You Keep Using This Word; or, How Can I Leave This Behind?

I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press.  The publisher's blurb proclaimed it 

a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.

Hm.  Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it.  I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.

The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.

I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements.  Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people."  Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.

What is "a people"?  The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental."  Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either.  Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier.  Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).

Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present.  It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.  

I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time.  It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.  

Let Me Go, Lover

This post on the Platform Formerly Known As Twitter was passed along by a "technical" philosopher still working on his Ph.D., with the remark "People are making fun of this, but it worked."

My first thought was to wonder if the man was able to extract himself because of the hour-long prayer session, or because the woman's muscles simply relaxed after awhile, as I think one would expect. It probably didn't save them money, because holy men expect compensation for their services.  You could argue that distracting them for an hour "worked," but it wouldn't mean that the prayer and preaching were direct causes. Or, going on the reasonable assumption that the goal was to get many views for the video, you could say that it worked: two days ago the video had 230 thousand views.  A philosopher should be able to do better than this.

My second thought was that the video was very likely staged.  My third was that from the description, it appears that the man and woman were not married to each other, and that the Lord was imposing the due penalty for their sin on the fornicators (or adulterers?), showing his infinite mercy by letting them go after a little time, while putting a little cash in the pocket of his servant.  My fourth is that there are people who need divine intervention a lot more than these two.

I also thought of a quip ascribed to the glorious snarkmeister Bernard Shaw, about the healing site at Lourdes: "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg or toupee."  I haven't been able to confirm the source, but what matters is the point.  Jesus, according to the gospels, healed a man with a withered hand, and restored life to a man who'd been dead four days. (According to Matthew, many people who'd been dead for much longer than that came to life when Jesus was crucified.)  One of the most famous Christian healing sites doesn't even come close to such feats.

While trying to find a source for the supposed Shaw quip, I found an odd article which quoted it, and tried to answer it.

Point taken, but somewhere in that logic a greater miracle is missed. Consider the cripple. Assuming he was not faking it, the fact still remains that he was able to discard his walking support. Hardnosed rationalists would not call that a miracle. They'd say that if such an event occurred at all, it was probably due to some psychosomatic effect - if they didn't say it was a placebo thing outright.

And that's the common everyday miracle they would be missing; how does the mind effect the body? Consider amputees next. Over 50% of people who have an arm or leg surgically removed report what is called "phantom pain" in parts of the limb which is no longer there. Medical science doesn't have a coherent theory why this happens though, amazingly, medications, including placebos, can reduce the pain.

So phantom pain is a miracle?  I've noticed that Christian apologists often try to confuse the meaning of "miracle."  They point to the glory of sunrise, the wonder of biological reproduction, and other everyday events and call them miracles. 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
 “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

If everything is a miracle, then nothing is.  Nobody marveled when Jesus walked on land, though it was just as miraculous on this logic, and a literal act of God; they marveled when he walked on water.  Nobody marveled when Mary gave birth; they marveled that she had conceived without sexual intercourse.  There's dispute among philosophers and theologians as to what a miracle is, whether it involves violations of the laws of nature for example.  It's true that earthquakes, plagues, and other events have been called acts of God, though many modern Christians are uneasy about doing so.  So it's conceivable that the eventual separation of the Kenyan fornicators might have been Jesus' doing.  But any other god could have been responsible, or none at all.  

Just because something is unexplained, and never may be explained, that doesn't make it a miracle.  Invoking placebos is an attempt to dodge the question, to distract. The point of the quip about Lourdes is that an all-powerful god's ability to work wonders of healing has some intriguing blind spots. Get back to me when a placebo makes a missing eye or limb grow back. 

Later the same day that I saw the Kenyan video, YouTube pointed me to this video.  (A miracle!  It couldn't be mere coincidence!)  The man who makes them, Andrew Henry, is a biblical scholar.  Unlike some other YouTube biblical scholars I could name, his videos are well-planned and organized.  This one is about reported appearances by the Virgin Mary to ordinary people, which have been happening for centuries.  I learned quite a lot from it, and it occurred to me that when Protestant apologists deride scholars for disbelief in the supernatural, they don't seem to have in mind Fatima or Guadalupe or the many other sightings Andrew Henry discusses.  Why not?  Don't they believe in the supernatural?  I'll have to ask about this the next time I encounter this accusation.

You Think I'm Joking?

A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media.  I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness.  It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged.  Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.

First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about.  Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires and superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions.  Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.  

I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.

Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump.  Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters.  "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients.  No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now.  ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)

Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators.  Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard."  I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist.  A few years later, he was better prepared.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."  Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.

Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then.  No, I didn't.  This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here.  The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes.  Yeah, I know that one too.  I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.

So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.  

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

"Loser" is a nothingburger as an insult, though I admit it's better than "ret*rd," which is popular not only among MAGA but everywhere on the political spectrum. But then so is "loser." Don't be stupid, people. If that's the best you've got, it's better to keep silent than to remove all doubt about your vacuity.

 

Oh, it's okay because Trump uses it and you're just turning it back on him? Keep digging yourselves in deeper.

He Strictly Charged Them to Tell No One About Him

The discourse on race / ethnicity stinks to high heaven. 

A new movie version of Wuthering Heights will be released next month, and not for the first time there's controversy over the casting of Heathcliff.  It has been more than a decade since I last read the book, and I'm in no hurry to do it again, but as I remember, Heathcliff was a man of mystery, of ambiguous and unknown ancestry.  The discussion I saw on Twitter/X today agreed, but people were still trying to pin him down, while others tried to impose "modern" Foucauldianism on the story.  For example, dismissals of "people who interpret everything through contemporary American racial dynamics," or "But Heathcliff is supposed to be possibly-not-fully-white by the standards of late 18th C Yorkshire, which is not the same thing as being clearly nonwhite by modern standards... He isn't clearly described as nonwhite, but as someone who raises suspicions because of an ambiguous appearance and background."

Whose modern standards?  Which modern standards?  The new movie is a US-UK production.  British racial dynamics are different than US racial dynamics, and both sets are complex and incoherent, even leaving "mixed-race" people out of it.  Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliffe in this version, is Australian with a Basque father. Judging by this publicity photo, I think he looks suitably ambiguous by modern standards.

 

"White" and "non-white" aren't clear categories, and never have been. As I've pointed out before, in English usage "black" is applied to human beings along a continuum from black hair to being sub-Saharan African.  Here's how Heathcliff made his first appearance to the Earnshaw family:

We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.  

Children, even little blue-eyed blond-haired rosy-cheeked English children, were commonly called "it" in English well into the twentieth century, so this passage shouldn't be assumed to be racist.  Heathcliff is referred to as a "gipsy," a "a little Lascar [i.e. South Asian], or an American or Spanish castaway" by other characters in the novel.  Whatever the racial dynamics of late 18th-century Yorkshire were, they weren't clear.  Numerous people have pointed out that Liverpool was a terminus of the Atlantic slave trade, and speculated that Heathcliff might have been a slave or the child of a slave. It's less often noted that the reader has at best only Mr. Earnshaw's word for it that he found the boy in Liverpool; what was he going to say, though, "This is my son by a slave wench"?  I don't assume that Emily Bronte had a clear picture of Heathcliff's ancestry in mind, nor that she could have explained herself clearly if pressed. Intentionally or not, she gave an accurate picture of the racial dynamic in her day by showing that Yorkshire folk just threw around a salad of labels for the boy. They didn't care much what he was, only that he was Other.  (I couldn't resist thinking of the various answers the Twelve gave when Jesus asked "Who do men say that I am?" "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.")

On "gipsy," Roma are not a single "racial" group: see the 1993 musical / documentary Latcho Drom, which ranges from India across Europe to Spain.  If Heathcliff could have been "a Spanish castaway," he could have been Basque; he still wouldn't have been white. Complaints about the casting of Elordi that call him white are as inadvertently entertaining as the complaints that Neo in The Matrix was played by a white actor.  (Keanu Reeves is multiethnic, to put it gently.)  The gatekeepers are as ignorant as their opponents, and contribute little or nothing to improving the discourse.

Are Hispanics white?  Hey, remember the right-wing think-tanker who thought that Spanish speakers are a "race"? But he wants you to know that he's not a racist. Remember the liberal queer diversity educators who insisted that Sunni and Shi'a are ethnicities?  Jon Schwarz likes to remind us that Benjamin Franklin said that Germans are "swarthy," that is, dark-skinned:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. 

You see, it's okay for a Basque to play Heathcliff: they aren't white! And I remember that light-skinned African-Americans sometimes passed, or were mistaken for Mexicans or or Latins.

A similar casting dilemma affects Shakespeare's Othello. What is a Moor, in Elizabethan racial dynamics?  Othello is called "black" by some characters, and he might have been African, but probably not. Numerous commenters in those threads mentioned that in more recent adaptations, Othello has been played by black African actors.  Laurence Olivier (who also played Heathcliff in a film version of Wuthering Heights) played Othello in blackface in a 1965 movie performance. (My goodness, the whole thing is on YouTube.)  Like this:

 

Then there was Andrea Arnold's 2011 version of Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff was played by an Afro-British actor.  I found it uneven but interesting, partly because the dialogue included some F-bombs. Was that "authentic"? "Correct"?  Bronte couldn't have published the novel with such language, and I have no idea whether she knew the word, but probably she did, and the expletives were in character for Heathcliff.  The English were notorious for their foul language: Joan of Arc called them "goddens," or "goddamns."

I don't intend to see the new version; I'll see how the reviews are.  But I don't love the book, so why bother? The anxiety and confusion over the casting - there's also an actor in it with an Arabic name, and a Chinese as well - drew my attention to it, that's all.  Is there even any point in trying to sort out the tangled web of race / ethnic discourse?  I don't think it can be done.

You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from most of Ehrman's fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And there was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.

Down the Memory Hole

Ah, NPR's Scott Simon.  What a guy.

On Saturday morning, Simon interviewed Cardinal Blase Cupich to find out why three American cardinals, Cupich among them, had criticized Donald Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela, Greenland, and elsewhere.  

The interview was of little interest, but at one point Cupich sneezed, and Simon said "Gesundheit!" He then chortled at the crazy idea of him, a layman and a non-Catholic, saying "God bless you" to a Prince of the Catholic Church. Cupich accepted it graciously.

The trouble is, Gesundheit is German for "health," not "God bless you." I know, I know, it's the thought that counts, but NPR is supposed to be high-quality, fact-based journalism.  Not that Simon's smarmy combination of coziness and obsequiousness is either one.  But it jolted me awake, and I figured I had an easy blog post in hand, so I waited for the transcript to be posted.

A few hours later, I read the transcript, and the exchange wasn't there.  I listened to the sound file; it too had been edited.  I don't know why.  If Simon was embarrassed by his tiny error -- no, he seems incapable of embarrassment. This isn't a big thing, but it's emblematic of NPR.

Elsewhere in the interview, Simon asked:

What about the argument, for example, that 8 million Venezuelans have voted with their feet and left their own country. It's a quarter of the population. Hasn't removing Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for drug trafficking in the U.S. opened the door to change?

It's true that extensive emigration from Venezuela has taken place, but it predates Maduro's regime.  First, when Hugo Chavez became president, wealthy Venezuelans moved to Miami, which has long been a haven for right-wing Latin Americans. Then as the US moved to strangle the Venezuelan economy with sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, plus support for multiple military coups,.poorer Venezuelans joined the exodus.  Most stayed in the region; certainly the US didn't intend for them to come here. How much of this flight was due to political opposition to either Chavez or Maduro and how much was driven by economic need probably can't be distinguished.  But I don't think, in years of waking up to NPR's morning news programs, I've ever heard more than token acknowledgment of destructive US policy, and never of its role in driving emigration. Nor did Cupich say anything about it, for what that's worth.

In other faith-based news, CNN reported on Saturday that our new American Pope had issued a warning that

“As we scroll through our information feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings, bots, or virtual influencers,” Pope Leo wrote on Saturday.

“Because chatbots that are made overly ‘affectionate,’ in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people’s intimate spheres,” he added.

So true! That's the clergy's role.

(I'm also worried about many people's turning to AI constructs for emotional support, but there are good as well as bad reasons why they do it. Clergy in all sects have not distinguished themselves by their respect for boundaries with vulnerable believers, and their superiors (and even parents) have protected the abusive ones. I'm still concerned by people who turn to AI for interaction that is designed never to cross them, just as I'm concerned by people who turn to pets for it. The trouble isn't just that it's difficult to understand whether one is interacting with other human beings or with computer software, it's that many people prefer the software to actual human beings.  That chatbots can become abusive is worrisome too.  But this is too serious for what I meant to be a lighthearted post.)