Working through disappointment

I have posted on this before, so pardon the self-centered nature of this post.  Higher education in general, and history in particular, are very hard places to find steady employment.  Most of us end up doing exactly what I am doing--teaching multiple classes at multiple colleges or universities for very low pay and no benefits or job security.  Oddly enough, there is a little bit of comfort in knowing that my experience is so common.  Very little comfort, but there it is.

Last spring, I had one more opportunity at a local community college.  It is the one job arena where my experience matters and my lack of publications don't.  Long story short, they chose someone else--a grad school colleague.  As much as I appreciate his work effort, I certainly don't think he is a better teacher.  But his connections were better than mine, and that is the story of my academic life.

Frustrating, though.  I emailed the chair to ask what I could have done better.  He said my presentation, experience and interview were excellent and he couldn't think of any way to improve.  What sounded like a pretty strong compliment also made the rejection that much more painful.  "You were perfect and could not have done better.  But we still aren't going to hire you."

I know I am a good teacher.  I had a student say "wow" the other day when I explained how the Black Codes allwed southern plantation owners to recreate the ante bellum south in 1866.  I have had numerous students tell me my class was their favorite.  That helps.  I have worked really hard this semester to figure out new ways to approach teaching the same course.

But the constant rejection has taken a toll.  Don't get me wrong.  My life is better than I deserve.  SOF and I get along and have so for 24 years.  We live in a nice community and have amazing friends.  My life is better than most of the people on the planet.  Being rejected for a community college job is not even close to the end of the world.

There are moments, however, when the disappointment is hard to ignore.  The worst occur when I am around multiple people who are deeply ensconced in the cult of academia.  They really don't understand those of us on the outside.  Worse, at times, they have no idea how hard we work to teach more than they do (often) for a tenth of the pay and no benefits.  Yesterday was one of those painful moments when one of the people from the job search last spring emailed me (again) to ask me to adjunct at the same place.  I feel like asking him gently that he might consider how hard it would be for me to meet the same people who voted against me, and the person who they chose, while I do the same job for pennies.

I can rationalize every single job disappointment.  Either I screwed up as I did at a couple of opportunities, or I was never really a serious consideration in a few.  Or there were those jobs that I am so fortunate not to have.  But occasionally, I am reminded of them and it still stings.

What are taxes for?

Heard this fabulous story on the drive home (Time to Overhaul America's Aging Bridges?) which both infuriated me at our political mess, and reminded me of the amazing nature of NPR.  No shouting, no names, just a thoughtful and informed discussion on the issues.

But the subject got me thinking about our political impasse today.  As I have suggested many times, most conservatives conceptualize tax money as undeserving and lazy people getting free stuff.  As I have pointed out to people, the safety net (outside Medicaid) constitutes only 14% of our budget, and surely even conservatives don't believe that all or even a majority of those receiving aid are lazy.  Do they?

Back to bridges.  This subject more than most reminded me of our unbalanced discussion on taxes.  Imagine what an infusion of tax money would mean for the 8,000 bridges that need substantial repair.  It would, first and foremost, update our infrastructure to make it more reliable and less risky.  So, we would get something tangible even if we, personally, don't drive on that bridge.  It would put thousands of people to work.  Those people would then pay rent, buy groceries and purchase clothing and cars.  That would help the struggling retail market, car sales, and possibly even help with some of the mortgage situations.

That infusion of tax money would help thousands and ripple through our economy.  And of course, we would get new bridges that won't collapse into the river.

More public shootings, and why are voters so dumb?

So, last week we had a few more public shootings.  The one that caught my eye occurred near the Empire state building where a man gunned down his former boss, and then died himself in a shootout with police.  The interesting thing is that the second shootout involved 9 bystander injuries, and reports suggest that most of them were injured by police bullets.

I am not criticizing the police here.  This was a difficult situation in a public place, but it highlights why I hate the idea of more guns on the street as an answer to public shootings at schools or theaters.  Here, people trained and practiced were unable to just get the bad guy.  What makes gun rights people really think that untrained people in a crowd will do better?

__________

Polling data out says that most people are concentrating on the economy, and on the economy and deficit, Romney gets better marks.  This makes me think that voters are dumb, dumb, and even dumber.  Republicans have, at every step, pledged to stop Obama from getting any traction on the economy, and have killed stimulus bills, middle class tax cuts, programs aimed to help small businesses, and people give the Republicans better marks on the economy?  Seriously?  As I told a friend this morning, this is like a coach who refuses to call any passing plays, then criticizes the QB for his lack of passing yards.

Oh, and Romney pledges to do what now?  Cut taxes on the rich, and slash safety net programs.  No one has said he will actually balance the budget.  He will take away your healthcare though.  Got to love that.

What constitutes an apology and did Todd Akin truly "make a mistake?"

I just saw this:  Huckabee Backs Akin, Lashes Out At GOP | TPM LiveWire, where Huckabee makes a plea for fairness and, essentially, a second chance for the guy who said that women being truly raped won't get pregnant.

He certainly apologized for saying so, but for what?  Is he really sorry for saying something that he clearly believed to be true?  Did he learn in the backlash that he had no understanding of human reproduction?

Or was he simply sorry that, as a friend of mine put it, "people on the interwebs thought he was a complete idiot."

If he really learned, then that would be great.  But I have been reading about all the people in the Republican party who believe things that are very close to this.  One doctor wrote an article about how rape victims rarely get pregnant, and both Romney and Akin know of him and Romney praised him.

Plus, in the day after he "apologized," Akin said that he really meant to talk about how women lie about rape.

Jesus Christ!  His apology about saying that raped women wouldn't actually get pregnant really meant to say that women lie about rape all the time--and would do so to get an abortion.  Just more of the trend, and I really see this in so many on the right--that women cannot be trusted with their own body.  Those same women, I would note, are left to their own devices and "personal responsibility" when dealing with abusive men, healthcare needs, access to contraceptives, and even providing healthcare and nutrition to an infant.  But when faced with a difficult pregnancy, they can have no individual responsibility, because women simply can't be trusted.

Sigh.

Romney uses same racist dogwhistle. Southern strategy returns.

Which means that he may not be actually racist himself, but more than willing to appeal to racism to win.  Despite Fact Checks, Romney Escalates Welfare Work Requirement Charge : It's All Politics : NPR.  Everyone who knows anything about welfare reform has said that Obama is not removing the work requirement.

It is a lie, and Mitt has to know it is.  After all, compared to some of the dim bulbs the GOP has elevated lately, Romney isn't an idiot.

But he doesn't care.  Because this ploy paints Obama as a welfare queen.  "How in the world could he not understand the power of work, the dignity of work?" Romney said the other day.

Right, because Barack Obama isn't a hard worker, right?  Because he is black.

This is fucking racist bullshit, and the people who are pushing this in Romney's campaign, including Mitt himself, are fucking racist assholes for saying something they know to be untrue.

This is your GOP, conservatives.  Don't you ever, EVER, suggest to me again that Republicans are moral.

Beer Geeks Determined to Unlock Obama's Home-Brew Recipe - Politics - The Atlantic Wire

Beer Geeks Determined to Unlock Obama's Home-Brew Recipe - Politics - The Atlantic Wire

Now we are geeks?  I haven't actually heard that Obama drinks anything I would really like to sample.  I love that he values craft brewing, mind you, but until he is requesting a double IPA or Belgian Dubbel, I am not sure I really want the recipe.

Though that could be cool, now that I think of it.

Rape victims get no help from conservatives--and Paul Ryan is just as bad as Todd Akin

What is more, far from being the outlying sentiment in the Republican party, this is now part of their mainstream beliefs.  War on women?  This is awfully close to that.

Todd Akin’s Rape Comment Was Bad but His Abortion Views Are Much Worse - The Daily Beast

For the Tea Party, a woman who gets pregnant can't have been raped

There is so much awful and stupid in this story:  GOP Senate nominee: Women don’t get pregnant from ‘legitimate’ rapes | The Raw Story.  As one person noted online, beating me to it, this is the pregnancy version of drowning a woman to find out if she is a witch.  If she gets pregnant, she must have actually wanted sex.

I would sigh, but that just seems too mild for this type of misogyny.  All from a guy who has a BS in "management engineering" and clearly didn't, as SOF noted, attend his elementary school "life science" class.  But worse than misunderstanding how reproduction works, this is the other side of the idea that women are asking to be raped.  "Look how she dressed," or "what was she doing walking in a dark alley," or "how dare she have breasts."

All to stop women from having abortions.  This really makes clear that this not about abortion, per se, but about keeping control of women and their fertility.  This is anti-women far more than anti-abortion.

And this guy isn't the first.  Here is a story from 1988, but that isn't the only one.  A doctor in 2006 said that "women are not fertile during an attack."   Nor is this the only stupid and hateful thing Akin believes.  He also believes the morning after pill causes abortions, even though the science says otherwise.

But here is the thing.  Todd Akin looks like a toad.  I am not trying to be mean, but he looks awful on tv and in print.  I am guessing that the American people, including my conservative evangelical friends will find his statements odious and wrong.  They will denounce them (oh Sweet Jesus, I hope so) and decide that Akin is not a good example of Republican thought.

Ah, but here is the rub.  Not only did Paul Ryan (does not look like a toad) endorse Akin in his primary bid and speak eloquently about Akin's leadership in the house, the GOP vice presidential candidate also worked closely with the toad to redefine rape downward.  To keep women from getting an abortion on Medicaid or other federal funding, Ryan and Akin worked together to redefine rape to only mean "forcible rape," which many observers noted would eliminate all sorts of awful situations.  Statutory rape, which can mean, of course, an 18 year old and a 16 year old, but can also mean a 30 year old man with a 13 year old girl--statutory rape wouldn't qualify as "forcible."  Nor would date rape or taking advantage of a mentally challenged woman.

So, while many conservative Christians will, undoubtedly, pat themselves on the back for standing up to Todd Akin this morning (and who knows how many will defend him out of tribal loyalty), they will all speak highly of Paul Ryan and not seem to connect that the difference between the two is not ideology or belief, but appearance.  One doesn't look like a toad.  He just advocates the same misogyny as the toad does.

One link between fundamentalist Christianism and racism

Blogger Jesse Curtis explains that one source of his own racism was the horrible Bob Jones U history texts he read as a child:

-The book's entire treatment of slavery, other than briefly mentioning it in other contexts such as the constitutional convention and the Missouri Compromise, is contained in a box inset on two pages. In this brief box, we're assured that slaves were well fed and clothed, and that the vast majority of southerners did not own slaves. Nowhere in the whole book do we find out what life was like for average slaves or free blacks, nor are we told that over a fourth of slave families were broken up by sale.
-The text states that slavery was not the primary cause of the civil war and argues that it had more to do with constitutional differences of opinion. It does not discuss the actions of slaves, free blacks, and black soldiers during the war to win their freedom.
-It says that the 14th amendment was the most important and far-reaching of the reconstruction amendments because it increased the power of the federal government. Apparently this theoretical concern was of greater importance than the 13th amendment which officially ended slavery for four million people.
-It dispenses with Jim Crow in a single page, and we're not told how the "Redeemer" governments regained control in the South.

I wish I could say I was shocked by this, but I am not.  But this is part of (only part) why we are still battling the civil war, and Obama's election was the latest part of that.  And, if you know anything about fundamentalism, you know that many conservative Christians have pushed their kids to read these very textbooks.  No wonder we have a race problem in the southern church as well.  

Time to just admit that the Republican party hates the poor

Choosing Paul Ryan as their VP and openly endorsing the Ryan Budget means that it is time to stop acting otherwise.  All my conservative friends assure me they care about the poor and give to the poor.  And I believe that.  But there is absolutely no way that they will give double or triple of what they give now, and that is just a bit of what will be required to address the need if this budget passes.  The numbers simply don't add up.  Conservatives who want to nearly gut the safety net while cutting taxes for the rich are lying if they then insiste they really want to help the poor.  

They don't.  The GOP might as well change their motto to "Fuck the Poor."  

At least that would be honest.  

Chick-fil-A continued

A nice list of thoughtful comments on the Chicken mess, here from Fred.  As for me, I have a few more thoughts.  I read several people on FB say that this was about defending Biblical marriage.  As many have pointed out, that isn't one thing.  But even if it were, Christian conservatives have a very inconsistent past on this--and I bet they don't even remember.

When gays people simply wanted the right to be gay, conservative Christians opposed that.  When they wanted the right to not be charged with a crime for having gay sex, conservative Christians opposed that.  When they wanted the simple right to not be fired for being gay, conservative Christians opposed that.

Conservative Christians have tried to make gay people not gay.  They have funded (though badly) organizations dedicated to transforming gays into straights.  And when that didn't work, they simply tried to push gay people back into the closet.

You don't get to say that it is just about gay marriage.  It was never about marriage.  It was about being gay.  Conservative Christians simply don't want gay people to exist.

But they do.

Gay Bashing as Christian value

I have no idea what will happen to Chik-fil-a after all of this.  I believe firmly that the tide is going against the anti-gay side.  Young kids don't care as much as the older people, and they find it frustrating to see their gay friends or kids with gay parents attacked with such hatred.

And that is what I felt when I read some of the reports of the people flocking to buy chicken sandwiches today.  Hatred is now a Christian value.  Is it any wonder I struggle more and more to identify with these people?

More on lying: universal healthcare version

Check out this interesting post by a pro-life conservative who moved to Canada for a few years.  She was pregnant with her third child and scared to death that the socialists in Canada would harm her pregnancy.  She even considered trying to come back to the states for treatment where she could choose doctors and pay for all of it.

As it turns out, she found out that it wasn't bad.  It was actually good.

Fast forward a little past the Canadian births of my third and fourth babies. I had better prenatal care than I had ever had in the States. I came in regularly for appointments to check on my health and my babies’ health throughout my pregnancy, and I never had to worry about how much a test cost or how much the blood draw fee was. I didn't have to skip my ultrasound because of the expense.

And about abortion? She was horrified to see that their healthcare covered abortions, but then realized that it wasn't as bad as she thought.

Abortion wasn’t pushed as the only option by virtue of it being covered. It was just one of the options, same as it was in the USA. In fact, the percentage rates of abortion are far lower in Canada than they are in the USA, where abortion is often not covered by insurance and can be much harder to get. In 2008 Canada had an abortion rate of 15.2 per 1000 women (In other countries with government health care that number is even lower), and the USA had an abortion rate of 20.8 abortions per 1000 women.

Imagine that? Fewer abortions even though they were covered?  But as she notes, the lower number might be due to the fact that no women had to worry about paying for expensive care or losing their job. Talk about pro-life.

In this follow-up post, she talks about why she was so scared of universal care:

I was afraid of Universal Health Care, because I knew nothing else but what I had been told by religious propaganda and conservative think tanks. They repeatedly spread the idea that Universal Health Care took away all choice. I was told that people were assigned doctors, and were not free to choose a different doctor. I was told that older people were denied health care and left to die because they were not a priority to the national interest. I was also told that abortion was pushed heavily on any woman who had an unwanted pregnancy or women who were pregnant with a child with disabilities. I was told that people with disabilities would be eliminated by government encouraged abortions or possibly even killed at birth (they wouldn’t want those people on the federal dole since they would “waste money” and “drain the system.”)

She was lied to. And often by the same people who want the Ten Commandments on courthouse walls. Many of those liars undoubtedly did so out of ignorance, but that explains it only so far.

I am tired of liars lying for Jesus.

Should we boycott Chik-fil-A for supporting anti-gay policies?

I am sure everyone is aware of the chicken fast food founder who had this to say about gay marriage:

"I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,' and I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to try to redefine what marriage is about," Cathy said.

I always love this theology. God loved America when we owned slaves, allowed children in mines, killed Native peoples and took their land. God seems to prefer us when we torture others because they scare us, and he doesn't mind a high infant mortality rate nor a high maternal death rate. Children in poverty? Nope. But embrace gays and God gets pissed.

That aside, I have been iffy on the boycott. It hasn't really been an issue because I rarely eat there. And I had to agree with some of my conservative friends who thought that Boston and Chicago were trampling on first amendment rights when they threatened to not allow the franchise access to their cities. And certainly, while I find Dan Cathy to be an uninformed bigot, he has the right to be an uninformed bigot.

But, as Fred Clark noted, the company doesn't just think this, they take action to cause "actual harm to actual people." I don't need to give them money to donate to Exodus International nor political groups trying to harm my gay friends.

And if the issue started as just another example of the culture wars, Now Chik-fil-A Is Pretending To Be a Bible-Quoting Teenage Girl. Why? To cover up for a blatant lie where they told their customers that their children's toys would no longer be from the Jim Henson company because of a product recall. Rather than say that the Henson company withdrew over the gay issue, they made up a reason.

Amazing, really. This started with Dan Cathy preening about Biblical values and traditional family, and ends with the company lying about someone with whom they disagree. I have wondered this for sometime, but how is it that the same people who tell me we should post the Ten Commandments in public buildings don't seem to sweat it when their political heroes violate the "thou shall not bear false witness" one. Is it ok to lie as long as you lie for Jesus?

I am guessing that this lie won't cost them one bit of support from the conservative Christian set. After all, Dan Cathy may be a lying bigot, but he is part of the conservative Christian political tribe. And that says it all.

The Certainty of More Shootings

Fallows on the Denver shootings.  I am mindful of the need to not politicize something like this, but have to say that after each one of these, I feel this deep sense of sadness that our country seems to do this more than others.  It isn't that we have more insane people, and it isn't even that we may not be good at dealing with the insane people we do have.  But we do seem to insist on believing that the answer to gun violence is to have more guns.

Seems like we should be able to talk about reasonable gun control without the NRA accusing us of caving to the UN.

On Sacred Spaces

SOF and I just returned from her family reunion.  This was one of our better ones in that we seemed to get along better and enjoy the interactions.  We avoided political and religious fights--all which left a few silent spaces at the dinner table, but contributed to a much more positive experience.

Part of the time was devoted to assessing family business and planning--part of which regards a family cabin.  And we mean "cabin" here, not "house in mountains."  No running water or indoor plumbing.  But for this family, that cabin represents more than shelter.  It has taken on a sacred dimension.

The recent spate of fires and beetle-kill has spurred a lot of discussion about this particular cabin--to say nothing about generational change.  Who knows what will happen, but the beetles have already changed the surrounding environment.  And that, I think, is the issue regarding sacred space:  change.  For many in the family, this cabin represents a sacred space, and one that should be protected, maintained and held.  As a quasi-outsider, it is clear to me that the building is more symbolic than real.  It has become a holder of family memories and is locked in a sepia-tinged photo of all-younger family members smiling on the porch.  No matter that during that time, many were deeply unhappy, of course, because in the cabin those memories are all positive.  

As that outsider, I remember my few visits there, and could not quite makes sense of my own discomfort.   In a sacred space, there are rules for your experience.  And in the case of this cabin, those rules were mostly unwritten and unspoken.  My discomfort was not understanding that I was in a place filled with ghosts and memories and connections to the past.  That back room was built by so and so.  That stove came from that other person.  "We don't do that here."  It is only in retrospect that I can see I could not experience that area or space as my own.  The experience was tightly scripted--even though I doubt anyone there thought of it that way.  And built into that script was the idea (contradicted by the narrative, of course) that the cabin never changes.  It always is.  

That isn't meant as criticism, because I am thinking of my own sacred spaces.  One of them will be for sale soon, and that news hit me like a brick.  That is because I had my own sense of what that space meant--even though it was not mine to define.  And, to be sure, we have had some amazing experiences there.  But more than once, in that same space, I have looked at others and wondered why they did what they did.  How dare they experience "my" sacred space that way?  "We don't do that here."  

Anglican often reminds me that "everything changes" and "nothing stays the same."  Those words have served me well over the past few weeks.  I am also reminded of SOF's great advice when addressing items or tokens that held great personal significance.  She gently pointed out that the item itself was not the memory.  

My sacred space will soon be in some other hands.  Likewise, that family cabin is just a building.  While it can function as a place to both connect to nature and family and enjoy the tradition and past, it does not have to be the holder.  Those memories and connections exist whether the cabin does or not.  But when we insist that the sacred space be the one holder of those memories and connections, we risk losing them all.

And we do not have to do that.  

On freedom and the individual and healthcare

Happy 5th of July, everyone. Our 4th turned out quite nice when we received a delightful invitation to dinner with good friends.  Our kitchen is in disrepair (new floors) so we were just going to hang out and cook something on the grill, but so much easier when someone else did it.  :)

But a couple of links for those who don't read Slactivist.  First, is this idea that ‘Libertarianism is [not] a philosophy of individual freedom’.  I am working my way through the Crooked Timber post and it is rather long and involved, but interesting.  I have always found libertarianism to be rather utopian in nature--just a vague belief that absent government interference, freedom would dominate.  I don't see any evidence in history or the world around me that smaller government leads to anything approaching great personal freedom.  Instead, all I see is that small government and low taxes leads to rule by a small group of very rich people, a tiny middle class, and a whole lot of poor people.

I am reminded of that when I see reports that right wingers are thinking of fleeing the country after the healthcare ruling.  Of course that is just a rhetorical flourish, and God knows I have thought of moving to Canada myself.  But the interesting thing was that those people could not move to another industrialized and free country that would have less healthcare than we have here.  Their idealized world looks more like Iran and Somalia than any other industrialized Western nation.

Speaking of that, this fascinating story (again, Slactivist) on the very conservative evangelical Michael Bird who teaches in Australia and has lived in the UK.  Turns out, while he agrees with American evangelicals on gay marriage and abortion, he is stunned that American evangelicals oppose healthcare, and one of his main points is that Jesus was very concerned with healing the sick.  Not only that, but in other industrialized democracies, healthcare has come from the Christian community, not despite the Christian community.

Christian Advocacy for Healthcare. Every western democracy from Norway to New Zealand has universal healthcare for its citizens except for the most prosperous nation on earth. Across the world this move to care for the sick has been driven by a Christian ethic of compassion and not by the pursuit of economic again. Now as any mission organization will tell you, there is no mission without margin, so you have to pay for it. But the purposes of taxation is not a re-distribution of wealth, but to do together what we cannot do individually, airports, defence, environment, education, commerce, etc. and to help the poor and the vulnerable. Universal health care is not a ponzi scheme any more than the USAF is a ponzi scheme. It is something that is needed and in the national interest of our citizens to have.

As he notes, American evangelical opposition to healthcare has nothing to do with the Bible or their own theology, but rather their tribal connection to the GOP.  And that is just sad.

Obamacare upheld

And the freakout was not far behind.  A former spokesman for the Michigan GOP suggested armed rebellion was the answer.  I always love that.  Conservatives seem to think they are somehow so patriotic that they can advocate shooting people?  One Republican referred to the SCOTUS ruling as 9-11, because, you know, it is hard to tell the difference between a devastating terrorist attack and a court ruling that says people can have access to healthcare.

And that is the part that just blows me away.  I hear conservatives everywhere talk about losing their freedoms, but I don't know what freedoms those are.  It is harder to smoke in public, that is for sure, but I don't know that Obama or the Feds are pushing that.  It is harder to scald yourself in the shower.  You can't purchase a completely unsafe car as easily as you could before.

Everyone I hear bitching about the mandate already has healthcare and would not, for a minute, think seriously about not having insurance.  Yet telling them they have to have it--for all the reasons that it actually works--is some kind of tyranny?  The government has the ability to mine your data, tap your phones, and find out what books you check out--to say nothing of my key test case--torture people--yet somehow telling people to get healthcare is a start to Nazi Germany.

I honestly don't get it.  And it isn't as if Republicans are serious about keeping government out of your life--at least if you are a woman.  They support a lot of healthcare mandates.  They don't have the least bit of a problem forcing a woman to undergo all sorts of medical intrusions if she has reproductive issues.  They can deny her access to emergency contraception, can actually force her to have a transvaginal probe, or they can simply force her to give birth regardless of the situation. 

I hate to break it to Republicans, but those stances are contrary to the idea of freedom. 

Ultimately, where I no longer respect that side of the aisle is their complete willingness to be duped into stupid outrage.  The Mandate came out of a conservative think tank, and until Freedom Works and others decided it was just what Hitler would do, was widely accepted in conservative circles.  As we talked about here, if you poll people on the basics of the ACA, even Republicans support most of them--including the ban on preexisting conditions and lifetime cap--both of which are completely impossible without the mandate. 

But my Republican friends will shout about freedom, and then go out to vote for someone who wants to restore our torture regime, and take away our healthcare.  If any of that makes sense to you, then you must be a Tea Partier. 

The least of these?

Old news, but the attack on the poor and the needy continues.  In Pennsylvania, the Republican governor is looking to reduce assistance to the needy, "including cutting support for the mentally ill." The mentally ill aren't the only ones, of course.  Anyone at the bottom is under attack to take care of themselves.  Or not. 

In Kansas, Brownback just signed a tax law that removes income tax for businesses, professional income, or anything that can be sheltered in a trust or partnership.  The elderly, the working class, and anyone who doesn't make enough money to shelter their money will still pay income taxes.  For reduced services that they need more, of course. 

All this, while my Christian conservative friends pray for the ACA to be overturned and for Obama to lose his reelection bid.  Obviously, for many of you here, that doesn't surprise or shock you, because as Leighton just said so eloquently, "lies for Jesus are just simply lies."  I still, stupidly want to believe that my conservative Christian friends--the ones who speak glowingly of their personal relationship with someone who healed the sick and hung out with whores and lepers--would actually want policies that look after the "least of these." 

But for many of them, Obama's race undoubtedly taps something they can't openly address.  For others, deep down, they just don't like poor people, and assume that many of those who are homeless or ill or poor are just lazy and immoral.  I wish I could say I understood that, but there is a cruelty there that is just scary.  But I absolutely don't understand their sycophantic kneeling at the altar of the wealthy and powerful. 

Read this from the late departed Elizabeth Edwards.  In this 2008 essay, she describes meeting a single mother (apparently), seemingly employed, grabbing Edwards at a talk and telling her that she was terrified by the lump in her breast, but could not get it checked because she had no insurance.

In the landscape of the health-care debate, two very different paths lie in front of us. Which one we choose will speak volumes about who we are as a nation and what values we hold dear. Our choice will determine what we say to women like Sheila—whether we say, “We are with you. Your challenge is our challenge too, and we will help you face it,” or simply shrug and say, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” That’s the moral choice we face today and which path we walk down is up to us.

My Christian friends don't want to admit it, but the people who pray to a man who healed women and lepers, are saying to people like Sheila, "you are on your own." 

There is nothing Christian about that response. 

Anti-intellectualism, evangelicals and the American mind

Two posts the other day caught my eye.  The first was this from Fred Clark on how professors in evangelical schools often have to lie to their students.  I remember as a teen a discussion about seminary.  One person noted that those who went to seminary expecting to get their beliefs rubber-stamped were in for a big surprise.  But I then watched as conservatives within the SBC went to rather extreme efforts to make sure that was no longer true.  And this is what Fred observes.  Intellectual inquiry has been banished, because for conservatives, intellectual inquiry and curiosity are bad things.

This, along with the emphasis on female submission started my exodus from the church.

But it isn't just the church that struggles with anti-intellectualism.  Americans, as Richard Hofstadter noted, have always struggled with this distrust of the academy and the intellectual life.  But in recent years, that has taken a different tack toward seeing education as just another market-driven problem.  I see it all the time with college students who see their tuition as payment for a degree, or, in my class, payment for a grade.  Not access to learning.  Just that letter grade and the ultimate degree.

But they aren't alone.  Conservatives everywhere have decided that education should be run as a part of a free market economy.  Cheaper to just use people like me to educate, and push everything to the online environment or for-profit education.  Chris Hayes has a really good discussion here.

I would have liked to see more discussion on the role the university itself has played here, but that will come.  I would also like to see more discussion of the role that education has played in research and social mobility.  But conservatives don't seem to value either.

Man walks up to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates

Peter asks, "Why should you enter the gates of heaven?"

Man:  "I fought for lower taxes and opposed healthcare for the poor."

Peter:  "Sigh"

Conservative Jesus

The Good Samaritan

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”

28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 In reply Jesus said: “A Moor was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was picked up by soldiers and took to a room. There they stripped him of his clothes, drown him in water until he was almost dead, and left him naked in a very cold room. His screams filled the air, but those who heard looked the other way.  31 When news of this reached the village, the local leader assured the people that he, a very religious man, had done nothing wrong, and the Moor was very dangerous.   32 The local priests agreed, and commended the leader for his righteousness.  Local church members also shrugged and told each other the Moor was a dangerous man who asked for violence.  33 But When one of the religious leaders objected, and asked if we were not to "love our neighbor," the leaders condemned him as valuing the life of the enemy more than the villagers. 34 After many more awful days, the Moor died in his cold cell and was buried without ceremony.   The village leader, who often prayed in public, retired from public life without punishment, though he often boasted of protecting the village from the Moor.  35 The religious people of the village nodded in agreement, and told future leaders to do likewise.  

36 “Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the Moor?”*

*Well, it might not have gone exactly that way.  You can read the real story here.

Handy Pro-life guide

The betrayal of the faith

As usual, Leighton has an insight that needs some thought:

I think that in practice, faith among laypeople in the U.S. (in the sense of non-ordained, not uneducated) seems to be rarely about belief in an actual deity, so much as a belief in the power of a group or organization that preaches love and charity to breathe life into its vision. It's a faith that the church can actually make things better for people - make sure they are safe and fed, give them meaning in the midst of the crushing dullness of the present, and hope for a better future for them and their children.

Seeing so many churches and prominent people of faith going out of their way to comfort the comfortable and oppress the afflicted is a terrible betrayal for people who try to have faith in the message of hope ostensibly championed by those who are working diligently to crush that hope. This doesn't have any direct connection to God (except that for whatever reason, God is not preserving his/her message). But that betrayal of trust by people can make it harder to trust people in general. This can be a deeper and more grievous wound than losing faith in someone who was never really there to begin with.

Struggling

Last night's outcome in Wisconsin is troubling for many reasons.  From what I read, Walker used tremendous amounts of anonymous money to spread complete disinformation.  In this world, disinformation works, because so many people are low information voters.  I know several people who vote based on completely half-assed information.

These Republican voters can't identify Grover Norquist, may not have heard of the Supreme Court case Citizens United, and probably aren't aware of the Koch brothers.  I have run into several who had no idea that Norquist dominates the Republican party tax policy.

None of that stops them from voting Republican, mind you.  Just as learning about torture or cuts for the disabled didn't stop them.  And the fact that so many of them are Christians just makes it all the worse.  I know that Leighton is correct in why these people vote the way they do--I get that in my head.

But the kid who grew up going to vacation bible school and revival meetings is struggling with the fact that my Christian friends don't actually care about others outside their view.  Oh sure, all of them do some for the poor.  I get that too.  But at the same time, they vote for policies that harm others--and don't care.  Their "relationship" with God is so powerful in their life that they can't manage to give a flying fuck about some poor disabled person who just lost some assistance.  Just as they didn't care when our government tortured people to death in their name.  Their God either communicates so badly that they can't hear--OR he doesn't mind torture and poverty either.

One Christian friend told me that Jesus said "the poor will always be with us," so we should just do what we can, cut government programs, and trust that "God is in control."

Jesus.

Are they trying to recruit for atheism?  Because that is unbelievable.  But on every issue--women's health and pay equity; poverty; the environment; torture and war; tax policy, etc. these good Christians in prayer and "quiet time" can't seem to care.

I am trying to believe.  But you guys are not helping.

When churches become more political than, well anything else

The Story of a Centrist is a great post (actually book excerpt) from Jonathan Merritt about his experience trying to address environmentalism from a Christian point of view.  You can read it, but it won't surprise you that at first he found great support from Southern Baptist circles.  But then the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission) found out and used what can be called "strong arm" tactics to try to silence the effort.

Some of this is the naiveté of someone who wanted to believe that churches were somehow different than other institutions.  I was certainly guilty of that.  I wanted to believe that because people used a language of faith that they operated from a different set of rules.  And to be fair, some groups do--both in and outside the church.

But the other part of this is the history of institutions.  At some point, the institution becomes more about protecting and defending the structure than anything approaching the ideas or goals they started with.  The Southern Baptists may have started as a group dedicated to religious liberty and the "autonomy of the local church," but they have become a de facto arm of the Republican party.  The same can be said of the Catholic church who are more about defending the structure than protecting kids, or punishing priests, or actually providing care for women.

You'll get my 40 oz. soda when you pry it from my cold, chubby fingers

So this last week, Bloomberg called for limiting soft drink sizes to 16 oz.  Not limiting people to 16 oz. of soda, by the way, but limiting the cup size.

You would have thought he called for the end of freedom.  I saw a lot of conservatives deriding this as the "nanny state" and an imposition on individual freedom.

Personally, I would advocate taxing soda and other foods that use high fructose corn syrup, but the Bloomberg model hopes that limiting cup size will serve as a subconscious trigger that the consumer has had enough.  I don't know.  High fructose corn syrup is different than other sugars, evidently, and may make people fatter than other sugars or fats.  The argument here is that these sugary drinks contribute to obesity, which costs our economy billions in healthcare costs, lost productivity, etc.   We all pay for those costs.

There are two real problems for me here.  First, is the assumption that this limit is somehow the first government intrusion into the fast food or junk food arena--or that it is completely unprecedented.  Yet corn is heavily subsidized (as is sugar) so this area is hardly some paragon of the free market.  Second, this is hardly new.  We have always made choices about things that we deem to be dangerous.  We are increasingly limiting areas where one can smoke, and charge taxes on alcohol and tobacco.  We force passengers now to wear seat belts (because the link between seat belts and saved lives is clear, btw), and impose all sorts of limits on various drugs.

But my first complaint with this is about the nature of conservative governing.  Their philosophy, as I am told, is that they believe in smaller government and more individual freedom.  Yet, the list of government intrusions they tolerate is rather stunning.  These same conservatives had no problem with the Patriot act allowing the government to invade their privacy without a warrant.  These same conservatives shrugged when their government tortured people.  These same conservatives seem to have little problem with a state that executes people even when we know that the death penalty is rife with class and racial bias.  These conservatives cheer a government that invades a woman's womb and reproductive system.  Or cheer a government that allows doctors to lie to women, or in this case, denies a rape victim access to emergency contraception.

Access to healthcare and reducing soda intake offends my conservative friends.  Torture and shaming a raped woman?  Not so much.

Is it too much to ask for some philosophical consistency?

Wrong place, wrong time.

Heard a fascinating interview on the BBC with a historian studying the Adolf Eichmann trial.  Turns out this is the 50th anniversary of his trial and execution.  The point that caught me was the observation that until this trial, most Israelis saw the Holocaust victims as "ghetto" Jews who were too weak to stand up to the Germans.  The Israelis had just defeated several Arab nations and thought of themselves as strong and self-reliant.  Hearing the testimony of the survivors at Eichmann's trial made them realize there was no difference.  The Holocaust victims were just at the wrong place in the wrong time.

The story before this was about the Sudan and people trying to survive.  Pulling them both together I was struck by the continuity of fortune.  I was fortunate in so many ways.  I was born in a peaceful part of the world, far from pogroms and death squads.  My parents provided more food than we could eat.  I didn't experience oxygen deprivation at an inopportune time.  I survived childhood with my wits intact, and after many childhood diseases had been virtually eradicated.  I had access to education and entertainment.

But in a different country; in a different family; in a different state of health--all the difference in the world.  A difference we take for granted in this country.  And this is not an American Exceptionalism talk.  I am stunned that Republicans have made that a requirement for patriotism.  I understood that as hubris and blind following.  American Exceptionalism is the opposite of humility, and for the life of me, I have no clue why conservatives don't see that.

If I were born south of the border, or in the wrong country in Africa, or a Jew in 1930s Germany--everything would be different.  If I were a minority and poor in this country, everything would be different.  I would be more likely to end up in prison, or on death row.

Our playing field isn't level--either in this country, and certainly in the world.  Conservatives would do well to acknowledge that.

I was born in the right place at the right time.  I was born to parents who love me.

I was blessed.

That wasn't due to my effort.

Profiting from the poor

I am a capitalist.  I like the profit margin and believe that competition and greed produce some very good things.  That search for profit has given us home improvements, Ipods, great strides in medical technology, and even safer and more efficient cars.

But there are aspects of capitalism that bother me.  Capitalism, after all, cares not if the worker is 12 or the byproduct poisons the local river.  But there is a new trend in capitalism of profiting from the poor.   This occurs in tax policy, in wages, and especially in lending practices.

I still remember when I first discovered "signature loans."  My mother scowled and said very plainly, "those are nothing more than usury."  Now, the payday loan people probably scoff at the signature loans.

Capitalism makes great cars, but there are some areas that are not made better by the free market's drive for profit.  Prisons, poor people, and I would argue, education are not improved by transforming them into revenue streams.

We can do better.  But since we have decided that the free market is a divinely inspired mechanism, it is doubtful we will.

Texas executed the wrong man in 1989--WTF?

Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says - Yahoo! News

On gay marriage

This has been an interesting week, that is for sure.  Watching the train wreck in North Carolina was painful.  But then, the next day, President Obama became the first sitting President to affirm gay marriage.  The response has been interesting.  Conservatives said that Obama had declared war on traditional marriage, and some on both sides accused the President of acting out of pure political expediency.

That may be true.  I would be naive to suggest that the Obama camp didn't have extensive meetings on this subject.  But I am also willing to give him the benefit of the doubt--that the story he told of his "evolution" is true.  Because that is my journey too.

I don't think I knew any openly gay people until my 30s.  SOF and I have been trying to recount the first time we met someone out of the closet.  Certainly in my high school there were people we suspected as gay, but none were open.  Like Fallows, I wonder how many times I used anti-gay slurs around gay people without knowing?  I hope I didn't.

In that context, gays were always illicit and perverse.  And, of course, it ran right into the complex sexual awakening of teen years, so any challenge to that was always difficult.  But, as Obama notes, times have changed.  I have had several gay colleagues, and we have neighbors who have been together longer than our nearly 24 years.  It becomes increasingly hard to dismiss that kind of relationship.

Obama noted that his daughters had friends with same-sex parents, and it was inconceivable to Sasha and Malia that those parents were somehow less than their own.  That is the generational gap that so many evangelicals and conservatives don't see.  The younger kids are around openly gay people--in their family or circle of friends.  They see them as humans, not as deviants.  And, as Rachel Held Evans notes, that is also true in conservative evangelical circles.  Watching her social media feeds Tuesday evening, she saw the divide.

Christians over 40 were celebrating. Christians under 40 were mourning.  Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that Billy Graham ad: You’re losing us

I don't think they can change, however.  The entire conservative movement right now is consumed with trying to stop the country from changing into a world where white and straight privilege don't dominate.

They won't win this war, I don't think.  But the casualties will be many.

More on the GOP as the problem

And I know that at least Steve wasn't impressed with this argument, but I certainly find it convincing.  Sully notes some reactions.  One of the key points is that this is not an issue of conservative v. liberal.  I don't think what the Republican party is doing on foreign policy or domestic policy is really conservative.

To give two simple examples: the outrageous use of the filibuster in the Senate and the refusal to give an incoming president in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s a single vote on a stimulus package that was one third tax cuts.

The Self-Made Myth

As I posted at the beginning of this year, I was interested in studying the role that government plays in our lives.  Obviously, that has fallen by the wayside--even with great assistance and information from people like Smitty--partly because I could not get a handle on the information.

Perhaps it has already been done.  Reading this on the "myth of the self-made man" and think this might be a good start.  I have several relatives who remind me of this story.  They see themselves as self-made, are angered by taxation, and just want others to work harder.  And they have worked hard--no doubt, but they aren't acknowledging the myriad ways that they have received help from others--because if they do, they will have to acknowledge the need to pass it forward.

Turns out this mythology is older than Horatio Algier.  In The Americanization of Ben Franklin, Gordon Wood argues that, in part, being "americanized" was to be a self-made man who had come out of poverty.  That was a new thing--coming from poverty was not a good thing before.  Of course, as he notes, Franklin wasn't actually self-made either.

But that mythology continues.  And it is a destructive mythology, unfortunately.  Not by encouraging hard work and effort, but by removing that group and community assistance that we all need.

Let's just say it: The Republicans are the Problem

Finally, someone says it: the Republicans are the problem, and avoids the normal media approach of blaming both sides.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

It is always dangerous to wax nostalgic about the past.  And there is no doubt that we have some heavy handed partisans in our past.  But my memory and reading suggests that we always had a pretty good mass of people who, while not motivated by altruism, had at least a goal of good governance.

I don't see that in the modern Republican party.  The Democrats, while hardly perfect, worked with Bush when they could.  Republicans, on the other hand, refuse to work with Obama, and reject even conservative proposals if they perceive that Obama might get credit.  Nothing is more important to these people than defeating Obama--and that includes serving the American people.

What is more amazing to me, however, are those still voting for the GOP.  At first, I wrote that off to the conservative lack of compassion toward the poor, and I still see that.  Conversation after conversation suggests that my conservative colleagues see the poor primarily as lazy and possibly immoral.  They have compassion, but think that most of the poor can, and should, work harder.

But this last round has revealed that it isn't just the very poor.  The GOP reviles the working poor too--those who work multiple jobs, but still apply for SNAP benefits to eat.  And let's take it just a little further.  The GOP is after the safety net, and even the safety net that middle and upper middles look to in their retirement years.  If the GOP gets their way, they will reduce Medicare to a voucher that increases only at inflation, leaving the elderly to negotiate for healthcare on the open market on a fixed income with less and less assistance.  As I mentioned to one of my friends the other day, middle class Republicans are not only voting to make life harder on the poor, but voting to make their own retirement more painful.  They are voting to cut their own throats, and thanking the GOP for the opportunity.

I hope they will wake up, but I am watching people vote out of emotion rather than logic--and emotion is much easier to manipulate.  And the GOP can manipulate emotional hatred of Obama (or whoever we throw up there, let's be honest) and distract their voters from the attack on their own interest.

Lest we forget, Christian President George Bush tortured early, often, and indiscriminately

Haven't talked about torture since the last time a Republican defended it--and that would be just a few months back.  The leadership of the party thinks that torture is acceptable and even moral. And why should they not?  It polls well among their base, as we have also discussed.

But a reminder of what these people did in our name:

Bush ordered the torture early in the war, and did so over the objections of moral people all along the way. To do so, they found lawyers to simply write briefs saying the torture was legal.

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

You get that?  They didn't just torture Khalid Sheik Muhammed, they tortured innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They tortured people who had a tenuous connection to torture, and they did it when there was no imminent threat.  The sadists we elected in 2000 and 2004 overrode the torturers in two cases and ordered more pain and more abuse.

Need I remind you these are the same people most likely to quote from the Bible as they run for office?  Most likely to talk about their "personal relationship" with Jesus as they authorize or defend torture?  Most likely to talk about "moral values" and their decline as they order some innocent person shackled by wrist and ankle to a D-ring in the middle of the floor and then induce hypothermia.

The Republican party is the party of torture.  They love it.  They want to do more of it.

capitalism, morality, and evangelical tribalism

It has been an interesting few weeks.  We had some great guests stay with us the last few weekends, and then this most recent Friday had to retreat to our shelter as a tornado came within a half mile of our humble home.  We were lucky, but one of our good friends had damage to her home and fence.  Luckily, she and her family are safe, but it was one of those afternoons that will get your attention.

I have had an on-again, off-again conversation with some evangelical conservative friends of late.  One of them works in a student ministry, and the other used to be a pastor--though that very fact both scares me and makes me very glad that he is no longer in that position.

Anyway, the conversation has been predictable in many ways.  Both tend to recycle right wing talking points, and many times, I think, without even knowing.  Both are convinced that government programs are inherently inefficient, and that a good many people who receive government assistance should not.  Both of those viewpoints, I think, reflect this idea of "tribalism" where they see things purely through a lens of  "with us" or "against us."  Conservatives have been very effective at using that belief, I think, in convincing conservatives (and many liberals) that the media is biased against conservatives, or most recently, that any program that Obama supports is probably a bad idea.  Fred Clark has written on this lately, and his last one suggests that this tribalism comes from a deep insecurity.

I am going to keep thinking about this idea.

But back to my conversation.  Beyond the rather reflexive "government is bad" from both, I also see what I believe to be a false sense of what the unregulated market will produce.  Both express a belief that people--as families, or as individuals, or as sexual beings--should act in a certain moral way.   But at the same time, they suggest that an unregulated market is best.  E.J. Dionne writes about this phenomenon, noting that most two-income couples are two-income by necessity.  But those who want one parent at home with the kids seem to also want the market unregulated.

As I pointed out (we will see if they respond), the market doesn't care about morality.  The market cares about profit, and if that profit comes by child labor, or selling crack or prostitution--that is fine.  The market only cares if the worker dies if he or she can't be replaced.  Same for the consumer.

And as I also pointed out to my friends, they tacitly accept this because they both want the government to ban certain things they don't like--drugs, abortion, and gay marriage.  The free market, however, doesn't care about either of those.

Why the market is to be trusted in some areas, but not others puzzles me.  But to be fair, so does the belief that somehow the market will magically address social or moral issues.  Not sure why anyone would think it cares.  Those things are only addressed when people make political and personal choices, and ask what are often hard questions.

Christianity in Crisis

On this day, one year ago, we said goodbye to Streak.  Amazing how much we still miss him.

My last post was obviously strident.  But the cognitive dissonance of conservatism and conservative Christianity is very hard to take.  I don't get it.  How do people who follow Christ (just ask them) embrace the politics of the rich and powerful, while stepping on the necks of the poor?  How has the teachings of an itinerant preacher become the preferred faith of the gated community set?  How do they not see a problem with that?

Thankfully, I am not the only one who sees a problem.  I know other readers here do, and it is nice to see others around the country asking the same questions.  I appreciate Andrew Sullivan's writings--I think he has written on torture more than just about anyone.  Here, in his article, Christianity in Crisis, he really examines the crisis of the faith, from the decline among Catholics to the disappearing mainline protestants to the evangelical protestantism.  But, as he notes, that evangelical protestantism is part of our problem, not part of the solution.  Not only do they embrace anti-intellectualism in just about every area of life, but an almost mindless authoritarianism.

And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.”

I have said to my evangelical friends that very phrase, "something has gone very wrong," and they just shake their head and insist that everything is fine.  But it isn't fine.  The most vocal followers of Christ are more interested in shaming women then preventing abortions.  They are more interested in protecting tax cuts for the rich than helping people rise out of poverty.  And they cheer the prospect of millions without health insurance.  Something very much fucked up about that.

One of my friends chastised me for my frustration during Holy Week.  He seemed to think I need to just focus on the meaning Easter has, and somehow look away from the rest.  But I can't easily do that.  I can't just turn my face from the attacks on the poor and women.  And, quite frankly, I won't.  I find great commonality in Sullivan's discussion of searching for God.  But I know he doesn't force women to have transvaginal ultrasounds against their will.  And he doesn't turn away from the hungry infant, or the sick mother.  If you expect me to just put on a nice suit for Easter and ignore all of that, then you don't know me.

Sullivan has hope for the faith:

This Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it lets it be. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. 

For this Holy Week, that is a good place to start.

Dear GOP, how do I help the fertilized egg without helping the slut carrying it?

Dear GOP,

As a new conservative, I am trying very hard to wrap my mind around uphold the Republican party's stance on issues.  I understand I am only supposed to care about the fertilized egg, because, as Oklahoma's legislature has decreed, it is a "person" with "14th Amendment rights."

I also understand that we need to ignore the suffering of the disabled, poor, and hungry infants cut taxes for the "job creators" and simply don't care can't afford to help everyone.

But since I do care about the fertilized egg (person) and would like to help him, her it, how do I help that fertilized egg person without helping (and therefore encouraging) the slut carrying help him, her it?  What if the fertilized egg person has severe disabilities or may not survive to be ignored as an infant?  What do I do then?  Obviously, the slut carrying it has no say here--that goes without saying.  (Which is why I said it.)  Nor, of course, do all infants.  But what if that fertilized egg person needs expensive healthcare?  I know we don't believe in healthcare for individuals, so if that egg person is now a "person," it doesn't qualify for healthcare either, right?  After all, we can't ask the job creators to pay for that.  That would be ridiculous and quite possibly Socialism.  Or Communism.  Or Fascism.  Or Kenyanism.

Here is hoping you all have a happy Easter.  Now is the time to remember the torture enhanced interrogation techniques that our Lord endured for our sake.  Oh wait, that doesn't sound right at all.

Streak

Dear GOP--I am working on not caring

As a new conservative I am trying to adjust to not caring about others--you know, those without insurance, or immigrants, or women who need contraceptives, etc?  I get part of it.  After all, if you were stupid enough to be born poor or female, you kind of asked for this, right?  And it isn't my fault, so why are you asking me to spend my hard-earned dollars to help you? (how is that?)

But my problem is then making that pivot back to caring about a fertilized egg.  That is a hard one. After all, if I don't care about the egg's future healthcare needs, or that egg's future family's healthcare or nutritional needs, why do I care about the egg again?

I am sure there is some trick here--some way of forcing cognitive dissonance that I am missing.  I hope you will advise.

Streak

PS, once I have turned off the caring about my neighbors and friends, can I ever turn it back on?

Being Republican means not caring what happens to other people

Well, that obviously isn't completely true.  As a Republican I am supposed to care deeply about a fertilized egg, and actually care more about that egg than the woman carrying it.  But once that egg is born and in the open air, I am not actually responsible for helping him or her.  That little infant is on their own. If their family is poor, or abusive, that, politically, is not my problem.

As you can tell, I have been having a rough time of things lately.  The news that the ACA might be overturned which would make the Republican happy, has pushed me into a bit of a funk.  I am once again reminded that Republicans found it offensive that we get everyone into some kind of insurance plan.  That act offended them.

Torturing Muslim suspects didn't offend them, but making sure that everyone could purchase insurance, not be denied based on a pre-existing condition, and not be kicked off if they got too expensive?  Conservatives found that to be offensive.

I have no idea how to operate in that moral world.  It makes absolutely no sense to me.  It scares me greatly, I have to say, at a personal level because I know that we are one layoff away from losing healthcare, and one major illness away from bankruptcy.  It is that simple.  And if Republicans get their way, that insecurity will continue well into retirement, because they don't want me or SOF to be guaranteed coverage.  At any level.  And, while the condition is not threatening or dangerous, a pre-existing condition makes us uninsurable outside a group plan.

And Republicans want us to be insecure about that.  They are cheering news that the ACA might be overturned and that hated "mandate" be struck down.  They want to go back to the environment where we are all one major illness away from bankruptcy, and one layoff away from being uninsured.

All, by the way, as the Republicans push their budget bill before Congress.  It won't pass--thank the Lord--but it reveals their priorities pretty clearly.  Turn Medicare into a voucher system so that I, as an 80 year old, will need to negotiate and shop for health insurance--and hope--fucking hope--that we have enough retirement to account for rising costs.  Because if we don't, then we are done.  And, of course, the same budget proposal wants states the option of handling Medicaid completely as they want.  If we stay in Oklahoma, I predict that means the bare minimum.

All while they absolutely and stridently insist that no rich people be even troubled by this sacrifice.  No tax increase for them.  No problem for their retirement.  No, the sacrifice has to be for those who are at the bottom of the heap.  And, of course, those low-information voters who don't realize that their middle class won't protect them from ruin and illness.

But that's the beauty of being Republican.  If I choose to go that route, I don't have to care about what happens to the poor and needy.  That is their responsibility, not mine.  My responsibility is to get as much as I can, because I am the only one who matters.

Yeah, I know.  I need to really think about a news fast.  But just because I don't read my twitter feed, blogs, or the news doesn't mean this reality will go away.  Nor will the fact that not caring is the hallmark of modern conservatism.

Guest Post: Does the Frontier explain our political incivility?

CIL left a very thoughtful comment on the previous post, and I thought it was worth reposting for a wider reading.  My first title was, "This is all the fault of Frederick Jackson Turner" but thought that was a bit much.

Streak,

You have raised similar issues on this blog, but the question I have is why? Why has the level of political civility apparently declined? Why is there such an attack on women's rights, people of color, etc. as we have seen in places like Arizona?

I wonder if it is not two issues. First, and I think you have disagreed with me about this before, I think that the United States is more of a conservative-leaning nation. That when pressed, the nation has not pushed social reform issues further than it could have because of inherent conservative tendencies. I think of Gordon Wood's discussion of the Constitution, Eric Foner's work on Recontruction, historians who assess the impact of the Progressive movement and the Great Depression.

Second, I wonder how the frontier mythology on which the nation is contracted is partly at play here as well. In other words, I trace much of the current retrenchment, xenophobia and the like to 9/11. Turner argued that the "consolidating agent" on the frontier was the fear of Indian attack. So, in this way, 9/11 resembles the colonists' and nation's response to things like the Pequot War or Pearl Harbor. Rather than bringing out the best in people, there is a backlash - sending Pequots into slavery in the Caribbean, interning Japanese American citizens, endorsing torture. 

For those who may not know, Gordon Wood is one of the preeminent scholars of the American Revolution, and he argued, among other things, that the constitution represented a fundamentally conservative retrenchment against the excesses of direct democracy and the rather flippant ideas of the Declaration of Independence.  For Wood, some of the freedoms that Americans realize after 1787 are almost accidental--in that the founders really didn't intend for those terms and ideas to apply to the "common man."

FJ Turner wrote a very influential article called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," that redefined American history at the time.  He argued that the frontier, or availability of "free land" defined America and encouraged the creation of American ideas like individualism, egalitarianism, and even our form of democracy.   And, as CIL notes, the identification of the Indian as "other" is critical to that American development.

Discuss.

Obama and Oklahoma

We all know that Oklahoma is the reddest of the red states.  Not one county voted for Obama in 2008, and that is unlikely to change in this election.

So this past week, Obama visited the state to speak for improving our oil distribution.  But not one of the State's Republican leaders was there to welcome him.  Not one.  And here is the sad part.  They won't suffer politically.  In fact, one could argue that the demonization of Obama and liberals is so fierce here in Oklahoma, that Mary Fallin or other Republicans would have been politically harmed had they done as much as greet the President with a cordial handshake.

What does that say about our political discourse?  I am not sure.  I don't recall the opposite happening with Bush and our former Democratic Governor, Brad Henry, either with a snub, nor with a political cost to the governor for being seen with Bush.

This is another example of how things are worse on the right than on the left.  The Tea Party and talk radio have pushed a degree of incivility that has become accepted by people who, as this editorial suggests, were "raised better than that."

On Trayvon Martin

I was out of town this past week on a short vacation, and realized on the road that I left the last post on misogyny in disarray.  Blame part of that on my fatigue, and part on the new Blogger interface.  Anyway, I have fixed it.

I come back to the world reminded again that the Republican party seems hell bent on alienating everyone other than white males--which puzzles the hell out of me.  But I also thought of the GOP's "southern strategy" when reading about the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida.  When Newt and others play that race card in the South, they play to this kind of environment where whites fear blacks in a false way, and don't even recognize the extent at which blacks live with genuine and very real fear that whites will use the power of the state or the gun against them.  That idea of white privilege is something I wish more white Americans would consider.  Yesterday, I watched ESPN's Michael Wilbon discuss the story about Lebron and the Heat donning hoodies to show solidarity with Martin, Wilbon just casually remarked that he had been stopped "driving while black" in his own neighborhood.  Or this from a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune.  Some of these stories are historical, but others are current.  

The furor over Martin is growing, and that is a good thing.  We should have a discussion about armed civilians taking the law into their own hands.  I know the trend (certainly here in OK) is to loosen and loosen gun laws and encourage more open carry, and in Florida, the trend has been to add easy justification for shooting if you are in fear.  Maybe this will change.  But, as Sharifa notes:  

"What nauseates and scares me is the deafening silence from the masses concerning Trayvon Martin, our neighbor. It’s curious to me how easily 100 million people could see the Kony video, buying t-shirts and forwarding videos, and yet remain silent about the neighborhood watchman in their own backyard who shot an unarmed boy for carrying Skittles."

This speaks to the same sentiment where people are deeply concerned with poverty in Africa, see the poor here as unworthy and lazy.  Our racism is deeply encoded and most of us don't even see it.  I see my own, and it bothers me greatly.  Or, let me say, I see some of mine.  I suspect some of mine is out of sight for me too.  But what I see bothers me, and I struggle to fight those voices.

As is very usual, Leighton has some wisdom to add to this conversation.  In comment from last week, he noted this problem of a world-view that doesn't include other people.

There is large subset of the population that has trouble with abstract thought, and tends to view the world in simple, black-and-white terms. It's been my experience that people like this will have moral universes that include only people they personally know, and strangers who are seen as simply good: fellow believers, their countrymen (so long as they aren't liberal), starving children in Africa (usually just the children), etc. Everyone else whose circumstances might require analysis or difficult consideration is rejected out of hand. To my mind, this explains why people who clearly care deeply about the people physically around them can be so vicious toward strangers, because it really isn't about people at all for them.

There is still much to learn about the Martin shooting, but there is some sense that the shooter saw Trayvon as a stranger and sub-human (in some sense, anyway) because he was young, and black in a white neighborhood.  He simply didn't fit.  Perhaps we will learn that the shooter's fears were real and legitimate, I don't know.  But the broader issue remains, and remains for all of us.  What limits do we put on those we care about, or will protect?

Republicans, conservatives and misogyny

This entire contraceptives battle has revealed an underlying misogyny that I didn't anticipate. Abortion, I understood, even as I disagreed with many. There has always been this deep discomfort with abortion in the American populace--a broad and shared sense that abortion is tragic and should be avoided if possible, but also a belief that it should be an option.

But there have always been those who were on the anti-abortion side, so it didn't surprise me that the pendulum swing against abortion sided to the conservative under Republican led states. I wasn't surprised at that. I was surprised, however, that the anti-abortion side started going so far as the "personhood" bills, but not that they went after abortion.

But the contraception angle is different. And reveals an underlying misogyny that I find deeply troubling. The defense is "religious liberty," but it dawned on me today that I don't find that convincing in the least. First of all, those crying "religious freedom" the loudest are the Catholics (makes sense) and the conservative evangelical base of the Republican party (makes less sense). That last group doesn't actually believe in religious liberty--not for others, at least. They are the heirs to the Puritan mentality where religious freedom was about their own approach, and was not for Quakers or Catholics or Baptists.

Historically, this group has never cared about Catholic freedoms, and has, in fact, often argued that Catholicism is either a cult or simply not truly Christian. Their adoration of Mary, the fixation on the cross, and, even, their opposition to contraception--Protestants have opposed (vocally) all of these aspects of Catholicism. And protestants have not historically opposed contraception. Abortion? Maybe. Depends. But not contraception.

And let's not forget that this group is part of the vocal and angry opposition to the supposed mosque in New York, as well as opposing the construction of mosques throughout the country. Their chant then was not "religious freedom," but "don't build that here."

Yet, they are now claiming religious freedom for a belief they don't hold. There are two possible explanations. One, is that they just instinctively oppose anything that Obama supports. That is part of this, I don't deny. But the other part, and the more shameful one, is that they have always been a little anti-women. This is the group pushing "submission" and decrying women clergy. This is the group that has opposed feminism and called female employment a "sickness" and an effort to undermine the family. And this is part of a larger group that referred to sexually active young men as "boys will be boys," but saw sexually active young women as "harlots," if not "sluts."

At some point many in this group will realize that this attack on women harms their own interests--and harms their mothers, sisters, daughters and wives. But until then, they will continue the lie that they are standing on some religious freedom principle. But that is a lie.

Gospel reading: Jesus rebukes an unclean slut

Fred once again posts a brilliant satire on the whole "slut shaming" from the religious right. And in doing so, reminds me of what has drawn me to the idea of Jesus. I lose sight, to be honest, listening to my religious conservative friends talk about the poor or in these discussions about women.

I continue to be amazed, frankly, at the lack of compassion or love for anyone who doesn't look like a middle-class evangelical Christian. I shouldn't be surprised, and am sure that Leighton will read this wondering just how long it will take me to figure this out. But it still stuns me that people who claim to follow Jesus have such little compassion for the poor, or for "difference" or for the "other" all while reading passages (or reading past) where Jesus demonstrates great love for those very people.

Here in Oklahoma, Republicans are trying very hard to do a couple of things in our legislature. One is to cut the income tax, and the other is the "personhood" bill that transforms a fertilized egg into a legal person. Meanwhile, our health is among the worst in the nation, and we also lead in abuse of prescription drugs.

The conflict between these two trends is very clear to me. Not so much to Republicans, or perhaps they just don't care. One of my FB friends defended the personhood bill as "biblical" (?) but about cuts in services shrugged and said something about there is "need everywhere."  When a poor or sick woman struggles with her pregnancy, they will say "God doesn't make mistakes," and "that is a human life that is sacred," and, of course, "your morals may not be the best."  If she needs pre-natal care, she may or may not get it.  If the child is born, they may or may not have food, or vaccinations.

She will absolutely have to give birth--even if it kills her.  But if that child dies during the first year (and we are on the bad list for children in poverty, and infant mortality), my Republican friends will shrug and blame the mother.  Or lack of a father.  Or both.  It just won't be their fault.

The people who talk about Jesus the most, are passing legislation that shames women, ignores the poor, and celebrates wealth and power.  Whatever this is, it isn't Christianity.  Or, to be more accurate, their policy doesn't, in the least, reflect the teachings of Jesus.

But according to my FB friend, the problem is my lack of faith.

Sigh.

Small government/failed state

Grover Norquist is most famous for wanting to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub," an image that haunted many of us as we watched NOLA drown during Katrina. But we are seeing the impact of Norquist's small government-no taxes, ever policy across the country. In Ohio, at least one town is simply going to go out of business if they can't raise taxes. Norquist was asked if he would support raising taxes in the case of a natural disaster. He replied, so a tornado takes your house, how does raising your taxes help you? Yeah, that tells us a lot. No concern for the others who lost their homes. Just how does this effect you?

But the best example is Colorado Springs, Colorado--otherwise known as the home of Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, and many other right wing organizations. It is a very conservative town. They are so conservative, they really started the whole "tax payer bill of rights" nonsense. This American Life had a segment the other day, and it is really one you should hear. Turns out Colorado Springs is run primarily through sales taxes--taxes that are very vulnerable to economic changes.

When the recession hit, tourism dropped, and their operating budget sank. It dropped so low they actually stopped mowing city parks, and turned off streetlights. The city floated a tax increase which failed miserably, so the local leaders started pushing solutions such as lowering wages for city workers and cutting benefits. They also privatized many city services. And when the budget was at its lowest, the city actually privatized parks and streetlights. If you wanted your lights on, or trash cans in your city park, you could pay for it.

 Couple of lessons here. One, privatization is really suspicious--at least when the purpose is supposedly to save money. I have never understood that argument. I understand that a private company can pay lower wages, or benefits, perhaps, but the profit margin usually makes up for any difference. And in some cases, our privatized services are more expensive (Xe or Blackwater comes to mind). Using outside firms for expertise? That makes sense. But not if the justification is to save money. That was fairly clear in Colorado Springs. The best example was the landscaping company that took over mowing the parks. The workers made less in wages (though not tremendously so), and had to pay more for fewer benefits. But there was no evidence that it saved the city money. And that was the point, remember? Oh, and they are doing less too. Fewer maintenance projects on older parks. But no evidence it is saving money.

Second, and the part that just struck me to the core, was a conversation between a city leader and a taxpayer on the failed tax increase v. paying for your own streetlights. This guy thanked her for that program and said he had gladly paid $300 for his own streetlights. She pointed out that the tax increase would have meant only $200 out of his pocket, and that would have allowed for all the services to work. Everyone's streetlights working, and all the parks mowed and cleaned up. The guy said he would never vote for a tax increase for government.

 That is the sickness of this anti-government bullshit. This guy was willing to pay more to have less, all because he hates government more than he cares about his fellow man. When those lights were out, it was the more affluent neighborhoods who could afford to pay. The poorer ones were dark, and their parks were brown and dirty. He didn't care about that. All he cared about was himself. This is the "I've got mine, you can fuck off" mentality of the anti-government Republican party. And it makes me a little sick. This is the breakdown of community, at its very basic sense--some kind of shared experience and shared services.