Divided We Stand

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves;

It is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles 

yet not sink to the bottom.

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

One of the most troubling aspects of our American life over the past three years has been the failure of our common identity.  Our Constitution aims towards a "more perfect union," we hold the motto: e pluribus unum,  "out of many, One."  These are noble goals, and thankfully, while they may seem to wander like that rudderless ship, they, we, have not yet sunk to the bottom.

Over the weekend, as Donald Trump went on another one of his divisive tweet fests, this time with the entire city of Baltimore and its representative Elijah Cummings, I was struck by the response of Larry Hogan, the Governor of this State of Maryland that I have called home for over six years now.  Hogan is a Republican, but he is the sort of Republican that seems to be vanishing from the national scene at the moment.  As a "Red" official in one of the "Bluest" states, Hogan has had to learn to come together with people to seek the greater good of the community.  Hogan has been critical of Trump, but not in the bombastic and overheated ways that many, including libertarians and conservatives of the pre-Trump/never Trump style, seem to favor.

Hogan, in my estimation, recognizes that Trump is a symptom of a greater problem, not the cause.  I'm not sure precisely when it happened, but somewhere in my lifetime we have lost the ability to disagree without declaring the other side evil.  Now, when one argues over issues that one considers to be matters of moral decency, like say the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, or the protection of unborn children (to cherry pick one cause from each side), it is tempting to label those who disagree as cruel racists or baby-killers.  However, down this path lies madness in a nation that is trying to succeed in the grand experiment of democracy.

The difference between a Larry Hogan and a Donald Trump, is not so much their policies, but their character.  In a Chief Executive at any level, I would say that character matters much more than policy (which is why I did not love Bill Clinton, even though my centrist politics jived pretty well with his).  Hogan's response to Trump's attack on Baltimore (the largest city in Hogan's state) was not to call out Trump's racist dog-whistling or even to staunchly defend Baltimore (plenty of people are doing that), but to lament the divisive spirit of our times.  I have heard him do this before, and it is usually not warmly greeted by either right or left, but it remains the right response to this age.

Let me bring it down a level, and speak of what I know better than state or federal politics, let me talk about church politics, because as the pastor of a church I know what it is like to lead a group of people who do not always agree.  I am also familiar with the dynamic that emerges when moral ideas come up for debate.  The reason why church arguments become infamously toxic is because they happen within a community that is supposed to be a united body.  To say that the United States was founded on Christian principles may not be entirely correct, but they did lift perhaps the most crucial principle of unity from the writings of the New Testament, particularly the pleas and entreaties of the Apostle Paul to the church to be of one mind, the mind that was in Christ Jesus. Even as Paul practically begged people to love each other as brothers and sisters, he also had to continually correct them and teach them that being different was not the problem, not loving each other was the problem.

So, even now, in the church, which has been learning these hard lessons for two thousand years instead of just over two hundred, we can still get wrapped up in partisan debates and start labeling those with whom we are supposed to be One Body, as enemies, heretics and apostates.

You could make a solid argument that, in fact, the church is in decline due to this failing.  Indeed, it may be on the way to dying.  But as Chesterton said, in The Everlasting Man, the church has died several times over the course of her history, but we serve a God who has managed to find his way out of the grave.  The dangerous thing for a nation/empire, is that God finds them exceedingly disposable.  The Church stands rooted in history and, despite my fears, I have faith that she will continue to stand, even if her form changes radically.  Our baby nation however, I am not so sanguine.

Over the past decades we have lost our rudder. We may be worse off than simply a house divided, we very well may have become a den of thieves.  Donald Trump is definitely a thief, he is a con man and a swindler at that, perhaps a worse sort of thief than even a common thug, because he brings into doubt the judgment of those whom he defrauds.  He has deliberately presented a "platform," if you can even call it that, which is entirely founded upon fear and division.  He clearly delineates the world into "good" people who support him and "love Trump," and evil people, who are "very unfair," any time they criticize him or even call him on what George Will colorfully named a "vesuvius of mendacity."

In my world, I have experienced the travails of trying to seek a middle way, to find a compromise on issues where there is stark disagreement.  You usually don't make anyone happy, and then you end up getting shot at from both flanks. I believe that we need leaders like Barack Obama and Larry Hogan (they can come from both sides), who recognize our commonweal is more important than winning whatever skirmish is happening at the moment.

The alternative is to move farther apart.  In a church argument, often times the pastor becomes a casualty of one wing or another, and usually that wing bullies their way to a position of power, then they pick the next pastor, who is more "like-minded."  In the process, the "losing" wing feels disenfranchised and often leaves or fades away.  This is not good for the whole body, because part of it is now missing, even if you win, you lose.

That is where we are as a nation, Trump has sold himself (fraudulently in my opinion) as a winner.  He perpetually panders to his base and has pretty much rejected any strategy of reaching out to his detractors.  His approval ratings hover in the low 40's which is where they were during the 2016 election and where they have steadfastly remained.  His sales pitch is still working on many of the people he duped, I mean convinced, in 2016. His success has precipitated a crop of Democrats who use his same tactics: get hit, hit back harder; they yell, you yell louder; they tweet, you tweet more.  While I am having a hard time getting on the Biden bandwagon, I now see the danger in my darling Bernie.  What I am hoping for in 2020 from the blue side is a return to normalcy.  I would like someone of character that is willing to stand on the middle ground, because I believe (maybe it's a vain hope) that the middle ground still exists.

So far, I do not see an Obama among the Dems, and I doubt Hogan is going to run a Quixotic primary campaign against the Donald, but we are still a long way from election day 2020.  In some ways I want it to get here faster, in others I am hoping that the arc of history has time to bend back towards e pluribus unum, before then.  This rudderless ship has been lucky so far, but I don't trust our luck that much longer.

Fourteen

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

-Wendell Berry, Sabbath 1998.VI

I keep telling myself that this will be the last year I do this.  I thought Ten years seemed like a nice round number, but I guess not.  July 23rd comes and with it thoughts that are beginning to seem like a well worn stone that I carry around in my pocket.  I thought perhaps I could leave it at the foot of Cruz de Ferro on the Camino, but I did not.  Sometimes I think I have laid it down or lost it, but I have not.  Sometimes I almost panic when I think it's gone, because it is all I really have left of my brother.

But it always comes back on this day, I can still remember the defeated sound of my father's voice when he said, "We lost Jonathan."  Tears still come when I think of that moment, the shock comes back again and again and again. Grief is that smooth stone.  The rough edges are gone, and it has become familiar and even comforting in a strange way.  Jesus did say, in his famously puzzling way, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."  At times it's hard to believe that, other times it seems like a truth that should be entirely self-evident.

This is why I know better than to ever assume I'm just going to "get over it." And it's why I try very hard to give others the space they need to grieve.  So much of our approach to stuff like this wants to rush in and help, to try and smooth out that stone quicker, but it's not possible, and it wouldn't be healthy even if it was.

I guess that's why I keep doing this year after year, because it's not for anyone but me.  If it helps someone else, so be it, but chances are it will not, their stone will be their stone, I can't give them mine, but I can tell them about mine.

Here's one of the last rough spots on my stone: this day the anniversary of Jon's passing, July 23.  It comes in the middle of the summer, when everyone and their brother is going on vacation, many of them are literally going with their brother.  People my age are usually teaming up with siblings to get a beach house or something like that.  I don't know for a fact that we would do that.  I don't know how broken or healed Jon would have been by the time he was pushing 40. It's the unanswerable nature of that question that jags me in the feels.  A wash of sentimentalism comes over me like a crashing wave.  I hear Bruce Springsteen's song Highway Patrolman, "Nothing feels better than blood on blood."

I don't know if you can understand that, I don't know if I'm adequately expressing what exactly plucks that heart-string.  Maybe I'm just whining at this point, after all I look at my daughter who was born less than a month after Jon died.  She's in high school now, her entire life happened in the wake of this disruption of our family.  My son has only pictures of his uncle holding him to even know that they met. In my better moments, I hope that this stone somehow makes me a better father to them, but I know that it has definitely cost them something too.  I have used it as an excuse not to do certain things, not to go certain places.  I have pointed to it's incontrovertible existence as a reason for many things, some good, some bad.  But sometimes I wonder if they really should have even known it existed from the time they were old enough to understand the word death.

These questions have no answers, and these ramblings have no end.

Still, I keep coming back to them on July 23.

Ripening

This is what the Lord God showed me - a basket of summer fruit.

-Amos 8:1

I don't much care for the stifling heat and humidity of summer, but I do love the produce: tomatoes that are actually red, zucchini the size of a baseball bat, sweet cherries, homegrown peppers, stuff that is locally grown and sold out of barn stalls and roadside stands.  But you know that stuff has a shelf life; it can go from good and ripe to rotten and moldy in a matter of hours.  I consider it to be a private little miracle when I manage to eat an avocado at exactly the right time, when it has just gotten a little soft, but not too soft, but it is a pretty tricky deal.

What I like about Amos' visions is that they are vivid without getting weird.  The plumb line and the basket of fruit, are pretty straightforward in their meaning, yet they pack enough of a visceral punch that you can't just breeze on by them. I think a lot about the plumb line, but lately I have been feeling like the basket of summer fruit, just on the verge of rotten, applies to a lot of what is going on in our nation. There are some people who seem to think it has gone past a point of rottenness, and others who think it may be fine.

In my family we have differing opinions about bananas.  My wife likes them on the green side, my daughter just a bit riper, and I like them when they start to show a little bit of brown.  None of us are wrong in our preference, and that, in normal times, is sort of what our political life amounts to, reasonable people on a spectrum between left and right, liberal and conservative, dovish to hawkish.  Much ink has been spilled over the fact that things "suddenly" seem to have gone rotten.  Now it seems someone one disagrees with has to be not only wrong but evil.

In my better moments, I want to believe that people who disagree with me are acting and thinking in good faith, even if what they say seems wrong, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have been trying really hard to do that for Donald Trump, but he is just not giving me much to work with.  His latest twaddle fest, where he tells certain un-named U.S. congresswomen to "go back where they came from," even though three of the suspected four were born here, just does not strike me as something that reasonable people can disagree upon.  It is racist, in fact it is one of the earliest brands of racist speech that I can remember, before I ever heard the N-word, I remember certain kids on the Elementary school playground telling a black kid to go back to Africa (the black kid was not surprisingly as much of an American as we were). I also remember teenagers on the street shouting at Hispanic men to go back to Mexico (very dangerous stuff if they happened to be Puerto Rican).

The racist tone of these taunts was never in question, even before I really knew what racism was, I knew these things were despicable.  So, even though I do indeed question Trumps judgment sometimes, I have to assume that he has at least the intellect that I possessed in the third grade.  He knows they are despicable and he has chosen, not just to say them, but to stand behind them, to belligerently re-iterate them.

Pundits have theorized that perhaps this is just some grand political scheme to make "The Squad," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Ihan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, the "face" of the Democratic party.  The theory goes that if Trump has to run against a moderate that doesn't inspire the hatred and fear of "middle America," whatever that means, he is doomed to be a one term President.  He is so desperate to avoid this, either for egotistical reasons or possibly to avoid criminal prosecution, that he is willing to wade into the cesspool of white nationalism and racial antagonism.  This is, frankly, the only explanation that gives Trump an excuse that does not make him a stone cold racist, but it makes him pretty much a moral failure all the same.

Look, in my youth I know that I, trying to fit in, engaged in some reprehensible talk with people who held racist, sexist, homophobic and any number of other abhorrent attitudes.  I know what it's like to feel like you need to "pander to the base."  I do not look back upon those times as proud moments.  I was a teenager, or younger, by the time I was 18, I had developed a firmer grip on what was good and righteous, now at almost 45 I can speak carefully and tactfully and without deliberately offending people if I choose.  Donald Trump is in his 70's, what is his excuse? Senility? Perhaps, but I think it's deeper than that, he may not, as he says, "have a racist bone in his body," but his tongue is not a bone, his brain is not a bone (well maybe it is ossified), and the muscles that guide his metacarpals over the twitter keyboard have been acting pretty damn racist.

More troubling than the single case of Donald Trump, is the rottenness that this reveals in our nation.  No, it didn't happen all at once, racism is in some very real ways an ingredient of who we are, but we don't have to let it be our primary flavor. We can grow up instead of rotting.  Or we could continue on the path we're on, but in that case I suggest you read Amos chapter 8 past verse one, see if you like the results.

Growing Pains

If you have not been reading David Brooks columns in the New York Times, I suggest you start.  He is, in my opinion, one of the people we most need in our culture right now: a conservative who has not either lost their mind or decided to hide until the current wave of maniacal tribalism subsides.  That Brooks (along with Michael Gerson, George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and a few others) often sounds like a progressive is merely a testimony to how off-center our public discourse has actually become.  Brook's column for today is not merely a commentary on the dominant headlines, but also a crucially useful history of the word Liberal.
In seminary, I was fortunate to have a Church history professor who had decided that the best way to teach history, particularly Church history, was as an evolution of ideas rather than just dates.  You can quickly look up the date of the Council of Nicea or the Diet of Worms and the names of those involved, but to understand the theological and philosophical assumptions that brought about those events is much more valuable.
Brooks does a good job of defining Liberalism, not just as a political point on a spectrum between left and right, but as an underlying assumption that is in fact responsible for much of what we count as human progress over the past thousand years. If you know your history of ideas, you know that Liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment, the age where humanity began to put reason and logic ahead of superstition and magical/mythical understanding.  The Enlightenment brought us out of the dark ages and into what is sometimes called the Modern world.  The Protestant Reformation was the religious child of the Enlightenment, only a Liberal mindset could have dared to challenge the nearly all-powerful Roman Catholic Church.  Martin Luther, John Calvin and their ilk had that deep sense of humility, which at times bordered on paralytic doubt, which kept them from truly wanting to be revolutionaries.  The reason those two particularly have become more commonly associated with the Reformation than say Ulrich Zwingli, is that they both thought that changing the church from within could ultimately be possible.  It took the Roman heresy trial and the attempt to kill Luther and it took Farel's emotional manipulation of Calvin for them to clearly become revolutionaries more than reformers.  Still they held on to the idea of reformation rather than destruction.
Conservatives/reactionaries prefer the status quo or even a regressive movement towards a past they thought more ideal.  Radicals/progressives want the utter inversion of a revolution where the low places are lifted up and the mountains are brought low.  Liberals, as Brooks explains so well, want the existing system to work at its best; if that requires change they lean towards the left, if that requires stability they lean to the right.  Thus they are frustrating to both left and right, because they seem to waffle and prefer to work for incremental, slow and steady change, and are not afraid of compromise or taking a few steps back.
Liberalism obviously has its own set of weaknesses, and those weaknesses have been on full display of late.  Around the world we seem to be pulled towards illiberal regimes.  Figures like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are representative of Liberalism.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were also representative of Liberalism, a fact which eludes many who have come to see the word as a synonym for left-leaning.  Reagan and Thatcher operated in a world where the assumptions of Liberalism were fully in tact and thus were able to engage their right leaning agendas in a very effective way, both of them would be absolutely awash in the current milieu, even though they played a large role in creating what exists now.
What exists now is not healthy, it is essentially the adolescence of what we call Postmodern thinking.  Remember that Liberalism and Modern thought are inherently linked, you can't have one without the other.  Postmodern thought therefore is also in some sense Post-liberal, but obviously this new age has not yet grown up, the tantrums and fits of extremism are symptoms of that, as are the sullen pouts and whining about things not being fair.  Can you tell I live with two teenagers?
One hopes that the Trump era, like the teenage years, ends without irrevocable damage to the psyche of this nation.  In Freudian terms, what we are seeing is the ascendancy of the Id, mercenary lying to suit any purpose, political hedonism, actual hedonism, lack of moral direction, raw self interest, profound narcissism, all things that one associates with adolescence. The Super-ego, that mature part of the psyche that hopefully takes charge in a mature adult, is basically a skinny nerd that the Id easily shoves into a locker at the current moment.  Right now that Liberalism that has been the Super-ego of the world for centuries, now sounds like Jiminy Cricket or a nagging mother, or a Father who says, "of course life isn't fair, nobody ever said life would be fair."
For all the rowdy, Id-dominated chaos of Twitter, it is good to be able to read actual professionally vetted journalists.  I appreciate the Liberal institution of Newspapers (even though I read them mostly on line), more now than I ever have in my life. I really do hope and pray that they survive, they may be our best hope of growing out of this.

Twaddler = Twitter

When at last the right one comes along, to set fire to this wilderness that is the asylum of all twaddle, all illusions, all clever tricks, he will, no doubt, already find there before him a company of twaddlers - a crowd.

***

Everything depends upon getting rid of the crowd, for all the crowd does with its hearty sympathy is to eradicate the real seriousness from the cause.

-Soren Kierkegaard, What Says the Fire Chief? (from Attack Upon Christendom)

Sometimes a stupid, inane thing clarifies something rather serious.  In the past week that stupid, inane thing was a mermaid, specifically a "Little Mermaid."  In the vast world of entertainment, where there is so much money to be made from the direly under-engaged and over-stimulated, the giant media corporations have determined that re-making old properties rather than taking risks on new things is a sure bank account booster.  That's why they're just doing old movies over again, that's why they can release a Marvel universe movie every three months and still make major cash, that's why Star Wars is still the biggest deal out there, even though most of us true believers have had to drastically adjust our expectations downward to avoid being angrily disappointed.

But this state of the entertainment industry is not my point, my point is that, in Disney's upcoming remake of the Little Mermaid, Ariel is going to be black.  My first reaction to that was... never mind, I didn't really have a first reaction to that, because I didn't know it was a thing, because my daughter has sort of outgrown Disney-princesses and because our family has thankfully graduated to movies where the characters use profanity (not saying that's great, it's just a step you take in life).  What I became aware of first was that there was a "backlash," maybe... sort of... well at least someone imagined that there was.  I mean there was a hashtag: #notmymermaid, so these days that means there must be something real right?

Question though, do you know anyone who is really, honestly upset by a re-rendering of a classic character as a different race? I bet if you do, it's more of a, "why did they have to do this at all?" sort of puzzlement.  That's sort of what I feel about the re-boot of Ghostbusters, it bothers me not at all that they made the 'busters female, I just wonder why they had to remake that movie at all.  The original had Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver and was already about as perfect as you could make such a ridiculous film.  Thus I think, as one who came on the scene of a "fire" already in progress, a lot of the people who were upset about a remake of The Little Mermaid, seemed to be in that boat.

But the Twitter-verse did not take it that way, oh, not at all.  This cause was immediately taken up by the most virulent twaddlers (thank you Soren, I am going to add that old word back into my vocabulary) on both the left and the right.  The racists on the right never seem to need much ammunition to add to their arsenal of cultural grievances.  This was clearly an attempt by the liberal elites in Hollywood to erase the white race from yet another beloved cultural institution: an animated movie about singing fish.  On the left the thought police were in full swing: "how dare you be angry about the attempt to simply increase the representation of brown people in media, you horrible racists you!"

Like Kierkegaard's hypothetical fire chief, I began to consider that perhaps the "crowd" really is the problem here.  Is our country "haunted" by racism? Yes, it is.  Do we have a long way to go before we reach true equality in thought as well as law? Yes, we do.  But I was really trying to figure out who was actually upset by a black mermaid, and as far as I can tell, it was all pretty much secondary outrage.  Someone, maybe what the old timers called a muckraker, tweets something critical of the idea and because Twitter is what Twitter does, the twaddle commences in earnest, and the flames get higher and higher.

I am trying not to be a cranky old man about these social media things, I understand that they do a lot of good, but they're also becoming increasingly toxic, and leaving all of us with a sour taste in our mouth.  The immediacy and reach of Twitter especially allows every little spark to become a full blown structure fire, and we don't have the ability to sort out what is really dangerous and what is just twaddle.  By the way, I'm going to post this on Twitter, but I'm not using the hashtag, because I don't want to get too close to the flame.