary censorship, of hinterland bureaucrats, obliged to erase things that exist and insert things that do not, spending their lives obliterating the lives of others in patient expectation of the day when their own lives will be in turn obliterated.  Along the way they make daily compromises to feed their families, commit private acts of rebellion, perform small mercies, and even make secret works of art.

We in springlike Boulder are miles away from Chechnya’s ruined dystopia.  But our local paper, the Boulder Daily Camera, is the property of hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which owns over 70 newspapers from the Boston Herald to the San Jose Mercury News.  Last week, the Camera’s local publisher fired its editorial page editor for publishing a commentary – not in the paper itself, but on his own online blog – that criticized Alden’s practice of looting its newspaper holdings for cash.  Our Editorial Advisory Board – of which I’m a newly-resigned member — sought to comment on Dave Krieger’s firing and were told we could not.  The newspaper, that for weeks ran letters to the editor complaining of the cancellation of Blondie and Peanuts, has not run one letter touching on the Krieger matter.  This silence joins a disturbing pattern — In Kingston, New York, the Daily Freeman’s editor has told its staff to erase from all news coverage any mention of parent company Alden’s management practices.

Instead, last Saturday, the Camera’s editorial page “reported” on the firing through omission and erasure.  Krieger’s name was missing from the masthead.  Mine was missing from the Advisory Board roster.  Whereas there are customarily five Advisory Board contributions, last Saturday only three appeared, the blank space filled with larger headlines and alternative copy.  One had to “read” the story by understanding what was not there.  This is now one develops the literacy of censorship.

Saturday afternoon, a dear friend in her eighties came to visit me.  Her family left Germany in 1933.  Her father was working for a literary newspaper during his postdoctoral year – it was the first outlet that Hitler closed.  She arrived at my door, her face haunted.  “This is how it begins,” she said.  I gave her a cup of tea and reassured her that we are not there, and we are not going there — not on my generation’s watch.  But I couldn’t calm the look in her eyes. In the morning paper she had seen ghosts.

Today, in the face of this public pressure the Camera could not render visible, our Boulder City Council will consider a resolution condemning Alden’s suppression of free speech and Krieger’s firing, and declaring the importance of independent media for the community.  As a result, the Camera’s city staff writer, whose beat it is to cover the council’s agenda, was able to run a small news item on the back page of today’s edition that covered the Krieger story – not for itself, but for Council’s proposed action addressing it.  Such are the small acts of provincial rebellion against central authority that might have featured in Marra’s stories.   Indeed, given this unfolding drama, Marra could not have invented a more deliciously ironic name for our paper than the “Daily Camera.” We will see how the tale turns out.