"Not Sent for Discussion"

I received the below by email the other day. The marvelous opening mandate is that it is "not sent for discussion." I suppose that the original sender would believe that matters of governance and religious life, what's public and what's private, war and peace, were also not intended for discussion. It's good to know that people think that this is a working definition of political and public life. The majority asserts itself without question. Brilliant!

Three quick points:

1. The nature of the survey interests me. It would interesting, for instance, to know: What was the educational level, median income, geographical location, etc. of the respondents? Does the group of people canvassed represent a legitimate cross-section of Americans? Are we supposed to take our cues from the people who happen to be watching TV on a particular morning?

2. The basic sophistry of emails like the one below, and of the entire methodology behind it, is that might makes right. This plea relies on a simple majoritarianism. It doesn't ask whether the majority's opinion is correct. It only states the majority's consensus and says, "Well, that's that. We should just do what the majority says. Screw the minority."

3. Isn't having the phrase "In God We Trust" on our money a bizarre melding of God and Mammon, and, if so, is it really something that Christians would want?

Here goes . . .

This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don't, fine, delete it. I don't want to know one way or the other. By me forwarding it, you know how I feel.

	I'll bet this was a surprise to NBC. NBC POLL Do you believe that the word God should stay in American culture? NBC this morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest Number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls, and the Percentage was the same as this: 86% to keep the words, IN God We Trust and God in the Pledge of Allegiance 14% against That is a pretty 'commanding' public response. I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't . Now it is your turn . It is said that 86% of Americans believe the word God should stay. Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such A mess about having 'In God We Trust' on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why is the world catering to this 14%? AMEN! If you agree, pass this on , if not, simply delete In God We Trust

Fiction and Ideas

A blurb from a February edition of the Wall Street Journal, dispatched to me from my father, relays that the journalist Clive Thompson has asserted that, in the words of the blurb, "Science fiction has become the last bastion for the literature of ideas," and that "realistic portrayals of contemporary life that win prizes have relinquished their claims of originality."

A clutch of fine writers who can be labeled under the term science fiction comes quickly to mind: Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut. To this we might add certain fictions of John Updike (Toward the End of Time), John Fowles (The Magus), and Philip Roth (The Plot against America). All of these are provocative writers who have either based themselves in or experimented with science fiction.

But whether science fiction is the "last bastion" of the literature of ideas remains up for debate. Science fiction is certainly the last bastion, or perhaps was the first bastion, for the literature of thought-experiments, hypothetical worlds and situations in which writers can test out moralities, dispense with old ones, or call contemporary ones into question. This is by many accounts the very definition of science fiction.

Bradbury's classic collection The Illustrated Man remains an example par excellence of how a writer can combine questions of technology and ethics into riveting literature. Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, whatever its literary demerits, continues to provoke: University of Chicago professor Leon Kass made it required reading for President George W. Bush's Bioethics Council. But insofar as science fiction raises questions about humans relations both to ideas (governmental, scientific, religious) and to each other, a number of other writers and books might be fitted into this category called literature of ideas--a number of other writers, that is, who are not explicitly writers of science fiction.

Potential names are Flannery O'Connor, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and even Evelyn Waugh. I'll go into each of these briefly.

O'Connor's main concern was for the state of the soul inclined to spirituality in an otherwise secular world. She saw what she believed was God working his way through so-called moments of grace, moments when characters were confronted with terrifying, grotesque events. The most famous example is when the grandmother of the story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is on the verge of being shot by a highway robber. After he shoots her, the so-called Misfit (the thief and murderer) utters the now well-known line, "She would have been a good woman, if she had had someone there to shoot her every minute of her life." This is not science fiction, but it is fiction raising ideas about vagaries of morality, especially as they depend on external forces, not internal commitments.

Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being sets forth a world in which characters struggle, against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of 1968, to create private, personal meaning for themselves when their lives have been robbed of public and political substance. Sex plays a big role in this book, both as an end and as a vehicle toward the end of freedom that the characters seek. Philosophy and music are also important in the characters' search. Again, not science fiction, but not devoid of ideas.

The Coetzee book I have in mind is Waiting for the Barbarians, a gruesome allegorical story in which an unnamed clerk of an unnamed Empire decides he can no longer perform his inhumane duties. His resistance is severely punished, in some of the most uncomfortable pages I have ever read. At any rate, the novel has a slight element of science fiction, insofar as it could be set at any time and in any place. But it is better termed allegory, and as such, it raises questions about the right to power, the abuses of power, the appropriateness of resistance, the value of matyrdom, freedom of conscience, and issues of mind-body duality. The same questions are raised by Kafka is his marvelous, bizarre story "In the Penal Colony," in which the allegorical aspects (nothing is ever given a proper noun) extend the story's applicability.

Finally, Evelyn Waugh's great novel Brideshead Revisited is a meditation on the seductions of high society, the horrors of war, and the urge to develop a coherent philosophy of life grounded in something outside the unpredictable nature of mere status. The main character is led through various layers of worldly hell until finally he arrives at Brideshead, the manse that had once been a great symbol of wealth and culture and was now used as an army bivouac. Charles Ryder, in encountering the great house once again, is moved to ponder its new use and the transformations of external power.

The list goes on and on, higher than I can count. Only in novels of science fiction can one count so high.

Losing Your Words at the Sight the New

This is the cover of artist and writer's Shaun Tan's gorgeous book called The Arrival (2007, Hodder Children's Books). Tan, who lives in Australia, says this of the project: "Much of this book was inspired by anecdotal stories told by migrants of many different countries and historical periods, including my father who came to Western Australia from Malaysia in 1960."

The book tells the story of an immigrant who must leave his family behind for a foreign land where, as he discovers, disorientation and solitude are more available than opportunity and community. While we may have seen the famous pictures of immigrant queues waiting for admission at Ellis Island, Tan's eye leads us to the homely, minute details that tie us to the ordinariness of the characters lives: the bowl of soup consumed before departure, the wrinkles in the packed clothes, the hand gripping tensely at the suitcase.

All of this is accomplished without words through Tan's sensitively rendered pencil on paper drawings. Especially imaginative are the new-world motifs, which in their surrealism and disconnection from any known language or semiotics refrain from suggesting any one particular place, but rather serve to universalize the experience of the displaced life in search of new connection.

The Faith of the Secularists

John Gray at The Guardian reminds us that anti-religious dogmatism can be just as terrifying as traditional fundamentalism. Excerpts follow, with the full story here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,2265446,00.html

In today's anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature. To some extent, this is also true of the current wave of terrorism. Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaida, most of them partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic traditions, while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaida, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese communist party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote from human realities, and more reliably lethal in its consequences, than most religious myths.

....

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

From the Meadow

As shorthand measurement for how much the world has changed since the flowering of the fourth-century BCE Greek poet Theocritus, whose poems I have been translating from Greek, consider this one word I happened upon today. The word in Greek is λειμωνόθε (transliterated, it's leimonothe, pronounced lay-mohn-AH-the).

In ancient Greek, λειμών means "meadow," and -οθε is a suffix denoting direction from which. Put together, the words λειμών and -οθε make λειμωνόθε, a word literally meaning "from the direction of the meadow."

Theocritus uses the word in his seventh Idyll when discussing a set of kindly bees that daily brought nectar "from the direction of the meadow" to a suffering poet who had been locked inside a treasure chest by his weird master. (Although cruelty and insanity are hardly new to our planet, it still struck me as strange that locking someone in a box should appear less culturally removed than the word λειμωνόθε).

Charles Miller, former rector of the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan, a Ph.D. from Oxford who also, interestingly enough, earned his B.A. and M.A. in classics before becoming priested, once said to me, "Studying Greek and Latin languages means that you're studying an entire culture." He did not mean this in a reductionist sense: to study Greek and Latin is, quite patently, not the only way to learn about ancient Greek and Roman culture. Rather, Fr. Miller meant that by studying Greek and Latin, one studies, by corollary, Greek and Roman culture. Culture produce language and vice versa. Language itself is both producing and produced.

Fr. Miller's dictum came to me again today when I read the word λειμωνόθε. On the one hand, this is an economical and elegant word, a dense compact of several words in either Greek or English (Theocritus could have said, ἐκ τῶι λειμώνωι, "out of or away from the meadow," but for either metrical reasons, or purely for the pretty way it rolls off the tongue (poetry was oral and musical!), he chose λειμωνόθε).

On the other hand, the word says something about the Greek relationship to the natural world, in the imagination at the very least, if not in reality. Meadows were an important enough aspect of life, at least in the lives of bucolic characters, that one word could signify moving away from them. This is almost astounding to fathom. If we could invent a post-modern equivalent, would it be something like (the admittedly clunky) "computerwhence" or "officethither," denoting our movement away from or to the technological meadows of modern life?

Of course as I write this I am in front of my computer. I spend a great deal of time in front of my computer, perhaps as much as an ancient shepherd spent in a meadow. But as I sat earlier today on the Mosel River, watching my own vague thoughts drift away from me like the river itself, I wondered what I would be losing when I moved "away from the river." I also wondered what our culture had lost, that it no longer had these beautiful words. We can move skyward, but what happens when we aren't moving earthward?

After-Words

At a recent town hall meeting in Beaumont, Texas, Barack Obama had these words of advice about how parents could improve their children's education: "It's not good enough for you to say to your child, 'Do good in school' and then when that child comes home, you've got the TV set on .... So, turn off the TV set. Put the video game away. Buy a little desk. Or put that child at the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don't know how to do it, give 'em help. If you don't know how to do it, call the teacher." The sermonic quality of the speech only ballooned, according to this AP blurb I'm reading from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, until Obama told the crowd to "settle down."

Obama's advice here has a strangely conservative ring, even though the anonymous AP writer asserts that telling parents to be better parents is a line "Democrats deliver often." Really? Stereotypically, liberals trust institutions and institutional solutions, and conservatives put the burden on individuals and traditional relationships like those found in nuclear families. So what's going on here?

From one standpoint, let's try combining a common criticism of Obama--that he is an unflinchingly orthodox Democrat who has not, despite his florid rhetoric, displayed tremendous creativity or innovativeness as a politician--with his words in Beaumont. Of course the words in Beaumont are, for now, words, not policy. But words matter. And they matter here insofar as they show a side of him that does seem, because it departs with the liberal catechism of not blaming people's laziness, creative. Another criticism of Barack--that he is all Talk Obama and not yet Walk Obama--is applicable to any presidential candidate in the current race. None of them has been president before. The talk of experience as a key qualifier for being president among people who have never been president is, to this degree, specious.

But, it needs to be reiterated, do these Beaumont words from Obama really mean anything? It's hard to say what words will or won't mean anything until someone is actually in office. Maureen Dowd's 17 February column in the New York Times succinctly dissects this phenomenon:

"Covering seven presidential campaigns has made me realize that when it comes to predicting how presidents will perform, 'nobody knows anything,' as William Goldman said about Hollywood.

"You'd think it would be safe to vote on issues, but politicians often don't feel the need to honor their campaign promises. I covered Bush Senior saying, 'Read my lips: No new taxes.' I also covered him raising taxes and saying, 'Read my hips.' I covered W. promising a humble foreign policy and no nation-building. I also covered the Iraq fiasco.

Voters try to figure out who they trust to have life-and-death power over them, but there's so much theatricality and artificiality in campaigns you can get a false impression of who someone is." (Maureen Dowd, "Captive to History's Caprice," New York Times, 17 February 2008).

Per Dowd's wisdom, I should not be swept up by Obama's Beaumont speech, exciting though I find it that an historically down-the-line Democrat is promulgating tougher, more inspirational language, aimed at improving our culture rather than enlarging the government. But if campaigns are so much theatricality--and the event in Beaumont was indeed theatrical, including Obama's plea for an "amen"--where then am I to turn to judge this man? If, as I have already asserted, past experience as a senators or governors or what have you also proffers inadequate criteria for judging how a person would perform as president, am I then left with the very thing that the wonky minutiae of campaigns is supposed to counteract: an attraction to personality?

One of the loftiest challenges for the next US president will be restoring good relations with countries that used to trust us more than they do now. Part of this will have, necessarily, to do with the personality of the next president (avoiding costly wars, isolationist policies on the environment, and various forms of torture might also be helpful). It is not surprising that most Germans I have met since August have not a shred of anything nice to say about George Bush. When pressed, their complaints boil down to foreign policy. Interestingly, though, it is the expression of that foreign policy, the personality with which it is carried out, that so alarms them. They find W. arrogant, brash, uncultured, bafflingly naive for the position that he inhabits. Would the acidic Hillary (who, according to her new ad, wears very nice clothing at 3 am) be able to overcome this impression of the American president, which in many ways seems to have become synecdoche for America itself among the minds of western Europeans? Or could Obama both put a new face on America and inject new substance into its political arteries?

Considering Dowd's comments, maybe it's best to go for the candidate who seems most likely to react well in moments of uncertainty. Bush's moment of uncertainty was 9/11, and his reaction was, eventually, Iraq. FDR, by contrast, faced the Great Depression, and his response was the New Deal. I'm left wondering which candidate (and I am not here ruling out John McCain) could, in the unexpected hour, have the wisdom and creativity to respond in such a way that not only the response but also its legacy would improve both our nation and the world.

Last Respect

The late Paul Moore, former Episcopal bishop of New York and prominent social activist, was, it now appears, a closeted homosexual. The news comes as a shock and, well, considering the nature of the Episcopal Church, not as a shock (full story written by his daughter, Honor Moore, at the website for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_moore?currentPage=1).

There are many things to say about this story: the manner in which Honor Moore pinpoints what she perceives as a cultural ineptitude for frank discussion of sexual matters as a source of detriment to her parents' marriage (remarkably similar to the ineptitude described by Ian McEwan in his novella On Chesil Beach); the remarkable fact that Paul Moore fathered nine children, at least one of whom seems to maintain an abiding and loving respect for him; the egregious violations of both marital and sacerdotal vows; the degree to which Moore himself, in a matter of decades, altered or at least catalyzed what some would call revolutionary, others would call an irreversibly destructive ideological trajectory in the Episcopal Church.

The most striking thing, though, is the revelation that a great cultural icon put issues before himself, causes before self-actualization. Paul Moore, it seems, never made being Bishop of New York about being Bishop of New York, about being Paul Moore, and certainly never about being Paul Moore, homosexual. Even one of the most prominent neo-conservative voices in America, Father Richard John Neuhaus, admitted after Bishop Moore's death that he "couldn't help liking Paul." Father Neuhaus went on to say, in the August/September 2003 issue of First Things in which the comments appeared, that "Paul Moore was a piece of work, and we are not likely to see his kind again."

Perhaps it was the time in which he lived, but one wonders why the first bishop to ordain a lesbian priest would hide his own "truth" from the world? Especially in a church notorious for elevating personal, discrete perceptions of "truth" and identity over dogma or received truth, Bishop Moore's decision to hide his sexuality may be viewed as either baffling, brave, or culturally utilitarian. Perhaps the moment wasn't right, and perhaps the man who was once pictured, concurrent with his installment as bishop, on the cover of Newsweek knew that causing a cultural rift over a personal issue would be costly not only for himself but, perhaps more importantly, for the unity of the church.

From what I know of Paul Moore, I am inclined to take the non-cynical view, i.e., the view that, unlike other bishops and priests, Paul Moore was unwilling to privilege his own desires and lifestyle above that of his calling as a man of the church. In our current era, when self-actualization and being true to the elusive, supposedly deconstructed self is the God-du-Jour, Paul Moore's reticence may offer a valuable counter-take on what it means to live in community.