Exhuming McCarthy

What I know about Joseph McCarthy all comes from movies, documentaries and history.  None of it is good.  I know that "McCarthyism" is one of the most roundly rejected "isms" of the 20th century.  It was fueled by fear of communism and a willingness for the system to sacrifice people on the altar of that fear.  At its core though, McCarthyism is a pure and simple over-reaction, like an allergy.  Communism was not a benign alternative to capitalism or even an under-rated threat to our nation.  It was an existential threat and a global rival (it was also not strictly speaking communism, but that's another discussion entirely).  The Communism of the USSR under Joseph Stalin was a brutal and hostile ideology manifest in a totalitarian system.  If it had risen to the level of ascendance that the United States occupied in say the 1990's the world would be a very different place.
Communists in the US were not anything like the "Red Communists" though, they were union organizers, artists and social activists who chose to criticize unfettered capitalism and/or speak for the dignity of human persons.  The essential difference between these two things made very little difference to McCarthy, all that mattered was the fear and the threat.  Nowadays we don't have any real villain to fight against.  China is a rival, but a hard one to hit, most of our political types agree that China is a bad actor with regard to human rights and economic policy, but they also acknowledge that we are locked in a codependent relationship with them.  China smiles and sends us cheap goods and dangles the promise of a "market" that is so very massive that our business class drools on their Brooks Brothers Suits.  We don't take India seriously at all, and our "Axis of Evil" countries are not really in our weight class, so we seem like bullies when we push them around and we seem like patsies if they take advantage of us (lose/lose situation).
So what do we do?  Well, if we follow the McCarthy model, we turn on each other.  Which is what we seem to be doing. Poll after poll is telling us that what we actually want as a nation is fairly consistent: justly regulated markets, good opportunities, immigration that is decent and in order, and a sense that we are "safe," whatever that means.  Most people want health care to be better (and more affordable) than it is, most are okay with the idea that the people who reap the most benefits should pay a greater share of the cost of infrastructure, defense and social welfare.  Some people trust the government to accomplish these goals, other people do not.  Shorten that: some people trust, others do not.
The non-trust crowd is a problem on both sides of the aisle.  Lack of trust is, in fact, a symptom of a deteriorating relationship.  One of the things I look for in couples that are seeking to be married, is whether or not they trust each other.  Not whether they love each other, not whether they are a "good match" because who knows what that means, whether they trust each other is the thing.  It's not always easy to sort that out, but there are symptoms of distrust that can quickly escalate to a toxic level.
One such symptom is not listening to what the other says.  Now I'm not talking about not hearing the words, I'm talking about deliberately interpreting those words in a way that suits your own narrative, regardless of what the actual content might be.  If you read different opinions about our political situation right now you see that happening on a large scale.  Trump assures his followers that what the "liberal media" or the "fake news" is telling them is not what is actually happening.  People believe him, because they "know" that that media is biased against him.  There are moments where I suspect that it can't possibly be as bad as what I read, then I read someone who says precisely that, like an opinion piece by a true Trump believer.  I do actually do that from time to time, it's increasingly difficult to find any that do not come across as un-moored from reality.  Most of them that have any reasonableness to them say that we just have to ignore his bluster and focus on what he's doing.  It's all just a smokescreen for pretty normal "conservative" agenda goals.
I do not have any great love for most conservative agenda goals, but I do like a few of them: fiscal responsibility, limits on government authority, free speech, rule of law, I'm really pretty good with those.  I do not happen to trust corporations any more than I trust the government (see I don't trust parts of this relationship).  To me the profit motive is actually behind the corruption of both corporate and government systems, the corporations are simply more up front about it; this does not make them more reliable partners.
Other symptoms are "gas lighting" and hypersensitivity, or some combination of the two.  These are particularly dangerous in our system right now, they feed each other.  "Gas lighting" is a manipulative process that seeks to convince another person that reality is not reality.  The name comes from a movie where a man dims the gas lighting fixtures and when a woman complains that they aren't bright enough, he convinces her that they're fine and that it is she who has the problem.  It is a form of manipulation often used by abusers to control their victims: this is normal, I didn't hit you that hard, regular people get into fights, I'm not lying, you're just paranoid.
Truth be told, we are all rather more vulnerable to gas lighting than we would like to admit, especially if we are being victimized by people we thing are on our side.  That's why Trump's supporters are proving so very resilient to reality: they really want to believe what they are being told by their demagogue. The vulnerability of the opposition actually plays right into the hands of the gas lighting abusers.  The "other" side of this coin is very easily cast as a hysterical woman being hypersensitive and seeing things that aren't there.  That is a literal part of this strategy: complain about the nanny state that censors free speech on college campuses and insists on "safe spaces," "trigger warnings," and "political correctness" in all its many forms.  "Look at Nancy Pelosi, she wants to shut all you good, red blooded Americans up and take your freedom and your guns." The problem with it is that Nancy Pelosi plays right into that scheme, at least enough for people to actually doubt whether the light is dim.
Political correctness should just be an attempt to speak in a way that avoids deliberately offending others.  The problem is too many people do not draw a very clear line about what is offensive, and in our modern age, everything anyone ever says is on the table.  Case in point, a couple of baseball players had their Twitter feeds from years ago dragged out into public, because they just made it to the majors.  When they were teenagers they had made bad jokes, said racist things and generally been despicable on Twitter.  Now they had to apologize for being stupid when they were 17.  I feel like, right now, I should just issue a blanket apology for stuff I did and said when I was 17, because I really need to, because I was an idiot when I was 17, and I said lots of dumb things, offensive things, probably racist things, and I wasn't even a jock.  I thank the Lord in Heaven that Twitter wasn't a thing when I was 17.
What we should do in a functional society is accept their apology and move on.  They were high school baseball players, who were good enough to actually be moving up the food chain.  Did you know any really good athletes in High School?  Were they introspective and sensitive types who deeply thought about how their attitudes and words effected those around them? I'm sure there were some of those out there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that is not the norm.  That's not an excuse for their behavior, it's more a "he who is without sin cast the first stone." We are going to have to get a lot better about apologizing and accepting apologies in this brave new world, or else our relationship is going to continue to circle the drain.  Being able to forgive and be forgiven is central to healthy relationships (that's why Jesus included it in the big prayer).
A perpetual quest for vengeance and the destruction of your opponent is really unhealthy, and that is where I feel like we are right now.  Joseph McCarthy was one guy, but he had a whole system of people that allowed him to do what he did.  That system really didn't change that much, even after they drove him out into the wilderness, perhaps we should get around to changing it now.

What Dystopia?

What you're seeing and reading is not what's happening.

-Donald Trump at a rally in Kansas City

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

It was their final most essential command.

-George Orwell, 1984

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned.

It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged...

-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

I doubt Donald Trump has ever read 1984.  By most accounts he is not the bookish sort. So I sort of doubt that he really has a Big Brother-esque vision what Making America Great Again looks like.  In an important book, written during the Reagan administration, Neil Postman argues that television was moving us towards the vision of Aldous Huxley rather than George Orwell.  Generally I believe that to be true, but Trump has presented us with a rather troubling mixture of the two.  According to Postman, the totalitarian dystopia might take two forms, either the bleak vision of 1984 where people are controlled via fear and hate, or the vision of A Brave New World, where people are sedated and fed pleasure in order to control them.

Postman's argument is that Huxley's vision was more likely in an age where people voluntarily switch the medium by which they receive information.  Television news is fundamentally different than print, watching a talking head tell you things, with pictures and video is an intellectually different exercise than reading an Op-ed piece in the Times.  All claims to "objectivity" aside, your brain will handle what is said differently.  As a writer, Postman obviously has a preference for the written word.  I do too. Donald Trump does not.  The fact that the things he says get written down annoys him, because it means that people can see his mendacity and it reduces his level of plausible deniability.

But Trump came along at the perfect time, because while reading and writing are not his thing, Television definitely is.  Not only that, but his rise came after decades of erosion of a certain cultural institution that honestly had become sad and lazy.  Of course I'm talking about the press.  I'm not exactly sure what happened, perhaps it was just a deepening cynicism, perhaps it was more sinister than that even.  

In the beginning of what I will call the era of mass media, the first superhero emerged, Superman.  Superman's alter ego is Clark Kent, a mild mannered reporter for the Daily Planet.  Clark Kent's job was a natural fit for a hero, because it kept him tuned into things that were happening, and also it was respectable and admirable as a profession.  By the 1980's when Postman was writing, and Superman was being made into a movie starring Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, something had happened to the press. Kidder's portrayal of Lois Lane in Superman had become brassy, pushy and slightly unethical.  Reporters were regularly portrayed as shameless attention hounds like Richard "Dick" Thornburg in the Die Hard franchise, who you are famously glad to see Holly Gennaro punch in the face at the end of the first movie and use a stun gun on in the second.

Movies and television shows almost seem to have it out for journalists of all sorts.  Fictional plot lines find those who tell actual stories easy to cast as villains.  As a kid who grew up on this sort of thing, I admit, for a good while in my adolescence I thought reporters were absolutely scum.  In the real world I have actually had experience with the media on a few occasions, one was when the church I served was vandalized on the same night as several others in the area.  It was nothing but stupid teenagers, but in rural Pennsylvania it was a slow news day, so I got on the TV news.  They pretty badly edited my comments where I was trying to talk about forgiveness instead of vengeance and to top it off I was presented to the world as Rev. Mark Gaskilo, which honestly sounds kind of cool, but it is pretty lazy reporting when you can't even spell a guy's name right.  The other experience I have was in getting requests for interviews when I was dealing with a community tragedy involving a triple murder by a father against his wife and two daughters.  That time, I absolutely refused to talk to the press, for pretty obvious reasons.

The thing is, I get it, the press can be annoying, TV journalists especially are problematic creatures, but there is a pretty solid reason why the first amendment to our Constitution says that we need to protect the freedom of the press to do their job.  That's what worries me about Trump and his feud with the "fake news," it seems like he is setting up a very Orwellian scheme, where he is intent on having his "truth" be the only truth.  At the same time he is a decidedly Huxleyan character, much more of a sly huckster than a ruthless tyrant.  What worries me is that he seems to have a sort of inclination to buddy up with some pretty ruthless tyrants, who I suspect would very much like to rule like Big Brother.

Postman, whose book I highly encourage you to read, made the case that our dystopian future was trending toward A Brave New World rather than 1984, however, perhaps it's not so much a case of either/or, but rather a both/and situation.  What if we are vulnerable to being enslaved by both our hates and our loves?  Honestly I see plenty of examples of both at work in the world.  I would like to tell you that it's okay, we can trust Clark Kent, but honestly I can't really do that categorically, there really are some Dick Thornburgs out there. However, I know we need the mild mannered reporter around, actually we need him more than we need Superman.  What I believe more than ever is that we need to read more than we need to watch, there I absolutely agree with Postman.  Somehow or other we have to learn to see, hear and judge the truth or else we will surrender our ability to live as free people.

Fables of the Deconstruction

"No reason to get excited,"the thief he kindly spoke,

"There are many here among us, who feel that life is but joke."

"But you and I have been through that, and this is not our fate."

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late,"

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower.

Last week I talked about the Reclaiming of Jesus by certain faith leaders.  This Sunday I preached about how we need to orient ourselves according to the Good Shepherd and the Righteous Branch that the Prophet Jeremiah predicted and which I believe to be Jesus of Nazareth, who is called the Christ.  I believe that certain works of theology perform the important function of deconstructing some of the mythology that the centuries have layered upon the person of Jesus.  For instance, without a certain amount of deconstruction it is all too likely that you will take Jesus as your "personal savior" and apply that ethic to mean that he is also the mascot of your nationalism, your imperialistic urges and perhaps even your un-examined bigotry.  People can "baptize" a lot of things in the name of Jesus and if we don't occasionally peel back the layers and layers of ideas that we have accumulated in our dogma we very well might have some serious blind spots.

However, complete deconstruction is a fairy tale and a falsehood as much as the dogmatism it seeks to correct.  I think of some of the proponents of deconstructionist theology who have essentially become atheists, or pantheists, or deists of the vaguest variety and it makes me think that the cure for an over mythologized and under humanized Jesus is sort of like chemotherapy: it can make you sick to cure the disease.

The dangers of an overly dogmatic approach to Jesus are manifest in ridiculous things like Paula White's assertion that Jesus was, in fact, a refugee, but he must not have broken any laws in that process or else he couldn't be sinless and thus would not be the Messiah.  This is obtuse and absurd on many levels of logic, however, one need not engage in any theological parsing to show it as such.  Jesus was a child when he was a refugee, immigration in those days was not tightly regulated and so, no, he probably didn't break any laws in that case. However, Jesus did rather publicly and controversially break several laws during his adult ministry, the time when he was most visibly engaged in proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   He broke the sacred laws in violating the Sabbath, he broke the secular laws by destroying property and creating a nuisance in the Temple court and he committed blasphemy, according to those who enforced the law.  For good measure he referred to those who were in charge of enforcing the law, religious and secular alike, as "a brood of vipers," which was at least as bad as referring to police officers as "pigs," if not even slightly stronger. The idea that he obeyed all the secular laws of the land is an absurdity of the highest order, and I'm not even talking about theology... yet.

In light of such realities we also should not try to water Jesus down.  He was not always nice and he did not always play by the rules, but most of the time he had compassion on people who were suffering, even if they were people he didn't particularly like, or people who caught him a little off guard. Trying to deny the reality of Jesus, whether we are over-mythologizing or over-deconstructing is a rather pernicious trap.  Jesus was not a "normal" every day guy, nor was he some sort of Gnostic abomination with no real humanity.  He was a man who lived in tension between his Father in heaven, and his brothers and sisters on earth and he loved them both.  He prayed to his Father for the sake of his disciples, and he taught them that the Father wanted to receive them as children regardless of their level of prodigality.

The way we know this is remarkable: through written accounts called Gospels.  These accounts all have strengths and weaknesses, each writer wanted to accomplish certain things and thus they clearly have an agenda.  But here's the thing: their agendas, their personal feelings, even their grammatical foibles, none of it prevents us from seeing the real, complex and challenging figure whom we should be glad to call Lord.  It is a mistake to view knowledge of the truth behind scripture as a road to the destruction of faith.  Deconstructionists love to find these little wrinkles they use as "gotcha" moments to say, "This isn't true."  But the Gospel writers are not at all interested in truth by that standard, they're not hiding that.  They're not trying to synthesize their account with the others who are telling the story, I honestly think that perhaps they were doing precisely the opposite.  Each one of them was telling their story of Jesus, and that is precisely what he told them, and us to do.  This is the ongoing process of incarnation.  Jesus knew it would have to move beyond mere eye-witnesses.  Legal experts will tell you that eye-witnesses are often regarded as less than decisive.

It was not the goal of the first generation of disciples to relate the truth of Jesus with anything like photo-realism.  They were telling their stories of how they became a follower of his and specifically telling their audience that they wanted them to follow him as well.  They had different angles and different recollections, and yes things didn't always jive precisely the way our scientific minds would like.  We can work with the material though.  Deconstruction is useful up to a certain point, even to the point where it challenges your faith, however faith must somehow survive the affair or else we will be pushed into the void.

I would offer the insight that mature faith faces the challenge and survives.  Much like secular maturity is achieved by experiencing the twists and turns of life itself, dealing with success and failure, joy and tragedy.  Spiritual maturity involves having your ideas about God continually challenged and finding the reality that your ideas must grow, because they can never hold God as they are now. Most spiritually mature people will tell you honestly that there were times when they doubted and maybe even when they lost their faith entirely, but they didn't give up and walk away, they simply sorted through the rubble and found Jesus there with them, because he doesn't really ever leave, we only lose the ability to see him sometimes.

Thirteen

I took a year off from doing this on July 23, marking the anniversary of my brother's death.  Last week I went back and read the old posts from years 7-11, and to tell you the truth, I think this might be a valuable thing to do.  But this really can't keep being about grief at this point, honestly I don't feel the sense of foreboding about this day that I did ten years ago or even five years ago.  Now it's just not that jagged, but I do remember this day, I can't really forget that this is the day that everything changed for our family.
As I have mentioned before in this regard, this is the time of year that a lot of people are going on vacations, and at my age, most of my peers have moved from going on vacations primarily planned by their parents to vacations that they plan with their siblings.  Not everyone, but enough people to make me realize what I'm missing.  This is one of the places where the presence of an absence comes back with teeth.
Another one of those places involves my daughter.  Caitlyn was born August 18, 2005, a little less than a month after Jon died.  She is going to turn thirteen next month and she is unabashedly, I would say even proudly, weird.  In that way she sort of reminds me of Jon, she is a lot more comfortable with her oddity than I was at that age. I see flickers of my brother in both my kids, and since Jack is a boy and from certain angles physically looks like Jon, I think I might note that more often, but I think there is a spiritual similarity between my brother and the niece he never even met. What I think Cate and Jon have in common is a sense that their strangeness is a good thing.  Jon learned to embrace the fact that he was not like a lot of other kids, he made a strange mix of friends (not always for the better).  The thing that I think everyone noticed is that he had like a gravitational pull with other people.
There is also this phenomenon with Caitlyn that her friends parent's seem to think she is a good influence on their children. People seem to readily invite her into their family activities. That's interesting to me because she can drive me up a wall sometimes, but with other people, her sense of independent identity seems to reassure them that she will not be swayed by hair-brained adolescent nonsense.  I don't know if it's exactly the same thing, but people used to take Jon places, neighbors with slightly younger kids would invite him places like the beach and on ski trips.  If my memory serves it was because, without really doing anything earth shaking he made their kids easier to manage.
I never got such invitations.  You might think, given how things turned out, that people got it backwards, but I don't think so.  I feel like I made people nervous, I was pretty inward and awkward, and not much fun most of the time. I'm still not much fun really, I spend too much time in my own head, and I actually need to do that particularly when I'm consciously trying to relax. I have to try too hard to be outgoing and fun. This was one of the reasons why, I realize in hindsight, that I actually liked spending time with my brother in those too few years where we were both adults: he could keep me going, he had plans and wanted to do things.  Plans and doing things seem like a hassle to me, but sometimes I want/need to have them inflicted upon me. Yet, he was also my little brother so I could tell him to bug off when I needed to without damaging our relationship even a little.
What I'm thinking about this year, as my little girl turns thirteen, and my brother has been gone for all of her life, is again about that permanently missing piece of our family.  I wonder about the effect that a relationship with her uncle would have on her life. Both of my kids are like me in the regard that we would all probably rather be left alone to read and do "self" things, I think we are all missing the dynamo that Jon would have certainly been for our little family unit. Deeper than that, since Cate is an exceptionally sensitive person, I wonder about how the grief that was such a constant presence in our world for so long shaped her experience of life through these childhood years.   I know these questions have no answers, but today seems like the day to ask them.

Faster than Words

Death and life are in the power of the tongue,

And those who love it will eat its fruits.

-Proverbs 18: 21

You could say that the one thing that sets us apart from other animals is our use of words.  Other animals communicate and we can teach certain words to dogs and other intelligent creatures, but we're the ones who make the words, we're the ones who use the words, and we're the ones who fight over the words.  Bill Clinton famously obfuscated in his testimony about the meaning of the word "is." Politicians have regularly been abusers of the conventions of language, to the point where "spin" is a universally accepted euphemism for justifying lies.  Trump's half-hearted walk back of his Helsinki faux pas is entirely believable from two angles: 

1. I can absolutely believe he said a word he didn't mean to say.  He is an imprecise speaker in the vein of Sarah Palin, whom John Stewart hypothesized wrote her speeches by throwing darts at a board of random words.
2. I don't think he ever really means what he says.  One thing I strongly suspect is true of Trump is that his word is NEVER his bond.  His famous straight shooting is really only ever exercised when he sure of the room.  His vulgarity comes out with Billy Bush who was rolling with the "locker room talk." His prejudiced view of the world comes out when he is crowing to a rally of people in American Flag shirts and red MAGA hats.  I have come to the conclusion that his nature as a salesman is the dominant feature of his personality, he will do anything to sell something.  He was selling something to Vlad Putin the other day and cameras were rolling.

The thing that worries me is the destructive power this sort of thing has on our ability to communicate.  Trump is a symptom of a disease that started a while ago and has exponentially accelerated in the internet age.  Since I was a kid though our discourse has been steadily deteriorating even as we have more and more channels through which to talk, we value the actual words less and less. I'm not just talking about the liberal use of acronyms in place of words like FWIW or LOL, I'm talking about the lack of thoughtful engagement with the thoughts behind the language.  People talk in slogans and slams.  Ever try to have a meaningful dialogue on Twitter or Facebook? Sometimes  you can actually do it, but it is a near inevitability that someone will jump in the middle of a feed with some comment that is clearly intended to just shut the thing down.  Whataboutism that I discussed the other day is a hammer that is frequently used.

See people don't use these frankly amazing platforms that we have to actually discuss, they use them in Trumpian fashion, to "score" points, to "burn" their interlocutors and to generally do anything and everything but actually learn in the process of conversation.  Debate and dialogue used to be a thing we did rather proudly and rather well.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a high point of American political discourse, but of course they didn't stop the Civil War.  G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw had immensely intellectual (and humorous) debates about the nature of faith and the existence of God.  There were profound disagreements that were not settled in some pollyannish "everybody's right in their own way," fashion.  People used words to sort these things out and move forward, even if they never came to agreement.  Agreement isn't always the goal, articulation with integrity was the benchmark that was agreed upon.  Edifying discourse, seriously I almost get a little choked up thinking about that phrase.  Many people seem to have accepted the notion that someone speaking of ideals and high values is an elite snob and not to be trusted.

Consider the difference between our current President and the last one.  Obama rarely if ever had to apologize for saying something, he was almost humorously careful and even in his tone and his word choice (look up Obama's anger translator by Key and Peele if you don't mind some PG-13 language). I used to give my kids dinner table lectures about getting good grades and making the right choices in my Obama voice, and it worked.  Eight years without a scandal, even though we had to dig out of a recession, deal with global terrorism and nightmares like Benghazi (yeah I said it, it was a disaster, but not a scandal).  In this administration, we can't even get through eight days without some thing or other making us all look like either morons or sociopaths.  It's not all about words mind you, but it starts there, if you can't even manage the basic things like communicating accurately, why on earth should we trust you with anything else.

Remember that Time?

Remember that time in November of 2009 when Barack Obama bowed "too low" to Emperor Akihito of Japan? Some people of a certain political bent got even more bent than Obama's waist.  But let's be honest, at this point in history, Japan is very little threat to us, in fact they're practically a vassal state in old medieval terms.  The Emperor of Japan is a symbolic monarch, very much like the Queen of England, and so Barack had pretty much nothing to prove, except that he could be humble and polite.  Akihito is also much older than Obama, and in Asian culture that counts for a lot. In the most positive light, what Obama did was honor a man who deserved the respect of his office, he showed an understanding of the culture he was visiting and he demonstrated that the power of the presidency of the United States is rather a different animal than the power of Kings, Emperors and feudal lords.
At the time, I laughed at those who accused Obama of "treason," because that was a ridiculous charge, overheated in the extreme and fueled pretty obviously by the rage of people who could not stand the fact that he was President in the first place.  So, as hard as it may be, I'm going to take a deep breath and extend the same grace to Donald Trump.  What transpired yesterday in Helsinki was troubling on a lot of levels, because I have been watching the career of Trump's new buddy Vlad for a while now.  I have watched documentaries and read numerous accounts of how Putin deals with dissidents in Russia. The reality that he is, at his core, a relic of the Cold War KGB is clear.
Trump apparently finds something admirable about Vladimir Putin, maybe it is the ability to bend/break the truth to fit their purposes.  However, Trump bends/breaks the truth like a salesman and a charlatan; Putin bends/breaks the truth like a despot, and there is an important difference there, and we should not engage in moral equivalence there.  I'm going to put aside dark theories about collusion until someone like Robert Mueller puts some evidence out there that Trump actually directly worked with those Russian agents to do the things that were clearly done during the 2016 election.
I sort of agree with Rand Paul on this issue, the dissemination of propaganda by foreign governments against international rivals is not just a Russian hobby.  We are practically the masters of this sort of thing, and if Putin wasn't the master of actually rigging his own political system, we probably would have had a large hand in bringing down his regime.  That said, two wrongs don't make a right.  My personal feeling is that we should be educated enough and aware enough as a population to see propaganda for what it is.  The problem is that many people were all too ready to believe that Obama committed treason for being polite and showing honor and deference to a venerable old Japanese Emperor.  Also this morning there are many people who are willing to accuse Trump of treason for kissing up to Putin.  But let's take stock of what was actually really wrong with what Trump did and leave the overheated rhetoric behind for a minute, because if we're going to fight Trump with overheated rhetoric, we're going to lose, that's his pool and he is the master of peeing in it, so we should not even get in.
Wrong things about Helsinki:

1. Trump publicly demonstrated that Putin suckered him.  Even if he privately knows that Putin is lying to him he made no demonstration of that knowledge in the public contest.  Even if he is trying to be diplomatic and acknowledge that Russia isn't the only one with propaganda up their sleeve he appears to be a credulous fool.
2. In "believing" Putin, Trump throws a lot of this nation's important institutions under the bus.  The CIA, the FBI, his own advisers and the US Justice Department, have all told him, in most cases without implicating him personally, that there was interference by the Russian government in the election.  In the case of Mueller's investigation there were just a dozen actual indictments of Russian governmental agents. Indictments mean there is sufficient evidence to engage in legal prosecution.
3. On the heels of playing a wild bully with our European allies, Trump's attempt at being diplomatic with a truly bad actor like Putin presents a horrible optic about the United States direction in the international community.

The question on a lot of people's mind is why.  As Sherlock Holmes mysteries often demonstrate the simplest explanation is most likely the truth.  The simplest explanation in my mind is Trump's ego.  His ego simply cannot deal with the reality that the Russians wanted him to win the election because they thought it would weaken our global power.  They did not want Hillary to win, because contrary to what you might think about Democrats being pushover doves when it comes to foreign policy, Clinton promised to be every bit as hawkish as George W. Bush, if not more so.  Trump clearly desires the image of a strong man and a decisive leader and the idea that he did not win the election by his own merits is a persistent irritant to him.  The idea that Russia might have supported him because they knew he would be a bumbling fool that they could use to their own ends is something he is blindly devoted to debunking.  The evidence from our side is mounting against him. His own behavior is mounting against him.

So where to go?

Totally flip the script, which is something that Trump, reality TV star that he is, understands all too well.  Shuffle the deck, rearrange the set, throw in some chaos, no matter how bad it looks at first it will keep people interested.  The thing is that the consequences of these actions in his current position can have more dire consequences than simply tanking the ratings. As several Republican types have indicated this morning, Trump needs to do some serious repair work on the spin this story is taking.  He needs to explain his behavior, because he is not a King or an Emperor or even a dictator like Putin, he is a public servant and he needs to bow a little deeper to the people of this nation that he serves.

Reclamation Project

I hope you will take the time to watch this:

And if you would like read the full text of the Reclaiming Jesus statement. If you know me at all, you will know that I am highly sympathetic to the ideology and theology that this group of religious leaders has put out there: Tony Campolo, Richard Rohr, Walter Brueggeman, Jim Wallis and one of my more recent favorites Michael Curry (yeah the one from the Royal wedding) are all included in the group who did this thing. I will let their words speak for themselves, they do a very good job.
What I would like to talk about here, as my contribution to this discussion, is the rather insidious trend of whataboutism.  When someone does something good, there is this seemingly immediate response of "what about X?"  When someone does something bad, the people who tend to sympathize with the person or perhaps their political party, think of something and say "what about Y?" to justify the bad behavior.
Already in response to this careful and well thought out statement from some of our most trustworthy Christian leaders, I have heard whataboutism coming from the left: "They didn't talk about LGBTQIA people and inclusivity."  And I have heard whataboutism coming from the right: "They didn't even mention abortion."  Respectfully you all need to shut up.  I'm quite sure that these folks knew you all were out there, and I'm quite sure they knew your what-abouts were coming, but they had to do something, and they did, and it was something that needed doing.
I think more people need to participate in High School Debate clubs, really.  They need to learn what a valid argument is, especially now that we have the interweb and any knucklehead with a Facebook page can inflict their "arguments" on their "friends." Sorry about the excessive "air quotes," I'm feeling lazily sarcastic.
There are times when an analogous situation can be used to shed some light on the issue at hand, but if your response to Robert Mueller returning dozens of indictments against people from the Trump campaign to the Russian intelligence service is the squawk, "what about Hillary's emails?" or "what about Benghazi?" you are being deliberately obtuse and are quite frankly contributing to the downfall of our democracy.  Not as much as Roger Stone or Sean Hannity, but you're putting another pinhole in the hull.  Were Bill and Hillary Clinton good people? Nope not really, but that does not mean that Donald Trump or his mafia of mendacity are somehow magically doing the right thing by our country. That being said, even corrupt warlords sometimes do the right thing.
We need to be able to accept several propositions in order to survive as a country, in addition to the things that are established in the Constitution:

1. People that you agree with will sometimes do the wrong thing, we need to be able to hold them accountable in a way that goes beyond just "calling them out." This means recovering our principles, and defending the institutions that are in place to defend those principles.
2. People that you disagree with with sometimes do the right thing, we need to recover our ability to recognize that and pitch in to help when it serves the common good.
3. People will try to do things to help, sometimes they will go too far, sometimes they will not go far enough for your liking, but remember "help," is the key word there. Is it helpful? The Reclaiming Jesus document is helpful, it doesn't answer all of our questions or provide the end result of what following Jesus in America is going to look like, but it's a step in the right direction to pulling ourselves out of the mudhole of the prosperity gospel.
4. If you are waiting for the perfect leader, or the perfect group of leaders, you are going to be disappointed.

Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Alpha and the Omega, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, you get the idea.  He was the one everyone was always waiting for, and what he spends his life doing is teaching a bunch of Galilean fishermen and other rabble that they are the ones God is going to actually use to redeem the world, and then he sends them.  They're not perfect, mostly they're not even very successful, but they bring others along the way and they help them see the vision that Jesus gives to the world.  Want to start to learn what that looks like and sounds like? See above.

Patriotism

Woody Guthrie wrote a song that we all know from the time we're little kids:

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

From California to the New York Island,

From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters,

This land was made for you and me.

Last night during the fireworks display at our local fairgrounds they included a country music rendition of that song.  Sandwiched between a tough-guy, revenge fantasy about 9-11 and a countrified version of God Bless America.  I was overwhelmed with irony, because Woody hated God Bless America, in fact, legend has it that This Land is Your Land, is actually written as a counter point to that song.  As you might know, Woody was not exactly what you might call an elitist, he was a man who believed that his music was a tool to advance the cause of human rights and particularly the rights of workers.  He was a bit of a communist, but not in the Soviet sort of way, in the John Steinbeck, Tom Joad sort of way.

This song that we teach our kids as a patriotic anthem is sort of like Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA.  It is a challenge to our triumphant imperial patriotism and a call to something better.  We mostly learn the first three verses, but if you're at all familiar with Mr. Guthrie beyond learning the kindergarten version of the song, you have probably heard this verse:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me

A sign was painted, said, "Private Property,"

But on the other side, it didn't say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.

Here's the thing, Woody loved this country and it's people enough to spend his time out on the road, learning stories and writing songs that lifted up the people.  He also had not a lot of good things to say about the establishment, he talked a lot about the people in the unemployment lines.  He traveled among the migrant laborers, the "Okies" of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and the other people of this nation who were displaced by industrialization and ecological disaster.

I want my patriotism be a lot more Woody Guthrie and a lot less Irving Berlin.  I don't bear any ill will towards people who get stirred by God Bless America, but I believe that the ideals of our country are so much better and higher than simply claiming a blessing and then acting like we've never even read the Scriptures where God pretty clearly cares about the last and the least of these.