There is, as Washington Posthack Dana Milbank remarks (via, h/t to Doonesbury's Daily Briefing) with unseemly Schadenfreude, "something exquisite about the moment when a conservative decides he needs more government in his life." Which doesn't mean I don't share his Schadenfreude, as:
About an hour later [after Senator David Vitter, R-La. called for Big Government to help clean up the oil spill rather than require the Private Sector to clean up after itself] came word from the Pentagon that Alabama, Florida and Mississippi -- all three governed by men who once considered themselves limited-government conservatives -- want the federal government to mobilize (at taxpayer expense, of course) more National Guard troops to aid in the cleanup.
That followed an earlier request by the small-government governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal (R), who issued a statement saying he had called the Obama administration "to outline the state's needs" and to ask "for additional resources." Said Jindal: "These resources are critical."
These would be reasonable requests if they weren't coming from vocal opponents of Big Brother's terroristic interference with ordinary citizens' lives. As Milbank goes on to point out:
It may have taken an ecological disaster, but the gulf-state conservatives' newfound respect for the powers and purse of the federal government is a timely reminder for them. As conservatives in Washington complain about excessive federal spending, the ones who would suffer the most from spending cuts are their own constituents.
An analysis of data from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation by Washington Post database specialist Dan Keating found that people in states that voted Republican were by far the biggest beneficiaries of federal spending. In states that voted strongly Republican, people received an average of $1.50 back from the federal government for every dollar they paid in federal taxes. In moderately Republican states, the amount was $1.19. In moderately Democratic states, people received on average of 99 cents in federal funds for each dollar they paid in taxes. In strongly Democratic states, people got back just 86 cents on the tax dollar.
That's nothing new, of course. Opponents of big government usually have their hands deep in the taxpayers' pockets. And that "newfound respect for the powers and purse of the federal government" will disappear down the memory hole as soon as right-wing pols go on the campaign trail, which means next week.
And Teabag Nation, where are they? I want to see them get out there and denounce Jindal, Vitter, and the other hypocritical Republicans-in-Name-Only who want the socialist (or fascist, depending on which day of the week it is) Obama to send National Guard troops in to suppress the freedom-loving people of Alabama, and government money from their pockets to help Big Oil. But I doubt it very much. As shown by their general allegiance to Social Security and Medicare (for themselves), they're quite willing to ignore Ronald Reagan's infamous quip about government help when it suits them. (The blogger who endorsed Reagan's quote seems mainly concerned about how the oil spill will affect his god-given right to eat his favorite foods.) Government helps those who help themselves to the contents of the Treasury, especially Republicans.
One thing I wondered about but didn't try to fit into my earlier post was how Marilynne Robinson felt about Barack Obama. I suppose I could have predicted that she'd be a fan -- indeed, she's "passionate" about Obama, and donated $1000 to his election campaign.
When the conversation veers toward President Barack Obama, another Midwesterner recently relocated to the East coast, Robinson leans forward like a slightly giddy teenager. She praises the president for "riding a wave of interest in public speaking—the oldest tradition in American life." The admiration, it turns out, is mutual. "He has a Facebook thing," she says—quickly adding that it was her students who found the page online, not her. Sure enough, Obama's personal page on the social network lists Robinson's novel Gilead as one of his "Favorite Books," alongside the Bible and Lincoln's Collected Writings.
Ah, public speaking, the oldest tradition in American life, and just as prone to hucksterism as public writing. I did some searching but couldn't find anything more substantial than this remark, and this was the only comment I could find on President, rather than Candidate Obama; during the campaign she was mainly tooting Iowa's horn, for defying stereotypes about the Midwest and supporting a black candidate. Robinson's enthusiasm for Obama seems to be merely formal. But the trouble with George W. Bush was not that he was a poor public speaker, though it wouldn't surprise me if that was a major complaint of Robinson's. I can't speak about all her writing, but she seems to be more concerned about form than content.
Take this famous exchange.
I remember watching the Bentsen/Quayle debate at the time, and part of me loved Lloyd Bentsen -- or more precisely, I loved his performance. The benign grandfatherly manner. The way he actually seemed to be listening to Quayle's babbling, smiling ruefully, making notes to himself, and then making a quiet, devastating reply that answered what Quayle had been saying. That, it seems to me, is the way debate should be done, but it rarely seems to be done that way in the US. (Britain, famously, is different.)
I watched a couple of presidential debates after that, and found that they didn't equal the standard Bentsen had set. I recall a news pundit remarking on Bentsen's putdown of Quayle, saying that it had surely been prepared. Of course it was! The odd thing, given the heavy preparation for these little shows, is how unprepared the candidates generally seem. But that may be part of the intention, especially since the pundits declared Quayle the winner in his encounter with Bentsen, because he was so ineffective.
The corporate media don't like smart people, even minimally smart ones. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller discusses, and quotes at length (pp. 68-70), an ABC News bull session from October 22, 2000, in which Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson complained that talking about substance was too "cerebral," preferring to talk about image and likability. Which isn't that far from gushing because Barack Obama was "riding a wave of interest in public speaking." That's very nice, but what was he saying?
I don't think debate has ever been popular, in the US or elsewhere, because, as Lady Augusta Bracknell remarked, "I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing." Or, as many of my contemporaries remark, "debating on teh internet is like competing in the special olympics - even if u win, your still retarded lol lol lmao!"
She has never had a live encounter with Dawkins. "I'm a little nervous about live encounters, because everything's a shouting match. I'm thinking of television of course [she doesn't own a television], but so much of it is who can bully, in effect. Not that I couldn't." She smiles dangerously.
Well, no, debate is not a shouting match, nor is it bullying. Many Americans may think it is, and American corporate news networks may like it that way, but the clip of Bentsen and Quayle shows that it shouldn't be. For that matter, you can find clips of debates at the Oxford Union online, such as this, or this. For someone who appeals to intellectual traditions, Robinson seems oddly ignorant of this one. Maybe someday I might aspire to a live debate -- though I prefer written ones -- with Marilynne Robinson (he smiled dangerously).
I'm now reading The Bigness of the World, a collection of stories by Lori Ostlund, which I found out about through a post at Band of Thebes. The book has won a slew of awards, which is very nice, though as Band of Thebes complains, "Nevertheless, mainstream review attention has been scant. And the book is impossible to find in Manhattan; I've called the chains and the independents. Buy it online and talk it up among your friends." By all means, do. I checked it out of the public library, read the first page, and set it aside until I'd finished a couple of other things.
I have to confess, though, that so far, sixty pages in, I'm not all that excited. Ostlund writes well, and I do appreciate the stories she tells, especially since lesbian characters in mainstream fiction are still too rare. But her work appears to be pretty standard MFA writing -- competent, disciplined, dull. Too much of the GLB fiction I've read in the past few years is like that, which is why I keep going back to writers like Nicola Griffith, Emma Donoghue, Christopher Bram, Rabih Alameddine, Sarah Waters, Sherman Alexie (who may not be gay but writes interestingly about gay and bi characters), Samuel R. Delany, David Levithan.
But don't blame those writers for this invidious comparison. The reason I'm bringing this up here is that I do find sparks of life in Ostlund's writing, like the bit I'm about to quote from "Talking Fowl with My Father", page 59. The narrator lives with her girlfriend of ten years in San Francisco, and keeps in touch with her widowed father in the Midwest. His health is failing steadily and inexorably, and he refuses to follow his doctor's advice.
Years before, when his doctor had first begun to mention diet and exercise, before my father decided to stand firm against anything that might benefit his health, he went through a brief period of highly anomalous behavior -- namely, following his doctor's advice. For almost two months, he and my mother drove back into town each night after dark and locked themselves inside their store, where, for forty-five minutes, they walked. They went up and down the same aisles where they spent their days, past gopher traps and sprinklers and all kinds of joinery, my father in the lead, my mother several steps behind. When my mother accidentally let this secret slip and I asked why, why, when they could be out looking at lakes and trees and fields of corn, they preferred to walk indoors, she said, "You know your father doesn't want people knowing his business."
This reminded me of my parents, both of whom were born in the 1920s. They both had something of this paranoid secretiveness, reinforced by the norms they grew up with. So "paranoid" isn't really the right word: it's not paranoid to keep your business out of other people's sight if those other people are watching you and everyone else to make sure they don't do anything odd, and if those other people regard almost anything as odd. I suspect it's not a specifically Midwestern trait, but like Ostlund the Midwest is what I know, where I grew up.
The anecdote is well-observed and told, but Ostlund won't let it go anywhere. That's what I take to be the MFA part: keeping everything low-key, avoiding melodrama or any "big" events in favor of the smallish, telling, meaningful details. The narrator of "Talking Fowl with My Father" begins by telling how her father wants to FedEx her a pheasant he shot on a hunting excursion, and she happens to know that he hasn't been hunting for at least five years. She knows he's been hanging on to lots of decaying things, perhaps trying to pretend that time isn't passing, trying to stave off mortality by pretending it isn't there. (Again I'm reminded of my father, who refused to take his blood-pressure medicine for years. He still lived to be 81.) Something's missing, though I think it's missing by design. The story is kept heavily restrained, and I wish it would get loose and go for a walk along the highway, out in front of all the neighbors, letting them see its business. I can't help imagining what some of the other authors I mentioned might have done with the same material, even though I know it's not fair to them or to Ostlund.
Still, you might get a sense from the quoted paragraph whether The Bigness of the World would interest you. I'm going to read the rest of the book, just because I consider it important to read the GLBT fiction that mainstream (straight, corporate, male heterosexual) media -- and too many gay people, alas -- ignore. I believe I've complained in this blog before about how most gay people I know don't seem to read any gay-related fiction; to me that would like refusing to breathe. I want a lot more GLBT fiction to be written, published, and read, and I don't mind if a considerable amount of GLBT fiction doesn't speak to me, any more than I mind if every human being isn't attractive to me. Go thou, and do likewise.
I knew there was something else I meant to write about here, but it kept slipping my mind.
I've always liked Doonesbury, though since I don't regularly read newspapers there have been prolonged periods when I didn't follow the strip closely. For a few years in the 1980s I would just buy each collection as it was published. Now that it's available online, I've done a little better. It was fun to watch certain right-wingers fume when he started up some plots about the Iraq War, with very sympathetic and intelligent portrayals of the troops. When longtime character B.D. lost a leg and his football helmet, a lot of people took notice, but Trudeau has also given serious story time to Leo aka Toggle, an Iraq vet who returns to college after his medical discharge, where he becomes romantically involved with Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex. Leo lost an eye and has trouble speaking due to Traumatic Brain Injury; he's also a heavy-metal fan who drives a pickup truck. Not exactly the kind of character the Right (or many liberals, alas) would expect to get sensitive kind of treatment in Doonesbury. Which only goes to show how little they know. Sure, Trudeau is a liberal, but he's the kind of liberal that gives liberals a good name.
In last Sunday's strip, Alex and Leo go out for coffee. Alex makes some slighting remarks about some men carrying guns, "open-carry yahoos" as she calls them. (Do such men regularly kick back at Starbucks?) Leo intervenes in the argument: "Listen, dude," he tells one of the men, "I spent two years behind an M60 machine gun defending, among other things, your right to be a moron about guns!" Alex exclaims in delight over Leo's unexpectedly getting out a full sentence.
It's a cute little story, but one thing jumped out at me. Leo was not defending freedom in Iraq. No Iraqi was a threat to Americans' right to be morons about guns. No Iraqi was a threat to American rights or freedoms. It was, and is, our government that is the biggest threat to American rights or freedoms -- remember the Patriot Act, which was passed under Bush but was originally a Clinton-era project? -- and it was in the service of that government that Leo and thousands of other soldiers went to Iraq.
I know, I know, what he said was in character. For that matter, the latest Doonesbury collection, Signature Wound, has a Foreword by retired US Marine Corps General and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, who hails "all who have stepped forward and volunteered to protect the freedoms we hold dear." Such talk is a conditioned reflex, not only in the military but among most people who can't quite bring themselves to object to any war the US starts. I must respectfully but firmly differ with the General, and with Leo, and with Garry Trudeau if it comes to that. The United States has not fought a defensive war in my lifetime, and I was born in 1951. With all proper sympathy and empathy for those who feel the need to rationalize and justify their participation in the wars of aggression we have fought and are fighting now, I can't go along with them on this point. As far as I can see, until Americans can recognize what their government and their armed forces are doing, we will continue to get involved in these wars, and that will mean more young people getting chewed up and spat out by the military, with more or less support from their society. (Not to mention the vastly greater numbers of innocent foreigners who suffer.) But the best way -- the only way, really -- to support them is not to damage them in the first place.
I am a homosexual American citizen and while I fight to defend the rights of free speech and a democratic legislature process, I suffer because these very same freedoms are denied to me as a gay Sailor.
Again, this is mere rhetoric (read the whole letter for his account of the highlights of his service). Which, as I've said before, doesn't mean the ban on gays in the military shouldn't be lifted, only that it has nothing to do with defending anyone's rights.
When serving in a war zone, you learn quite a bit about yourself and what’s important to you. I’ve had the chance to work on a close and personal level with the people of Iraq, and in doing so, I have realized more than ever that the freedoms we enjoy as Americans should not be taken for granted – we must protect them at all costs. These freedoms are essential to the very foundation of our society. Yet so many men and women who fight for these freedoms aren’t allotted their own. Our freedom to love and be loved by whomever we choose. The freedom to live of a life of truth and dignity.
I wonder if it's possible to talk about an issue like this without relying on such pious garbage. But this young man isn't protecting my freedoms, or your freedoms, or anyone else's freedoms. If anything, he's fighting for a state that is dedicated to taking freedom away. (In an exchange on the Campaign's Facebook pages, one guy inadvertently came closer to reality: "I'm gay, and I would love to serve my military..." (But then I noticed that "Serving the Military" is the thread topic; I can't even give this poor kid credit for the Freudian slip.)
Now, this is what I'm talking about. Mm hm hmm. Yes indeed.
Early in the life of this blog I complained about a music video by a diva beloved of many gay men, which kept everything thoroughly heterosexual in its choreography: "I suddenly noticed that though the choreographer had paired males with females and a few females with females, there were no males paired with males. This, although in a cast full of dancer/model types, there must have been a few gay males, and although Dayne’s target audience was presumably not homophobic teenaged boys."
Oh, well, I don't pay much attention to music videos, but I did pay attention when the Angry Black Woman touted Toni Braxton's new one: "Fat Dancers! Muscled women! Church Ladies! And all other sorts of hot LGBT dancers!!! And the music! SQUEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" With a link to Rod 2.0, who writes, "The track is destined to be a clubbanger especially because the Billie Woodruff-directed video is a love letter to black and Latino LGBT youth. It fuses the vintage "house" music club scene of the 80s to the ballroom scene of the 90s and 00s." Yeah, that's a lot more like it.
I recently saw a new book by Marilynne Robinson, the novelist and essayist who wrote a good (though uneven) dissection of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. (The review used to be available online, but now you can only see it if you're a Harper's subscriber.) The new book is called Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self; I hadn't seen the subtitle until I looked the book up on Amazon, and it looks like something you'd see in The Onion, but apparently she's serious. The book is apparently based on her Terry Lectures, just like Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which I finally found embarrassing and unreadable. Robinson appears to be a more careful, rigorous thinker than Eagleton, but I'm not ready to spend money on the new book, and it's not in the library yet.
So I took one easy way out. Robinson's earlier book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Picador, 2005) was in at the public library. The last essay, "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion," looked interesting. And so it was. Robinson is concerned with the courage to express dissenting opinions, which she seems to think is in shorter supply now than in younger, happier days. "Physical courage," she writes (255), "is remarkably widespread in this population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by being universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves." Those who act on it, I'd add, can also expect respect and praise for doing so, unlike those who say or write unpopular things.
Moral and intellectual courage [she continues] are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail -- financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism -- are comparatively minor. ... Indeed, consensus is so powerful and so effectively defended that I suspect it goes back to earliest humanity, when our tribes were small and vulnerable, and schism and defection were a threat to survival. But it should never be forgotten how much repression and violence consensus can support, or how many crimes it has justified.
It is true that in most times and places physical courage and moral and intellectual courage have tended to merge, since dungeons, galleys, and stakes have been extensively employed in discouraging divergent viewpoints. For this reason our own society, which employs only mild disincentives against them and in theory positively admires them, offers a valuable opportunity for the study of what I will call the conservation of consensus, that is, the effective enforcement of consensus in those many instances where neither reason nor data endorse it, where there are no legal constraints supporting it, and where there are no penalties for challenging it that persons of even moderate brio would consider deterrents [256].
Whew! She does run on, almost as much as I do. Anyway, she then offers an example of what she's complaining about:
Here is an instance: for some time the word "bashing" has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are straightforwardly true or false. To say that the disparity between rich and poor in this country exceeds any previously known in American history ... is to say something falsifiable -- that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case arguable. But such statements are now routinely called "Bush bashing." In other words, something that is objectively true or false is dismissed as the slur of a hostile subgroup. Perfectly sensible people flinch at the thought that they might sound a trifle Jacobin, and they are shamed out of saying what they believe to be true in the plainest sense of the word "true." Nor is it the critics alone who lose their bearings when these strategies are employed. Those who identify with the group toward whom the criticisms are directed -- in this case, the present administration -- can hear irrational attack where they might otherwise hear a challenge to their values or to their theories and methods.
So the exchanges that political life entirely depends on, in which people attempt in good conscience to establish practical truth and then candidly assign value to it, simply do not take place [257].
As I read this, I couldn't help wondering if Robinson has ever read the writings of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman on the ways in which dissenting views are muffled in a society which does not use violence to suppress them. Nina Eliasoph's Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1998) also addresses this problem, as did George Orwell's preface to the original publication of Animal Farm, which was not published until 1972. Quite a number of people have noticed and studied conformism, self-censorship, and the ways in which such behavior is produced, encouraged, and enforced. The "exchanges that political life entirely depends on" rarely take place, and it's an uphill battle to make them happen at all.
I'd also point out that the tactic Robinson deplores is ancient. The Romans dismissed the early Christians as atheists, and the Bible (both Testaments) is among other things an anthology of bad arguments against opponents, be they "pagans" or other Christians or Jews. Jennifer Wright Knust's Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia, 2006)
describes how,
From biblical tradition, to Greek invective, to early Christian polemics, "the opponents" -- be they gentiles or slaves or barbarians or heretics -- were universally said to devote themselves to sexual excess. Though there may have been licentious gentiles, slaves, rulers, philosophers, barbarians, heretics, or Christians, the sources I have been exploring will not help us find them. Instead, these sources indicate a widespread attempt to employ moralizing claims regarding sexual behavior and gender deviance to validate authority. Still, there is a sense in which all this sex talk was actually about sex: by strategically claiming superiority on the basis of a strict sexual morality, early Christians were under tremendous pressure to display the sophrosyne they had defined for themselves. Therefore, all of this highly charged sex talk was necessary. Christians had to be convinced to live up to sophrosyne, displaying it for all to see. Moreover, the content of in-Christ self-discipline required frequent renegotiation and reiteration in light of the changing circumstances of the first Christians. Charges against the heretics provide further clues regarding the contested claims of Christian sophrosyne as well as the imagined constitution of the group [160].
On the other hand, many of Bush's liberal critics were more obsessed by his Texas accent and his inability to pronounce "nuclear" the way they thought he should, as well as his often-incoherent speaking style, than by his actual crimes. They welcomed the advent of Barack Obama because, as so many said, it was such a relief to finally have a President who wasn't an embarrassment as a public speaker! If anything, this was a convenient way of ignoring Obama's actual stated policies, and those who criticized Obama from the left were also accused of bad faith by his devotees, just Bush's critics were. But I've dealt with this issue often before.
I suppose Robinson is aware of all this, and is only citing instances from the Bush II administration as a contemporary example rather than a novelty, but some acknowledgment that she's not a lone voice crying in the wilderness would be nice.
Which brings me to my next point. No doubt some people were inhibited from criticizing the Bush administration by the fear of being accused of "Bush-bashing," but many more were not. There was no shortage of criticism and attack during those long eight years, though admittedly not as much, or as substantial, as one might have liked in those media we call Mainstream. What actually happened (another verifiable, or at least arguable, claim about truth) was that many critical voices were excluded by the corporate media, but 1) there were probably more alternative venues for criticism than at any other time I can remember in my lifetime, especially on the Internet, but even so there was plenty of criticism of Bush at a personal level, in letters to the editor, and elsewhere, undeterred by the accusation of "bashing"; and 2) the corporate media have never been friendly to critical voices; I think there was more rational political discussion going on during the Bush years than there was during the 1960s on Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement. You don't have to read Chomsky and Herman's writings to know this, but they're convenient, well-known (and therefore frequently misrepresented and demonized) and well-documented; many other students have covered the same ground, with much the same results.
But Robinson is really aiming at something else, I think: the claim that what one is doing and saying, though many other people are doing and saying it, is in fact hardly being said or done by anyone, and therefore one is speaking out at great personal risk, if only risk of being accused of Bush- or Obama-bashing or of Political Correctness.
This is a time when it actually requires a certain courage to declare oneself a liberal, even among presumptively like-minded people. That might seem a minor act after the instances I have just cited, in which people defied prejudice, custom, and law. But the purely arbitrary nature of this little coercion isolates the impulse to enforce consensus, even when absolutely nothing is at stake for the enforcers and the one subject to coercion risks no penalty -- except the embarrassment of seeming not to know that a word is passe, that posture is, well, as of now a little ridiculous [260].
Does it "actually" require a certain courage to declare oneself a liberal, "even among presumptively like-minded people", in these troubled times? I don't know, since I'm not a liberal. Nor, living as I do in a college town among the presumptively like-minded, have I needed much courage to declare myself gay, atheist, and of leftist opinions. But I have often noticed people, like Robinson, telling the world how courageous they are for stating their views, often in front of audiences of the presumptively like-minded. And I'll bet you can guess what comes next.
To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed [260-261].
Parenthetically, I'd like to point out that much of what Robinson says here is true of me, and I'm an atheist: I also have a strong attachment to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, etc. and they (along with the other cultural products of Western civilization -- which would be a good idea, as Gandhi quipped) inform the way I think. (See, for example, the poems I wrote using the Bible and Christianity as source material.) But then, I could say the same of Greek and Roman "narratives and traditions," and I daresay so could Robinson. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann said the same of Judaism, which he contended with even long after he'd ceased to be observant or to believe in Yahweh. If I'd grown up in China, the same would be true for me with respect to Chinese narratives and traditions. What Robinson is doing is sort of like bragging that she's attached to the English language, simply because she grew up in an English-speaking country.
The reason this tactic annoys me, I think, is that I associate it mainly with bigots and other reactionaries, like the people on Facebook who declare that they are Christians and dare you to copy the same declaration to your status, only a few will have the courage -- will you? When I declared that I was an atheist in response to one of these, they attacked me for denying their right to believe. I guess they didn't have the courage to declare their faith in Christ unless absolutely everybody around them agreed with them. (Given their beliefs, they should worry, considering what the gospels show Jesus saying about those who will not acknowledge him before men.)
Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/mystical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. ... Now, I do feel fairly confident that I know what religion is. I have spent decades informing myself about it, an advantage I can claim over any of my would-be rescuers. I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant, as these same people know. I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it at all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements [261].
Again: Hey, most of this is true of me too! Robinson's claim reminds me of an exchange I once saw between William F. Buckley and Malcolm Muggeridge on Buckley's TV show, where Buckley said basically the same thing as Robinson says here, and Muggeridge said that he found that people were intensely interested when they found out he was a Christian. (Hey, here it is! Starting at about 2:55; Muggeridge responds at about 4:30.) Maybe the reaction you get depends on your own attitude? (Muggeridge suggests as much, very tactfully.) But I'd never invite Buckley to a dinner party in the first place, and I'm having my doubts about Robinson.
The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? [261].
This is also familiar to me, especially as a gay man. I've often been asked whether I'm not worried about being judged by those crazy Gay Pride Marches, for example. But it is also familiar in the context of the "New Atheism." As I've written before, many of my fellow atheists are an embarrassment to me, and I'm still not always sure what to do about it. (Except, I guess, to keep on learning, and take pot shots at my fellow atheists when they say especially stupid things.) But as Robinson wrote in her review of Dawkins, “The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule.” And as I wrote of her remarks, the question then arises of how to tell which are the best elements and which the worst, both in Christianity and in atheism. I suspect that one reason why Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett have gotten so much media attention is that they are clowns and yahoos, which the corporate media love. A more informed and nuanced discussion of the issues is too boring for the corporate media, which prefer soundbytes to analysis.
This is only one instance of a very pervasive phenomenon, a pressure toward concessions no one has a right to ask. These are concessions courage would refuse if it were once acknowledged that a minor and insidious fear is the prod that coaxes us toward conforming our lives, and even our thoughts, to norms that are effective markers of group identity precisely because they are shibboleths, a contemporary equivalent of using the correct fork. ...
The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think [262].
"The present dominance"? I see no reason to think that what Robinson is talking about is anything new. It was true when I was young, and seems to have been true long before that. (I'm presently reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which shows the same processes of aspersion and ridicule being used very effectively in English life at the end of the 18th century.) But what baffles me is that Robinson is writing as though she only just figured this out, and she's eight years my senior. Well, maybe she did. Maybe she spent most of her life sheltered in "mainline Protestant" circles, and never had to try to have a discussion with people who differed with her on basic issues. But if so, that undercuts her stance as a longtime observer of the American political scene, distressed by its degeneration into aspersions and attitudes.
And finally, is it just me, or is there something of the very attitude she deplores in her own reaction to those silly billies who are so shallow as to disrespect "the religious/mystical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me"? Don't they see that she's the one who's really cool after all? But I'm sure it's totally uncool of me to point that out.
P.S. Hey, Robinson is going to be teaching a workshop on theological writing at Princeton this summer. That's what happens when you make shocking statements about your faith in today's attitude-ridden secular society. For those who want to be in with the in crowd ...
I got more e-mail from the blogger I've been talking to about Don't Ask Don't Tell:
I read your post on DADT and I understand what you mean now. I agree too that we should focus on ending the unfair wars first and then focus on allowing gays in the military.
Oh, dear. The trouble is that I don't agree. But I think I see where the problem lies. In the last paragraph of my previous post, I wrote:
I think few people today would agree that the first goal should have been equality for German Jews in military service, and then you could ask whether supporting Hitler and invading Poland was really a good thing. But that is what the more moderate opponents of Don't Ask Don't Tell argue: first we need to get formal equality for the LBGTQ Citizen, and then we can debate the propriety of invading Iraq, or escalating the US war in Afghanistan, or attacking Iran.
From this I think it's an easy jump to supposing that I would believe the opposite: first end the unjust wars, then end DADT. But that's not what I wrote, and it's not what I meant. I don't mean to tell anyone how to set their priorities. There's too much to do, and people have to decide what matters to them and what they think they can do about it. For many gay people, ending DADT is the most important thing, so it's where they put their energy. I won't tell them that they should work against the war instead, especially since the antiwar movement is currently moribund, apparently because of unwillingness to oppose Obama. That's why I praised the getEQUAL activists, for getting in his face, for not believing his promises, for holding his feet to the fire (to use a popular phrase for what progressives were going to do once he was in office -- those were the days!).
President Obama thinks it's funny to joke about the predator drones that have killed between 109 and 188 people during his administration, making him officially a grotesque monster. (Possibly even more so than Pre-President George W. Bush joking about a woman on death row.) I'd like to know what Dan Choi has to say about that. But anyone of any sexual orientation who has joined the American military since 2003 must know that they are not defending or protecting the United States. I don't see any reason not to ask the people who oppose the military ban on homosexuals what they think they're supporting. Such questions are, of course, in bad taste, but they aren't in nearly as bad taste as blowing up innocent people, or the President of the United States joking about it.
