Another Point in Time

Last night I spent the remains of the day helping to conduct the annual Point In Time (PIT) survey.  For those of you not familiar with this, it is the annual, one-day, census of people experiencing homelessness across our nation.  It is ostensibly the data that HUD uses to allocate resources, but in the hands of community action groups like Lifestyles of Maryland it becomes a one day lesson in human compassion for many people who do not see the economic and social tragedy of our nation.  In the NY Times this morning I read this, and it is no surprise to me, because for the past three years I have given a few hours of my time to looking behind the curtain of one of the most affluent areas in the country and seeing the reality of our disgrace.
Here in Southern Maryland, just outside the D.C. beltway, there is a clash of worlds. There is the old, agrarian south, and there is the growing creep of the megapolis, we're right on the boundary of it in Charles County. The article from the Times expresses what is perhaps the most crushing reality of our particular place and point in time.  Right now, the old way of life is practically no way of life at all.  If you work in a service industry or at an entry level job of some sort, you cannot afford to live here.
On the 8:00 PM to midnight shift, the only homeless person we encountered was employed, we actually found her at work while asking people working at restaurants and stores if they had any leads on people experiencing homelessness.  We were giving out resource cards to the employees to share with anyone they might encounter. In what must have taken some courage to tell a couple strangers, she said, "I'm homeless."
Believe me when you encounter people who break all the negative stereotypes we generally heap on homeless people, it will break your heart if you've got one.  Without violating confidentiality, I will tell you that this woman was sheltered, but without anything like adequate housing for her extended family, which included several adult/nearly adult children and also some grandchildren.  Too many mouths to feed and nothing like affordable housing available makes you homeless in this place at this time.
You may quibble with the methodology of studies done by academics that try to quantify and describe poverty, but I've got a better idea for you: volunteer to do Point In Time next January, wherever you live, you won't need any studies to show you the reality.
I have had an unusually busy week, so I was not able to give my usual amount of time to PIT this year.  Lifestyles sent some Americorps volunteers out to the rural part of our county called Nanjemoy, that has become my regular beat for PIT.  In Nanjemoy you encounter the old south part of the county woven in with the new affluent part.  You have colonies of poor people who live back on dirt roads in shacks and trailers, interspersed with very well kept homes with boats and RVs in the driveways.  You might not see the poor people on first glance, but they are there, and they are everywhere.  The reason I couldn't go to Nanjemoy this year was because I really couldn't spend 8-9 hours weaving my way around the hollows finding the unseen people who live in the back waters of our world. One of the Americorps volunteers told the staff that she was originally from Afghanistan, and the poverty of Nanjemoy left her shaken.  Let that sink in, if you doubt the gist of the Times op-ed.  Someone from Afghanistan, war torn, drug riddled, fundamentalist haunted Afghanistan was shocked by the poverty of a place that is half an hour outside of Washington D.C.
Nanjemoy and the rural parts of our county are a testament to the fact that the old way of life just doesn't have much of a place in the new world.  Sure, by Haitian standards the Nanjemoy crowd might be rich, but they don't live in Haiti or the tropics (as the article helpfully points out).  People in most of our nation need adequate shelter and warm clothes, they also have a rather dire need for clean water.  Many of the wells that used to serve these places have gone dry or been contaminated, or simply had a pump go bad.  Property rights can be murky and the political will is simply not there to do anything about it, so people who are already poor either have to buy water or somehow haul it from a reliable source, be it a public well (there are a few), or a kind neighbor's hose spigot.
Anyone who pays attention might know that water, the daily need of all human life, is a major challenge for impoverished people everywhere.  You may have heard the stories of the African women and girls who must haul water up to five miles every day.  You probably have heard about the public water crisis in Flint Michigan, but there are way too many people who don't have such attention grabbing stories that still struggle to get good clean water to drink.
As one of my partners in crime last night and I reflected on our way back from our survey: "There is something wrong with us."  We have too much wealth and too many resources in this great nation of ours to let this sort of thing happen right under our noses.  Working people should not be homeless and no one should have to worry about where their next glass of water is coming from.  This doesn't mean that everyone gets a BMW and big house in the suburbs, but we have to at least start seeing the problem clearly.  No study is going to do that for you, no statistics will reveal it for you, a few hours honestly looking with your heart open definitely will.

Blame

So once in a while you have a display of broken politics that doesn't entirely center on the Donald.  He's a player in this shutdown thing, but not the only one.  It displays his failing as a leader of men, but it is not directly his fault. His unpredictability and propensity to shift with the wind makes it tough for anyone on either side of the aisle to trust him, but they have had a year to adapt to this dysfunction so sympathy runs thin.
I live right outside of Washington D.C. and thus I know many people who are employed by the federal government.  The conversations yesterday were about who was going to work today.  "Are you essential?" I heard more than once. I know what it means, but it's still a little jarring to hear people talk that way, with such frustration about how little agency they have over their own livelihood. Again, I look at congress, and notice that most of them are wealthy, and they are still getting their salaries, and I think something is wrong with this picture.
But I am puzzled by something, and I guess I should expect this sort of slant and spin in this day and age, but it still seems shockingly obtuse even now: certain sources are trying to pin the shutdown on the Democrats, you know them minority, who couldn't keep the government open even when they had their man in the big chair.  This is a congress thing, so I'm actually going to let Trump off the hook for this one, as I did Obama when the GOP pulled this shenanigan before.  This is a political dice roll used by people who are increasingly afraid to compromise; the stakes are the paychecks of a lot of people I know, including the military personnel that everybody loves so much during the National Anthem.
Yes, the Democrats could totally cave on their demands regarding DACA and just join with the GOP to get things done, but the fact of the matter is, the best they can even hope for is just a continuation for another couple of weeks or months.  Congress has been kicking the budget can down the road for far too long, I think because both sides, at least the parts of both sides that retain contact with sanity, realize that actually passing a budget is going to require difficult and unpopular choices.  If you think the fight over discretionary spending is nasty wait until you see what happens when they have to deal with the fire breathing dragon that no one wants to wake up and have to set new priorities concerning non-discretionary spending.
I don't claim expertise in economics or in the passing of budgets on the federal scale, but I know this from passing a church budget every year: when your expenses exceed your revenue, for the necessities: mortgages, salaries, utilities, you absolutely cannot do everything you want to do, and hard choices are going to have to be made.  The bills that must be paid are non-discretionary things.  Like the government, churches passing budgets tend to focus on little things like the money we spend on office supplies, because we don't really have any control over the mortgage payment.  That is what the current government has been doing for the past several years, fighting over the cost of paper clip items like food stamps and even maybe the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), while whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the actual problems of Social Security, Medicare and other non-discretionary spending. For quite a while, mandatory spending has exceeded our revenue, this means that almost everything we hear argued about on the news is more or less not about balancing the budget, it is about how big a deficit we run.
Churches do this too, but we have the capability of under-spending our budget too, we also have the ability to rely on the generosity of our members, our savings and most crucially the grace of God to make it through.  The US Congress at this point has none of those things, but I will pray for God's grace to be upon them because it may be the only hope at this point.
What I am frustrated about this morning is the utter irresponsibility of the people up the road to let it come to this. They should have fixed this long ago.  I listened to conservative types rail about the deficit during the Obama years, especially when the Democrats had control of congress and the Oval office.  Funny thing now that they're holding the reigns that stuff doesn't seem to matter much.  Right now the GOP has all the power, they have majorities in both of the legislative houses and they control the executive branch (well sort of).  To gripe about how the minority won't totally cave to their demands is the behavior of a whiny bully who is upset that other kids won't fork over their lunch money.
The budget thing will probably work out, but our democratic processes are seriously endangered.  The danger comes from the idea that the majority gets to make the rules completely.  I will remind any conservative types who happen to read this, if majority rule were all that mattered you would have President Hillary Clinton right now.  Our Republic is a representative democracy because the wealthy white guys who wrote the constitution understood that they couldn't just share power equally.  They knew that somehow, someway the minority opinion needed to be heard, because it might just be theirs.  They rightfully feared the uneducated and ill-informed "masses," they were elites and elitist, but because they understood human nature fairly well, they wrote us this constitution that actually resists even their own worst impulses.
That's pretty freaking brilliant, and we could use some of that savvy up the road this week. Think about that before you blame the Democrats and call for doing away with the filibuster.

Our Daughter Tamar

So Tamar remained, a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom's house.

When King David heard of all of these things, he became very angry,

But he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn.

-2 Samuel 13: 20b-21 (NRSV)

I understand if you have never heard a sermon in church or a Sunday School lesson about Tamar. There are actually several Tamars in the Bible and their stories collectively explain why nobody names their daughter Tamar.  The first Tamar we run across is way back in Genesis, and she is a very unlucky lady indeed, she keeps marrying sons of Judah and God keeps striking them dead, because they refuse to do their proper duty and give Tamar a child, which would then be the rightful heir of their oldest brother, Tamar's first husband. They refuse to do this by "spilling their seed," which they taught us in health class is not reliable birth control, but in this case it works, and despite having "married" multiple brothers Tamar remains childless and deprived of justice.  This Tamar though, despite being definitely a victim of an unjust system actually uses the lust and lechery of men to her advantage in the end. She poses as a prostitute (yes, this story is in the Bible, look it up: Genesis 38), in order to actually get pregnant by Judah, her father-in-law thus circumventing all the injustice of Judah's sons and getting the heir that was rightfully hers.

Icky right? But not nearly as icky as what happens to David's daughter Tamar.  Tamar is raped by her half brother Amnon, and if you want some heart-breaking dialogue read 2 Samuel 13, where Tamar begs Amnon not to rape her and instead tries to convince him to just ask David for her to be his wife.  He doesn't listen.  Afterwards, he is filled with disgust at her and sends her away.  Again, she begs him not to do that, let that sink in, she begs the man who just raped her not to send her away.  He does not listen.

Absalom, Tamar's all the way brother, finds out what Amnon and comforts his sister and takes her in.  This is where the story gets really fun.  David finds out, and is angry, but he doesn't do anything because Amnon is his firstborn.  Absalom plays his cards close to the vest, but soon he takes justice into his own hands and murders Amnon.  You might think that murdering your half brother is a bad thing, but given the circumstances I'm pretty okay with what Absalom did.  In fact, I think Absalom is probably the only one of David's sons that ought to really get some serious respect.  Not just because he took out a despicable rapist, but because he proceeded to go all John Wick on David himself for being such an enabling toad.

Eventually Absalom meets the same fate as Sonny Corleone, but only because David's primary hitter is a seriously bad man named Joab who decides not to follow the weak kneed order of the King to not hurt the lad, and decapitates Absalom while he's hung up in a tree. Through this entire narrative, the women who suffer sexual violence are just props to illustrate apparently how crappy men can be to women and to each other (David's concubines take some abuse at Absalom's hands, so he doesn't get to stay any sort of feminist hero).

Which brings me to the significance of #metoo, as a historical moment. It's really no secret that women have been used and abused in this sort of way going back to the beginning. The only time that it actually gets mentioned specifically though is when it impacts the narrative arcs of the men, whether it is brothers avenging the rape of a sister, or explaining an anomalous jump in the inheritance chain.  In other words, the only thing that gave the suffering of the women in these stories relevance was the way in which it effected the behavior of men.  You would think it is long past time for that to change, but we're still having the discussion aren't we?  We're still trying to decide the implications of women deciding that they would rather not be used in the way they have historically been used.  Our collective response is muddled; we still have a lot of David's reticence to punish Amnon, and we are not entirely lacking Absalom's chauvinist craving for vengeance.

I think probably the best response is to start by simply listening to Tamar, believing Tamar, comforting Tamar, weeping with Tamar and ultimately repenting of the role we have had in creating and protecting the Amnon's of the world. I think we should also restrain our inner Absaloms as well.  We need to recognize that the Victorian impulse to treat purity and virginity as some sort of sacred virtue to be defended at all costs is a powerful tool to keep Tamar quiet and desolate in her brother's house.  It is the reason why she begged her rapist not to send her away, because she feared the shame and the response more than the sexual violence itself.

Also, as an aside, read your Bible, and not just the comfy parts.

New Colossus

By now you know what he said, you know who he said it about and you know the context of what it was.  Reactions are the usual gamut from the chicken-little shouts of racism from people who already believed that about Trump to the complete denial from his true blue supporters.  In the middle somewhere are the people who want or need to support him, but who have always done so with their noses held.  For those people this seems like a critical moment.  I admit, it may not be, because the Access Hollywood tape seemed like one that came before they actually made this decision and it was not, in fact, vulgar enough to stop the train wreck of utilitarian ethics that brought us President Trump.
For me, I have to say my part on Saturday morning so it does not derail my entire sermon tomorrow morning.  Because as one lectionary preacher I follow on the internet said, "The Bible seems to be trolling Trump."  The Gospel of John text for tomorrow is the one where Nathaniel says about Jesus, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"  Which it doesn't take a bible scholar to see, is a pretty analogous, if less vulgar, statement of prejudice to the one that Trump used to talk about Haiti and African countries.  Jesus says of Nathaniel, "here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit," which in and of itself is a compliment, but a back-handed one, he is essentially saying he has no tact, that he is honest perhaps to a fault.
I cannot say the same about Trump, because it has been shown that he lies an exceptional amount, even for a politician, but what I can say about Trump is that he is becoming a rather biblical sort of character.  He is becoming Ahab, Nebuchadnezzer and Pharaoh, he is becoming a leader who is nothing but a man desperate to retain their power.  He is also becoming an idol to many, and a revelatory sign to all of us.  There are things and symbols which we use to represent our ideals, and that is pretty natural human behavior, but the problem is that when those things become divorced from the ideals and cut loose from their moorings, they are en route to becoming idols.  The reason why the terrorists on 9-11 attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was because those things were symbols of our economic and military power.  Unfortunately for them they created the wrong kind of martyr on that day, they gave some very dangerous idols way more power than they already had.  Another symbol that we have as a country is of course, the Statue of Liberty, given to us by France and placed in New York Harbor to welcome people to this great nation of ours.  The poem at her base is called New Colossus by Emma Lazarus.  On Thursday night, at a committee meeting of all places, the chair of the committee, as all of this vulgarity was oozing out of the oval office up the road chose to read us this poem out loud and I can't say I made it through without a tear, partly because I knew what he was reading before he even got to the famous lines about the poor and the huddled masses. So I'm just going to put this here:

What breaks my heart about this whole scenario is that we have such high-minded ideals in us.  We know, somewhere, that this is who we are, and yet out of self interest or anger or something have elected a man who seems to know nothing of these values, even though he grew up and lived in the shadow of Lady Liberty.
Now, I will admit that sometimes I use vulgar language, in fact, I know I have used the exact word that Trump allegedly used to refer to someplace less than wonderful. I am not wringing my hands about that part, because I knew that is who he was and who he is.  What troubles me is that he is so very un-examined in his vulgarity that he doesn't seem to know when it's entirely inappropriate to express such sentiments.  To openly say such a thing during a discussion of immigration, among people who have the power to set policy and change the lives of so many is a tragic thing.  It is tragic because it represents and openly displays a very dark part of our national psyche.  I cannot truly say that Trump does not represent America, because he does.  He represents us as our duly elected chief executive, and I'm afraid he also represents us spiritually, because we have made him our idol not just our president.
What he is showing us about ourselves should shake us to our very core.  Very few of us are actually that crass or mean.  Very few of us as individuals would express such disdain for people from impoverished nations trying to grab ahold of the American Dream.  But our collective will, and our selfish id, expresses that disdain all too clearly.  What bothers me is that Trump may actually be a reflection of who we are.  When I look in that mirror it makes me a little sick. The thing is, for all the people who like him because "he tells it like it is," I would offer a counter idea.  Perhaps what we need from our leaders is not to tell it like it is, but rather to tell us how it should be, and actually try to lead us in that direction.
He is very well becoming the "brazen giant of Greek fame." Conquering enemies, dismissing rivals, putting America first, but that, according to our highest standard, is not who America is supposed to be.  If we don't wake up and realize that we may not wake up at all.
So I don't want impeachment, or the 25th amendment process anymore.  I want us to survive Trump, and learn our lesson.  I want us to think very long and hard about who we are and who we want to be.  Three more years isn't too long, I just hope it isn't to short a time to recover our senses of who we are. Maybe we need to remember that our President should never have been an idol to begin with.  So here are a couple of lines from Alan Ginsberg's America, which I won't share in full, because we've had enough vulgarity, I'm just lifting some thoughts:

America after all it is you and I who are perfect and not the next world

Your machinery is too much for me, you made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set 

America is this correct?

I'd better get right down to the job. 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Not to Lose

Pointed threats they bluff with scorn

Suicide remarks are torn,

From the fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn

Plays wasted words, proves to warn

That he not busy being born is busy dying.

-Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm only Bleeding)

So let's talk football, at least to start.  On Monday night Alabama and Georgia played in the National Championship of college football.  Despite the fact that I had very little rooting interest in this game other than a vague desire for someone besides Alabama to win, I stayed up until midnight to watch the thing, which took overtime to come to a decision.  The first half looked promising for my vague hope.  Georgia was up at halftime, 13-7, not a huge lead but the game looked like it was going to be a defensive slug fest, and Georgia was well equipped to grind out the clock with an impressive stable of running backs and a typical SEC offensive line of men who ought to all just be named "Bubba."

But they were playing against Nick Saban, who did something at halftime that no one expected: he switched quarterbacks from Jalen Hurts (who had been the starter and played every meaningful down of the season) to Tua Tagovailoa, a true freshman from Hawaii (hereafter simply referred to as Tua). Hurts was the horse that Alabama rode all the way to the championship, a running quarterback who was good at throwing little dunk passes and picking his way down the field.  Alabama has a reputation, going back to before the Saban years of being the sort of team that grinds you down with their size and strength rather than dazzles you with their skill.  Alabama sends a lot of linemen and running backs to the NFL, and only the occasional QB or wide receiver. Hurts fits that scheme, if he is drafted it will probably be as a WR or RB. Tua, however, is a different story, he is a thrower, and by that I mean someone who is preternaturally gifted at slinging that oblong thing we call a football all over the yard.  He looked like a kid (the Hawaiian features made him look even younger than he is), everyone watching wondered what in the world Tricky Nicky could be thinking. It seemed crazy, like the thing no one would do in their right mind, unless Hurts was hurt.

Nick Saban, like many great coaches (Greg Popovich, Bill Belichick, Mike Kryzewski), has this ability to seem like a dull, grumpy, pessimist, but then he comes out with a move like this.  If it didn't work, it would have been madness, but it worked.  Tua had one thing that Hurts did not, the ability to throw the ball down the field (really well as it turned out).  The freshman didn't come in and play flawless football either, he made some pretty predictable mistakes, he took some risks he shouldn't, but he did something truly crucial: he gave Georgia something they were not prepared to handle.

Georgia had come loaded for the typical Alabama assault, Kirby Smart used to work for Nick Saban, he knew the drill and how this was going to look.  He knew that he was going to have to defend the run and the short pass, and so he prepped his team, coached his team, and had them executing well enough to win, until Saban flipped the script.  As soon as Tua took the lid off the defense it was pretty clear that Georgia was going to lose, even when they were up 20-13, I could tell they were doomed, somehow someway.  Alabama had evolved and they did not.  It took overtime to do it, but the decisive plays in that OT were paradigmatic of the whole thing, Georgia played it conservative, kicked their field goal and then Tua came out and got sacked on the first play and threw a beautiful touchdown on the second, game over.  Nick Saban is a genius.

The decision that Saban made at halftime could have gone horribly wrong.  Tua could have come out and thrown interceptions, gotten overwhelmed by the moment and the fact that at 19 he is really just a kid and playing against grown men.  Saban though, knew how to put that kid in the right place at the right time to do something remarkable.  Part of the genius of this move was that people had seen so little of Tua, they maybe only knew that he was a gifted player in High School, after all, you don't get recruited to Alabama from Hawaii unless you're pretty special, and you don't go to Alabama from Hawaii unless you figure you've got a shot at playing there.  That last pass of the game was a perfect illustration of the thing that Tua does so very well, a long throw that hit the receiver in stride, something Hurts just did not seem able to do, and something that Georgia had obviously not considered to be a possibility.

Saban and Alabama are, in most ways, a definitively conservative system: run the ball, play defense, grind it out. But here's the thing that we can learn from this: sometimes conservative isn't going to work and you need to learn how to adapt.  This is true in politics and it is true in the world of the church.  When conservatism stops working you need to be able to change, and change is risky and can seem crazy, until it works.  As a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles phan, I lived through the recent coaching debacle that was Chip Kelly, who had a radical plan about how to play fast and sling the ball all over, pretty much the opposite of Alabama.  As a college coach at Oregon, Kelly's system had been revolutionary and exciting, but he notably did not manage to unseat the Alabama's of the world.  In the pros, his first couple years were thrilling, the Eagles scored lots of points and flashed the idea that this might just work, except it didn't, teams caught on to the shenanigans and then the Birds were a failed gimmick.  If Saban had come into the game with Tua at QB this thing would have gone differently, Georgia was a good enough team to beat Alabama from a talent perspective, but they weren't good enough to overcome the paradigm shift that happened at halftime.

The cycle of things is that innovation happens to address a challenge.  If innovation works, it tends to become entrenched as the status quo.  Challenges to the status quo arise and innovation is necessary again.  The problem is that the status quo can sometime exert a powerful inertial force on innovation (believe me church is the poster child for this problem). Fear of trying something radical and risk averse thinking are sometimes simply too much to overcome (sorry Dawgs).  The genius of what Saban did was that no sane person (Kirby Smart) would have ever expected him to do it, so even if he was aware that Saban had a gunslinger like Tua in his stable, he simply didn't prepare for him to be deployed.

The challenge is to try a new thing, sometimes a shocking new thing, while understanding your roots. Honestly, if Alabama's defense hadn't stepped up and pretty much shut down Georgia at the end of the game Tua would have been chasing ghosts.  Alabama's core identity as a team that grinds you down physically was still there, Georgia started to look tired, started missing tackles and breaking coverage schemes. The uncertainty and fear that came upon the Bulldogs was pretty clear, they started playing not to lose, and that was what doomed them before they even went to overtime.

I think since we have invested so much in the games we play we ought to learn the lessons they have have to teach us.

My eyes collide head on with stuffed

Graveyards, false gods, I scuff

At pettiness which plays so rough,

Walk upside-down inside handcuffs

Kick my legs to crash it off

 Say, "Okay, I've had enough, what else can you show me?"

Slow Your Roll

So Oprah was given an award last night at the Golden Globes.  She gave a speech that is apparently a big thing today.  As a person who does some public speaking, that is a pretty good sermon.  She does what Oprah does so well: spins emotional stories delivered with all the earnestness you can possibly handle.  Little girl Oprah watching Sidney Poitier get the same award as her mother comes in from the brutal soul sucking job she had as a cleaning lady. The story of a black woman who was raped by white men who never faced justice despite the best efforts of none other than Rosa Parks.  I admit, I got choked up several times during that speech, and I am not an Oprah true believer.
But in true Interweb fashion there is all sorts of reaction this morning that inspires a "please sweet Lord no!" The most terrifying of which is people who think that the Big O ought to run for president in 2020.  Part of me thinks that would serve the people who voted for Trump right, but most of me thinks that we have had all of the TV personality presidents we actually need. Reagan, who once co-starred with a chimpanzee, was bad enough, but now we have Mr. "You're Fired!" running the show.  This has got to stop, and we need to put the government back in the hands of people who actually know about legislation and governing.  Look, I have no love for career politicians, I actually think the imposition of real term limits on both houses of Congress would be a pretty darn good idea. I would, however, really like it if the people we elected were actually skilled in the art of legislation and had the ability to govern for the common good.  I don't see much of that now, but just giving up and voting for whatever character sells the best lies just isn't a very good strategy in the long term.
I like Ellen Degeneres, Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart a lot, but I don't want any of them to run for President, because despite the last year I happen to believe that being President is a serious thing that should only be taken up by serious people.  Whatever other problems I might have with Donald the thing that I can't get away from, even when he does things I happen to think are OK or at least not horrible, is that I don't think he is quite sincere about much of anything.  I think he can fake it to sell things, I think he can put on a mask of sincerity, but it seems to change all too quickly as soon as exigent circumstances press a button.
Oprah gave a good speech to a very sympathetic and supportive audience.  She rounded the bases in a glorious slow trot because she knew it was a home run.  And she reminded us again that she is the epitome of the American dream, rising from a poor childhood to become one of the richest and most powerful people in showbiz.  She is an example of how a black woman can make it in this country even though the deck is really stacked against her... and I really hope she doesn't run for president.  Because she would probably win. My confidence in the American system and the electorate is not at an all time high, and as you may have discerned, if you have read these ramblings of late, I really want a grown up lawmaker back in charge.  Oprah may be a different kind of salesperson than Donald, but a salesperson she is.  I may agree with her, like her, be moved by her speeches, I might even admit that, as a figurehead and a cultural totem, she might make a good Chief Executive.  But, I really want us to have a President who is more than a mascot for our delusions.
We need to stop voting for the best salesperson and start voting for the best states-people.  This is a needful thing up and down the ballot.  I have come to believe that if we want better representation and governance then we the people need to stop voting with our ids (and no that is not a reference to voter ID, I'm talking about the Freudian personality construct).  We go in too easily for the people who make the best speeches and promise the moon.  We go in too easily for people who tell us what we want to hear. Oprah is the queen of that, whether it is the famous giveaways or the miracle diets, she is undeniably the ruler of the entertainment world, and increasingly the entertainment world is the only world many people care about.

Things Fall Down

They lived and they died,

They prayed to their gods,

But their stone gods did not make a sound,

And the Empire crumbled, til all the was left

Were some stones the workmen found.

-Sting, All This Time

I don't know if we are living through the end of an Empire.  I read the papers more now than I ever have, which is not always a soothing exercise. Whether it is Fareed Zakarias analyzing the protests in Iran with Alex de Tocqueville's commentary on the French Revolution or Jonathan Capehart summoning H.L. Mencken and Edward Gibbon to make the case that our nation may be the Empire that is imploding, breathless anticipation of old orders passing away seems to be in the air.  For many this creates anxiety, and leads quite often to reactionary sorts of thoughts.  I am fairly certain that our current administration is a symptom, rather than a cause, of such anxiety and the reactionary brand of conservatism it has brought on us all.  Perhaps the Iran situation is easier to see clearly thanks to distance. I think Fareed points out fairly clearly that the Iranian theocracy has been standing athwart the progress of their nation for some time. While it is naive to think that a truly democratic Iran would emerge to champion western ideals, a more secular Iran would be much less likely to be a destabilizing influence in the region, and frankly would be much less frightening to all involved.

While I wonder whether the Iranian protests give a half a fig about what Donald Trump thinks of their struggle, I think, for once, his tweet on the subject may be on target. We should cheer change in Iran, and do what we can in diplomatic fashion to support it, however, what I fear is that we as a nation tend to see moments like this as opportunities for our worst imperialist tendencies to come out and dance.  We start to meddle, demand and otherwise play the big kid on the block.  As it turns out, we may have liked being a "super-power" a little too much and our tendency to try and make the world in our image is sometimes more than we can restrain.

Just as Iran's theocracy deserves to die and be relegated to the dust bin of history, I'm not entirely sure our own regime isn't due for a sturdy rebuke from history.  Perhaps the spirit of self-interest and consumerism is too much for a real democracy.  As I read the excerpts from Wolff's Fire and Fury, I am tempted to believe it, even though I know he is a hack and a purveyor of half truths.  I guess I agree with one of my more conservative sources: 

Let's stipulate that Michael Wolff is not a 100 percent reliable reporter.  The problem (for Trump and his supporters) is that most of what he says is plausible.

The thought that keeps coming back to me is that, in our system we really do get the government we deserve, which in Mencken's decidedly jaundiced view was that: "one day the the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  The other day, a commentator referred to Trump as "obnoxiously ignorant," which I think gets at the core of what we mean by moron.  Trump is obviously not a moron in the same sense as Spongebob Squarepants (a children's cartoon character who lives most gleefully doing mindless things), he is rather the sort of character who simply refuses to do anything as odious as self-reflection or deep consideration of facts.  Trump is famous for "going with his gut," and "telling it like it is," however, what we see day after day is that he can't or won't really do anything beyond that, which is the most fertile soil for a reactionary, incompetent leader I have ever heard.
Rome survived several mad emperors and the good news is that our version of "bread and circuses," is rolling right along (a strong stock market and lots of Netflix). I am not sanguine that our current direction is rising towards greatness though.  It may be that humanity is advancing to a place of global culture where empires are no longer viable.  That will be cool, but the transition may be painful, particularly for those who are used to power.  Maybe we have invested too much of our faith in the false god of great men.  Maybe it is good and right for the empires and oligarchies to fall, but I am all too aware that what came after the Roman Empire fell is what we call the Dark Ages.
It's an interesting idea that Rod Dreher, whom I quoted above, has seized upon in his rather interesting treatise The Benedict Option.  The general premise of which is that, in his view, the postmodern version of the Dark Ages is, in fact, upon us, and the Church needs to recognize this and close ranks like Benedictines did during the last Dark Ages and keep the light of civilization and Christianity (one and the same to his mind) alive in the safety of our communities while the barbarian hordes and plagues rage through the secular world. While I may take a less dire view of the secular world than Dreher, I do think that relevancy for the Church does at least have something to do with the fact that we can endure the rise and fall of Empires, we've done it several times.  Beyond that, being resurrection people, we can actually endure our very own death.  As G.K. Chesterton sharply observed: "We follow a God who has managed to find his way out of the grave."
So I guess, in the end, even if this is the end, that is where I will put my hope. The community that matters to me more than any other is one that is not built by human hands, that has no frail and broken emperor, president or king to lead it off of the cliffs of history.  I do not know how any of this will go, but unlike certain others I believe we who are part of the Body of Christ are supposed to be right in the middle of it. We do not pray to stone gods, we pray to the Living God, who is love and love casts out all fear, even when things fall down.

Stuff I Learned a Long Time Ago

So buttons huh? Yep, bigger, better buttons.  Buttons with horrifying consequences, buttons that could destroy the world, being available to men who apparently have the mentality of a surly fourth grader.  That's where we are, an implied Armageddon that starts with something like, "my Dad can beat up your Dad."
Let me start with my grumpy old man routine: I grew up in a world where there were real bullies, not just trolls on the interweb.  I have been punched in the face, and I have punched others in the face, I have experienced the raw, adrenaline stoked rage of being in a fight. I get it, violence seems like it will solve things, on some level I agree with this guy:

But I don't agree all the way, because I don't think using your fists makes you a man, but it's a lot better than shooting somebody. When I was a kid, there was that phase where boys on the playground would get into the arguments of the "my Dad can beat up your Dad," sort. I don't remember what the exact context of that was, but I do remember considering the scenario.  I don't think I ever got to the place where I actually worried about my Dad getting beat up.  First of all, I had seen my Dad do really strong stuff, like carry heavy things, dig holes really fast and split wood with an ax.  But before any of that, I understood that my Dad was a grown up of the sort who would almost never get into a fist fight. Other kids apparently didn't have that confidence in their Fathers. I don't remember how exactly this stuff went down, but I do remember knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my Dad wouldn't be getting into a fist fight with that other kids Dad, and that reality was certainly not a weakness.

That did not stop me from getting into fights myself, but it did shape my consciousness concerning violence, so that, as I grew up I at least wanted to fight less and less.  The last time I threw a punch in anger was in college, at a friend of mine who was drunk and disorderly, it was a bad punch, technically and philosophically.  I didn't really want to hurt him, but I was irritated enough with his drunken foolery that I did want to let him know that I wasn't messing around.  I regret that punch more than any other I have ever thrown, not because he didn't deserve it (he did), but because by that point I was fully aware that violence doesn't solve problems and I let my anger and reactivity get the better of me.

As I grew up my heroes were like MacGyver, who wouldn't use guns.  Doctor Who, whose weapon was his mind and a sonic screwdriver, and of course Captain Jean Luc Picard, who unlike a former Captain of the Enterprise very rarely had to monkey flip a giant space lizard, and who mostly had to think his way out of problems. In other words, they were men who could be trusted to handle things like grown-ups, like my Dad would. Ingenuity, intelligence and diplomacy are not boring, or weak, and they are things I would very much like to see our President exhibit rather than bragging about his button.