Shame

No multimedia today, just words, one word really: shame. If you watch Game of Thrones, you will have a distinct visual image to go with this word, but it's an image I will not put on this page, because it's R-rated.  There is a scene where Cersei Lannister is compelled to make a walk of penitence from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep through the streets of King's Landing. Her hair has been cut off, her clothes taken and she must walk through the crowd of people who hate her and throw filth at her, while a Septa (a nun-like character) rings a bell and shouts, "Shame."
If you don't watch the show, you need to know that Cersei is not a good person, she is conniving and power-hungry and really someone that you generally hope gets what's coming to her.  Except, somehow, when this happens to her, I actually did not feel any sense of justice.  It's weird really, because the whole sequence didn't really change Cersei for the better. In fact, if anything, it made her harder and more spiteful than ever.  But for a moment I did actually feel bad for her, maybe because the visuals were so striking, but also because, I think, shame is such a deep, dark human emotion, that there is very little in a fictional tale or in reality that can make you detach from it, unless you are an actual sociopath.
Most of us have at least one powerful experience of Shame in our lives, some folks practically live there, and all of us pretty regularly experience Shame's nicer little sister, Embarrassment, on a pretty regular basis.  This, I think, is the reason it becomes such a powerful motivator in our behavior, and for the most part, does not really need explanation. Shame is the shadow of pride, the more proud of something you are the greater your shame will be should that pride fall.  For instance, I feel no shame when I lose a footrace, because I  have never been fast, I do not aspire to be fleet of foot, and the fact of the matter is that life requires very little actual running of me.  If someone is faster than me it is not a source of shame, because I have not pride about that particular aspect.  However, if I am proven to be ignorant of something I feel I should know: shame.  If I am negligent in my duties in life: shame.
Which brings me to the point, the thing that I think we should all feel some shame about in the world today: kindness.  Not entirely abandoning the Sci-fi theme from yesterday there was a sequence in the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor is about to regenerate and he is trying to give advice to the next iteration of himself.  If I were able to do such a thing, I would like to give myself and pretty much anybody who cares to listen the same advice:

Always try to be nice, but never, ever fail to be kind.

It's writing like of that sort that I really hope the new folks taking over the Doctor Who franchise manage to hold on to.  You don't always have to be nice, sometimes you can't, you're cranky, you're afraid, you're just plain tired, maybe someone just doesn't deserve niceness, but they always deserve kindness.  That is what I think explained the strange incongruity of emotions I felt about Cersei's walk of shame, it wasn't kind.  She didn't really deserve nice, she really is a pretty unrepentant character, but the blatant imposition of shame seemed too far, and in the end, it proved more dangerous than kindness would have been.
I worry that, in many areas of life, religion perhaps most of all, we have been too free with the shame.  We shame people for being poor, we shame people for how they look, we shame people for what they do to make a living, we shame people for their personal sins, we shame people for simply being human. We shame people and we claim that we're doing it, "for their own good."
I have seen people with a veneer of nice, impose shame like that bell ringing Septa and those filth flinging peasants.  You can be "nice" and use shame as a weapon, but you cannot be kind and do so.  Kindness recognizes that shame will happen without assistance in most cases, and when it does offers a hand of solidarity or, better yet, a glimmer of grace.
I would like very much to live in a world where I am ashamed of fewer things, and that involves working to make things different.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my culture treats people like things, so I will act in a way that affirms human dignity.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my church fails to be Christlike, so I will work every day to be more loving and forgiving.  I don't want to be ashamed by failing to be kind, especially on those days when I just can't muster nice.  I know most often, my kindness fails when I think something is unjust, and on those occasions when I am correct about the injustice, I need to search earnestly for the way to apply kindness to that injustice.
Not always an easy mark to hit, but one worth trying for.

New Years Eve

I've never been much for New Year's resolutions.  I don't really have the willpower for them, and I know it. I do sort of like to look back on the past year and try to learn something or other though. This past year seems like it has contained its share of hard lessons, the first of which is:

And carry a towel if you really want to be sure of preparedness. This time last year, I had a major case of the fear about what 2017 might hold.  This year, while I'm not at all happy about the state of things, I guess the unknown and the things you can make up for yourself to worry about are always mostly worse than what actually goes down. Worrying about the future is one of the most futile ways to occupy your time and it is pretty much a total drain on your emotional reserves.  We all do it, and I don't know anyone who feels like it is a good way to live.  Bad stuff is going to happen, and pretending that it won't will not help at all, but when it does you're going to need all your resources (towels included) to deal with it adequately.
This time last year, I was hoping against hope that a good friend of mine would be able to beat cancer.  He didn't, and I needed to figure out how to deal with that reality.  This time last year, I thought maybe Trump would get us into a war of some sort. He didn't, in fact most of the most dire fears I had about what was going to happen to us as a nation have not materialized. I'm still regularly embarrassed by what he says and dismayed by what he does, but I have decided that I really need to settle down and deal with the reality of the situation rather than what I think might happen because of the decisions made by people I have absolutely no control over.  In other words, I need to heed the words of a wise teacher:

Fear is the path to the Dark Side.

Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate,

Hate leads to suffering.

Since I appear to be rolling with a sci-fi themed New Years, how could I leave out the Bene-Gessarit litany against fear:

I must not fear,

Fear is the mind killer.

Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear,

I will permit it to pass over me,

and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

None of this is really a resolution, just things that I have needed to learn, or re-learn.  I'm putting them down, with pictures, so that some time I can remember what it was I probably shouldn't have forgotten.

Now for something actually important

I just realized that I haven't even written anything about The Last Jedi, I have been so busy with all kinds of serious grown up stuff that I neglected something really important: YODA.  Sorry, before you read any further, if you haven't seen the movie (SPOILER ALERT), I'm going to talk about stuff that happens in the movie that will really be better if you just experience first hand.
So last things first, I understand why some people are upset with this movie. There has been the usual interweb backlash against this thing or that thing and I agree there are some things about the movie that could have been done better, or more specifically, not done at all.  BIG THING that should not have been done: Princess Leia force gliding her way through the icy vacuum of space to basically spend most of the movie in a med-stasis tube.  We all know Carrie Fisher is a glowing force ghost in real life, so why not make her exit the film world too?  She died not long after filming wrapped, they could have given Leia a dignified exit and worked the rest of the story some other way, it would have made so much sense and would have avoided what is probably going to be an off screen death or worse a CGI death.  I'm pretty sure Carrie would have chosen to go out with a blast if they were able to ask her.
Second, less big thing that maybe shouldn't have been done: the entire Finn story line until the reunion with Rey, which was really touching. There is only one reason why Finn and Rose needed to go try and find the master hacker on the casino world, which they don't do and only end up finding a guy who betrays them to the First Order, and that is to introduce DJ, the character played by Benicio Del Toro, who is part and parcel of setting up the whole moral punch of the movie.  DJ gives Finn repeated lessons about how there are no "good guys" and that the galaxy far far away is every bit as morally ambivalent as our own.  I think they could have worked that into the plot without what amounts to a rather lengthy chase on cat-horse things and some scenes that look like Vegas crashed into Mos Eisley.
The third thing that really could have not happened, at least according to my daughter, is that Kylo Ren really didn't need to be as naked as he was in that one scene, but hey that's just a 12 year old's aesthetic critique.
What was done well was a connection with the themes that really made episodes IV through VI great.  People have critiqued the fact that The Force Awakens was essentially a total rip off of A New Hope and it was, but in a good way that is trying to advance the story past Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  In the second movie of this trilogy, Episode VIII, we have the connections being made to Return of the Jedi: the conversations between Ghost Yoda and Luke, the conversations between Grumpy Luke and Rey, the conversations between Kylo and Rey, they are all offering us evolution of the plot line about balance in the force.  There is enough sameness in the sequence of events to really see how The Last Jedi essentially leaves us at the same spot, story-wise that VI left us.  Snoke, as it turned out, was a giant skeletal red herring, which bummed out a lot of Geeks who had spent considerable time and effort inventing theories about his identity.  But Kylo managed to dispatch his Sith master a lot more cleanly than Vader did with Palpatine.  Kylo Ren evolved in this movie from whiny little punk to pretty serious bad guy in a way that makes me optimistic for where they're going with this arc.
By the end of The Force Awakens, I was quite frankly glad that Rey managed to slice Kylo up, so I didn't have to hear any more about his daddy issues.  By the end of The Last Jedi, I am so ready to see more Kylo.  Also, Rey is no longer the wide-eyed, over-matched orphan kid, and she is a character that is not at all governed by her origin story, which I think is a great direction to head with this.  The prequel trilogy gave me more than a stomachful of ancient prophecies about the chosen one and fulfilling destiny.  I'm liking that this movie basically established a good breaking point from all that sort of stuff and leaves Rey and Kylo, Finn, Poe and Rose free to tell a good story going forward.
The Yoda sighting proves that they will be credibly able to bring Luke and Yoda back at certain opportune moments to provide guidance from beyond.
Near the beginning of the movie, when Rey is trying to convince Luke that the rebellion needs him, he says something like, "what do you expect me to do, charge to the rescue swinging a laser sword?" I was personally glad that he didn't take up that challenge, it provides credibility to his character and honestly sets up what he actually did do in the end.  Honestly, I was afraid that they were going to turn these new movies into nostalgic retirement tours for the original cast, despite the fact that I knew Hamill, Ford and Fisher really didn't want to do it that way.  The new characters give me hope and a sense that they might take this thing in a direction that won't be so dead locked in to a known conclusion.  After all, wasn't it the big secret, that Vader was Anakin, that made Empire Strikes Back  the best of the movies?  I was personally glad that Rey's lineage is not apparently going to be the central plot point of these movies.  Do something new! No we can have new secrets and things to find out.
All of the homage points and scene parallels provide strong enough contacts with what was, we get it, but I'm 43 years old now, my son is older than I was when I started with these movies, I'm really hoping we can grow up a little at this point.

The Angry States of America

There is a lot of anger going around right now.  I felt it this morning when I read the front page description in the Washington Post of the self congratulations that took place on the White House lawn yesterday. The way that a bunch of politicians were now kissing up to Trump and calling him an exceptional leader because they got their "dream" of tax reform through the legislature without doing anything that could be remotely called legislating, well it kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I generally agree with this George Will Column from this morning (please note for the record that George Will is a fairly conservative chap), that the tax bill is not really of such terrible significance, and that it is rife with flawed assumptions and that its hasty passage is an egregious violation of the principles of our government.  But it is not the end of the world, it is simply Washington D.C. showing us, fairly clearly, where its priorities are: with the corporations.  By all accounts corporations are the only real and permanent winners in this deal.  That seems to be the only thing that experts from all over seem to agree on.  The reality that corporations run the world is not new, or surprising to anyone who has bothered to pay attention.
What makes me nauseous is the smug pretense of politicians who think we're buying their propaganda.  They're not on our side, none of them, they just proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they think a couple thousand bucks a year is enough to buy us off.  Maybe it is, we've all got a price, and mostly it is lower than we would like to imagine.
Those stuffed suits up the road are missing something fairly critical in our world right now: we are a bunch of angry folks.  The Democrats ignored it to their peril for the past eight years and hung on to a vision of hope and change.  They talked about national unity and rising to the challenges that face us, and it got them booted from their majority in congress and left them hanging on to Barack Obama as their only hope.  But their hope came with a term limit.  The GOP, rather than ignoring the anger, decided (foolishly methinks) to try and harness it and ride it into power.  The Tea Party was the early incarnation, and Trump is also a symptom.  Many people voted for Trump as thumb in the eye of the establishment on both sides of the aisle, he is a repudiation of both the Clinton machine and the Old Guard of the GOP.  Naive people felt like D.C. would pull him in and make him be presidential and responsible.  His Twitter feed demonstrates that is a false doctrine.  This tax plan, if not for its content then certainly for its process, is a Golem of hasty and incompetent legislation.  It is what you get when you are just trying to appease the reptilian brains of your donor class, and the monstrous ego of Donald J Trump, who really needed to start winning something.
It will not do what they think it will do, and people know it, and it's making the anger worse.  We are just so very angry at things, and I wish I didn't have to include myself in this diagnosis, because I know it's unhealthy.  I preached a sermon last Sunday to a handful of people at our early service (it was Cantata week) where I talked about the three I's that are symptoms of our problems.  I was talking about the church, but as the week has gone on I think this applies to our society on a broader scale.  The I's are: Irritability, Irrationality and Irrelevance.  They are linked together and one feeds into the others.  In the church the I of Irrelevance is probably a little more clear than in the world in general, but it has to do with the fact that we just aren't what we used to be, we are being out-competed by other stuff.  The Church used to be the center of most communities, it wielded significant authority and formed the core of the social structure, not so much anymore. We now sort of get the leftovers after all the other stuff is taken care of, and that makes us irritable, because we used to occupy such a high station.  I think that the anger of people in this country is motivated by similar feelings related to the loss of high station, the particular thing they feel they have lost may differ from person to person, because there are a lot of privileges on the list that we are losing: whiteness, maleness, "christianity," heterosexuality, cis-gender identity, middle class, working class, traditional family structure, educational status, professional esteem, and the list really goes on and on.  I'm not criticizing people for feeling angst about losing these privileges, losing things makes you irritable, even if it's just misplacing your car keys, I just feel like maybe we are in danger of harming ourselves and others, in other words we have become irrational. That's what happens a lot when people have anger at things that are far beyond their control. But technically, and maybe it is only technically, this stuff should not be beyond our control, we have been given the gift of living in a democratic republic, where we have a voice, maybe it's time to stop shouting in futility and actually do something.
We really need to get serious about taking our Democracy back from these oligarchs that have gotten a hold of it, and I'm talking about on both sides of the aisle.  Maybe it's even time to break the two party stranglehold.  Most other advanced nations have more than two viable parties, maybe we need to shoot the donkey and the elephant and move on. Hysteria is not going to help, party loyalty definitely isn't going to help.  We need to start channeling our anger into something besides impotent rage at the man like a bunch of high school seniors giving the finger to their principle on the last day of school.  That's going to mean looking beyond the self-involvement and self-interest that adolescents are so very good at.  We're going to have to recover the nature of politics as the practice of serving the people, all the people, not just your constituencies or your donors.  I know it's a big job, but if we don't do it anger is going to eat us alive.

Of Containers

Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, 

did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, 

whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying,

 "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

-2 Samuel 7: 7

This is from one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for this Sunday.  It will probably be like the chubby kid when sides are picked for dodge ball and not get chosen.  I'm certainly not going to turn aside from Angels and Shepherds and Mary pondering things in her heart to preach about Nathan and David having a bad idea.  That's why I have this blog right?

For those of you not familiar with the context of this story, David has the bright idea, after he is all settled in his nice palace, to actually build a temple for God, where they will keep the Ark of the Covenant (yes that Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie) and where all the people can come and visit the courts of the Most High God.  David tells Nathan and Nathan thinks it's a super cool idea too, so they're about to go through with it, when God comes to Nathan in a dream and says essentially, "Boy, you two done lost your minds!" 

See, God never asked for a temple, he never really even needed a tent, people tend to feel better about their relationship with God if they have nice buildings where they can meet up.  Temples and tabernacles are like that coffee shop on Friends, where you can be sure that someone will be there.  If you think about it though, it's a silly idea at best, that God would somehow be that localized of a phenomenon.  It's also highly derivative of pagan practices where shrines were built and deities had tremendously specific powers, desires and locations.  The second scroll of Samuel records this story of David and Nathan having their minds changed, but it goes on to allow for the Temple anyway, just it has to be Solomon that builds the thing.  It's one of those places where the Bible is definitely shown to be very much a human document that reflects the understanding of a specific people who were very much culturally and geographically bound to their own way of seeing and understanding God.

A lot of the Hebrew Scriptures work under the presupposition that trying to contain God is a foolhardy enterprise.  From one of the oldest texts, Job, we find God speaking out of a whirlwind and challenging Job to man up and defend the idea that God should somehow justify God's actions to a regular mortal person. Job, confronted with the presence of God, realizes the arrogance of his presumption and repents in dust and ashes.  Moses deals with the reality that the presence of God often makes his life very, very difficult, likewise Elijah and most of the Prophets.  One of the most fundamental mistakes of human beings in these stories, from Abraham, to Moses, to David and pretty much everyone else is to try and make God in your own image, rather than the other way around.

God resists that impulse with the fire of thousand suns.

It doesn't matter how good and beautiful your container is, God will not fit inside of it.  Which is why I always get this sort of strange feeling around this time of year, like I'm a man without a country.  I can't really abide the sweet, sentimental visions of the Christmas story.  Partly because I'm well aware of the darkness that surrounds the light. The world that Jesus was born into was a hard place and his life was vulnerable and in danger before he was even born.  Herod, Caesar, even the respectability of Joseph and Mary's families, are all threats to Jesus ever even drawing breath.

But there is another reason as well, and that reason has to do with the very stories themselves.  It sort of starts with the fact that the Gospels of Mark and John don't really even talk about Jesus' birth at all, and it is at least partly informed by our remarkable talent for idolatry.  These stories open up the truth of the incarnation to attacks from those whose hermeneutics and epistemology seem aimed at proving the Christ to be just another mythological creation or a theological mirage.  There is something about the nature of these stories that is dangerous to us.  You can read all sorts of analyses that "prove" that these birth narratives are really just ripping off the cult of Mithras or something along those lines.  When I read this sort of thing, I understand why God told David and Nathan to cease and desist.  The container will not hold.

What I have come to realize though is that the stories are not the problem, it is our tendency to want them to be rigid and ironclad historical accounts that is the problem.  The birth of Jesus stories, like the Creation accounts in Genesis are really touching and beautiful things, full of mystery and wonder, full of human fragility and God's majesty intimately connected, one to the other.  Embracing this mystery and letting God be free to be wherever God is, rather than trying to lock God up in your special little temple, is the essence of the story.  Jesus is born in an unexpected place, to people who aren't important in any worldly sense.

It is actually our authoritarian and idolatrous impulses that create the very slippery slope that many folks decry.  The argument goes that if you start to pick and choose what parts of the Scripture you believe, sooner or later you won't believe any of it.  I would say that it is rather important to go beyond simply believing or disbelieving and actually get into a living relationship with Scripture.  The people who are least able to actually do this are people who insist on everything fitting neatly inside the lines of what they think they know. Life is messy.  Human life is profoundly messy.

At the end of Luke 2, after the good Doctor has given us all the stories about shepherds and angels and then told us about Simeon and Anna with their visions and oracles, then told of the time that the boy Jesus gave his parents a terrible fright by disappearing only to turn up the temple, in other words, most of the material that we know and celebrate during Advent and Christmas, and which is not well corroborated by history or even other Gospels, it says that "His Mother (Mary) treasured all of these things in her heart."

Some seize on that to mean that Mary was actually the source for Luke's accounts, and that very well might be, but it seems to me that the more important thing about these stories is that they are valued and loved (treasured) for all their mystery and their messiness.  Don't make that old mistake over and over again.  God does not need you to build him walls of cedar or anything else. The Scripture tells us that the goal is for the dwelling place of God to be with us and us with him, Jesus shows us how possible that is, it's a shame that we so easily forget it and try to build the stupid temple anyway.

Comparison

I am enough of a cynic to generally distrust a lot of what I hear and read.  Part of what has been so distressing over the past year or so has been the way that truth has been utterly beggared in our common discourse. I am not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when politicians did not lie or distort the truth, and I understand that reasonable people can sincerely disagree as to what the truth is, but I have to say, when I read this piece in the NY Times this morning I was surprised.
That Donald Trump is perhaps a pathological liar does not surprise me, the sheer scope of it was what was shocking. Politicians all play fast and loose with the truth, even ones you admire don't always tell it like it is.  Fact checking and the virtual verbatim record of who says what has been in full effect for nearly a decade, thus the journalists behind this article have solid ground for comparing Trump and Obama.  You probably know that I am an admirer of Barack Obama, and you probably also know that I am deeply ashamed of the fact that Donald Trump sits in the oval office.  But, even as a fan of Obama, I knew there were times where he must have deliberately lied or where he spun things in a way that was politically expedient.  I get that, there's no way you get elected to a public office without learning to play politics and there must be a certain amount of moral equivocation and flexibility that comes with holding public office.  I assume that all politicians lie to us, but I also observe that this lying is sort of in the same vein as the lies of advertisers and marketers, it's salesmanship, it's part of the game; caveat emptor. What Trump is doing goes so far beyond the pale that we may have trouble keeping our grounding in the safe territory of sanity and reason.
I recommend reading the Times piece in it's entirety and noticing, especially that they have actually been rather kind to DJT, they have not counted a lot of the salesman type lies that he has told, they forgive him imprecise use of numbers, and things that are simply misleading rather than outright falsehoods.  That latter category is where a lot of politicians and advertisers make their living after all.  But after reading the whole thing, do this, go back and find the side by side column of Obama's lies and falsehoods, committed over the course of a whole eight years, next to Trump's first year.  You don't even have to read them all.  Just scroll down and notice how far you have to scroll after the Obama side has gone blank.
Trump voters have told me that they like him because he "tells it like it is." This is a pretty solid piece of journalism that indicates that assumption is not, in fact, true, or anything like true.  I knew it was bad, I just didn't know it was this bad.  Also worthy of note, is the observation that both Obama, and George W. Bush, when they did tell lies or falsehoods, which were revealed as such, modified their later speech to stop telling those lies.  Trump just keeps repeating demonstrably false ideas, again they were kind and did not include repetitive prevarication.
The mendacity of our current President actually makes me nostalgic for the George W. Bush years, at least he eventually admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Trump would be bragging about how many they found.
Look, I understand if your political perspective is different from mine.  I get that we might disagree about the effectiveness of corporate tax cuts, or the relative merits of single payer healthcare, or even what sorts of gun control measures ought to be instituted, but there is a fundamental attack that is not just about our political system or the liberal/conservative tug of war, it is about our connection to the truth.  In a monarchy or a dictatorship, truth is what the leader says it is, but in a democracy truth needs to be a more sacred ideal.  Our democracy particularly has been built with safeguards against tyranny, even tyranny by a duly constituted majority, certainly against tyranny by a despot.  The truth, self evident truths you might say, are the foundation of our whole system.
To support someone who despises the truth so thoroughly, even if you agree with some or all of his agenda, is utilitarian ethics of the basest sort.  The Dems made that deal with Bill Clinton and it has hamstrung them for nearly 20 years.  One of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," which is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "Thou shalt not lie."  But Trump has actually managed to transgress bountifully upon both sides of that semantic division. Not only that but he has sucked a good number of other people right into the bog of eternal stench along with him.
Everyone crosses the border into untruth from time to time, but Trump, unlike most of us, seems to have decided to set up shop and probably has plans to build a golf resort there sometime soon.

Sanity

Alabama, you've got the weight on your shoulders that's breaking your back,

Your Cadillac, has got a wheel in the ditch, and a wheel on the track.

-Neil Young, Alabama

I've heard Mr. Young sing about her,

I've heard old Neil put her down.

But I hope Neil Young will remember,

A southern man don't need him around anyhow.

-Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama

Yesterday, the people of Alabama had a choice.  Were they going to be the people that Neil Young criticized, or were they going to be the people that Lynyrd Skynyrd defended.  Honestly I'll take Neil Young over Skynyrd just about any day, but this morning I'm feeling pretty glad that Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama showed up at the polls yesterday.  I understand that this does not mean that Alabama is suddenly going to go blue.  Doug Jones is the only Democrat to win in Alabama in decades, and he may be the only one to win for decades to come.  The election that just ended was more about people saying no to Roy Moore than it was about them saying yes to Jones.  In that way it is sort of similar to the way that last year's race was about people saying no to Hillary Clinton and all that she represents than it was about people really being in love with Trump.

That is where we are at this moment though, we are shaping up into a nation of what one of my Western PA friends called "Aginners," people who were "agin this, and agin that." "Agin," in Appalachia speak means against.  Neil Young's critique of Alabama and the South in general was based on his observation of deep seeded racism and white resentment (because apparently those things didn't appear last year).  While Neil was not unsympathetic: 

Oh, oh Alabama, can I see you and shake your hand?

Make friends down in Alabama,

I'm from a new land, I come to you and,

See all this ruin, what are you doing?

He was decidedly negative in tone. Skynyrd, by comparison, was perhaps naively sentimental about their Sweet Home, they knew something about the character of their homeland that Neil never would.  What they knew was that the idea of Alabama was sacred to people who live there.  While the rest of the country uses Alabama as a punchline to their jokes about rednecks and backwardness, Alabama holds on to its skies so blue and its government true.

I'm hoping that some day soon we will all be able to start being proud of our Sweet Home instead of just constantly having to cry out like banjos playing through the broken glass windows.  I think where we are as a nation is that we do have a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.  Stopping Roy Moore, who was such a conglomeration of negative stereotypes about the south that he would have been unbelievable as a fictional character in novel, was crucial to keeping a wheel on the track, especially for Republicans.

Losing one seat now, is nothing compared to the carnage that would have happened in all those northern rust belt states that brought us President Trump, if Democrats could have put clips of him waving his little pocket pistol and talking about antebellum slavery as the good old days.  Whether or not the GOP takes this defeat as the actual gift that it is and tries to end their nosedive into absurdity remains to be seen, but the common sense and decorum of the Alabamian people has given them a few more months to give it a shot.

Democrats on the other hand, shouldn't get too swell headed about all of this.  Doug Jones is not exactly a paradigm they should follow, but he does demonstrate some necessary truths about politics in the age of social media.  First of all, don't try to be a strict party platform candidate.  Jones toed the party line on civil rights and reproductive choice, but he is also a gun owner and a rule of law former prosecutor.  If the Dems want to compete in red states they're going to need to get a little more Sweet Home Alabama and a lot less New York City elite.  And second of all, the thing Doug Jones did better than a lot of Democrats (especially Hillary Clinton) is avoid self inflicted wounds.  He observed that Roy Moore was growing increasingly unpopular for just being Roy Moore, and he stood back and let it happen.  He didn't so much attack as he simply stood up and said we can do better than that, he didn't dwell on the negative problems of his state, he sung about skies so blue, which honestly is what everyone wants to hear about their sweet homes.

It's easy to get sucked into the swamp of negativity that dominates in politics, because that swamp is about real stuff, important issues, critical policies.  As much as pundits want to shovel the blame for that negativity at the door of Donald Trump, honestly, he didn't make it up.  He makes plenty of of stuff up, but the way that he seized upon the zeitgeist of middle America and the deep south should not be written off as fiction. People are tired of "Aginners," and my hope is that we are beginning to see through the facades of both left and right.  Alabama doesn't have a great reputation for leading in a positive direction, but they may be the first state to give us, as a country, the sanity that we so desperately need.  You might even see this moment as turning of the tide of tribal politics (I think you know where I'm going with this, Lord help me).  If Roy Moore was that stinking, rotting bottom detritus that we had to see at the low ebb, so be it.  Let's hope the tide keeps rolling in.  Roll Tide (I'm very sorry for that, I just couldn't resist).