Just You Wait Till Your Father Comes Home!

I was poking around in the recent past when I found this interview of Anne Lamott by Joan Walsh. (I got there by way of Walsh's piece on Internet misogyny, which I agree with.)

Now, I like Lamott's writing, from her fiction (all of which I've read) to much of her nonfiction. Bird by Bird is a great book, not just about writing but about being a human being. Operating Instructions, her journal of her first year as a mother, was beautiful too. But when she writes about Faith and Spirituality, she turns me off; I've only read her first Christian book, and that was enough. From time to time I find myself tempted to read the later ones, just because she's a good writer; but then I remember how obnoxious she -- yes, even Anne Lamott -- becomes when she starts talking about God. In this interview she has a lot of good things to say about aging, politics, and Molly Ivins, but first she has to deliver a little sermon.

Everything in the culture says that if you’re a person who really loves Mary or Jesus or one of the Hindu gods or whatever, that you’re not supposed to have jealousy or existential waves of judgment. And I don’t think God ever said that. I think the message of Jesus is “Me too” and “It’s weird down here” and “People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you’re going to see around you, whether in San Francisco or Fairfax or a foreign country, is going to literally blow your mind.” I work like hell but I’m also secretly kind of lazy. I do tons of benefits and stuff like that and yet I’m kind of lazy and shiftless; I take a nap every single afternoon. I have a life that allows a 45-minute nap. So what I can say to people is, “There’s nothing you’ve thought, I haven’t thought too. No matter how awful you behave I can probably relate, although the details will be different.”

That last sentence is good, it's a major part of what I like about her writing. It's what comes before it that doesn't work.

"I don't think that God ever said" that "you're not supposed to have jealousy or existential waves of judgment." Perhaps she should read the gospels, where Jesus says that if you judge others, you'll go to Hell; and that if you even experience lust, let alone act on it, you'll go to Hell. The message of fanatical perfection that she blames on "Everything in the culture" is an echo of Jesus' teachings in the gospels, and particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. I'm not aware of any passages that counter them. I'm sure Lamott has her ways of getting around such sayings, but that's what she has in common with other fundamentalists. Christians have almost two thousand years' experience explaining away troublesome Bible passages. That's long enough that most of the time they can forget that it's what they're doing.

I think the message of Jesus is “Me too” and “It’s weird down here” and “People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you’re going to see around you, whether in San Francisco or Fairfax or a foreign country, is going to literally blow your mind.”

I'd sure like to see her expand on this. It's not very easy, as Lamott surely knows, to boil down all the teachings of Jesus in the gospels to a single message; probably Jesus himself couldn't have done it. It's very subjective, but what's subjective can be discussed, defended, and criticized. "Me too"? The Jesus of the gospels is quite sure that he's better than you, that's why he came to give his life for many. He is, after all, the Son of God, come to rub elbows with the canaille downstairs for a season, until it's time to carry out his suicide mission and return to the heaven from which he came. I can't think of any place in the gospels where Jesus commiserates with anybody; sometimes he takes pity on their suffering, but that's not a "Me too", it's an alm tossed to the lepers. "It's weird down here" doesn't make sense to me at all when I think of the Jesus of the gospels. "People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you're going to see ... is literally going to blow your mind." ("Literally"? I'd hope Jesus wouldn't use that word that way.  And "blow your mind" doesn't have a literal sense: it's a metaphor.) Again, I can't extract this message from the gospels. It's more like, "If you think things are bad here, wait till I cast you into eternal hellfire, you craven sinner! Wait till Our Father comes home!"

And there's the irony. Lamott's conclusion is just fine, but it really has nothing to do with Yahweh or Jesus; their concerns, as far as we can tell from the Bible, are quite different. (Yahweh's, for example, seems to be more like "Ooh, gross! Body fluids! Wash them off this minute before I get sick." Or his take on animal sacrifice: "The food is terrible here -- and such small portions." There is, I admit, more interest in social justice in the Hebrew Bible than in the New Testament, and that's good, but why would an omnipotent, omniscient being be so squeamish about the same ladyparts he created?) Lamott believes in her message because it's what she wants to believe, and I consider it preferable to anything I've ever found in any religion I've looked at. But I don't agree that it's the message of Jesus -- I know the New Testament too well to fall for that.

Which just goes to support my reversal of Gandhi's famous (but evidently apocryphal) platitude: I do not like your Christ. Some of your Christians are pretty decent; they are so unlike your Christ.

Infidels! Circle the Wagons!

Joan Walsh has a fairly good piece on the Catholic hierarchy's battle against covering birth control in their employees' insurance plans. She's an apostate Catholic from a working-class background -- sort of like me, except that I didn't know I'd been baptized until I was in my forties, so I never consciously abandoned the Great Whore of Babylon, as the Church is affectionately known in serious Protestant circles. She admits that despite her personal break with Catholicism, and her support of Obama, it makes her uncomfortable when "secular" types bash the church, and she wonders where that defensive reaction comes from, even in someone like her, let alone among the still faithful.

There’s a vestigial impulse to circle the wagons and protect our right to practice our persecuted religion (even if it’s no longer persecuted, and many of us don’t practice very much of it anymore). Where does it come from?

Walsh notices what many have missed, that this controversy is not about the religious freedom of ordinary believers, but "the 'freedom' of the Catholic hierarchy to impose rules that even most Catholics don’t live by", and indeed to impose Vatican doctrine on non-Catholics who work for Catholic institutions. She warns about the "many Catholics receptive to GOP blathering about out-of-touch 'elites' who supposedly disrespect their religious freedom" -- well, who's more out of touch than the Catholic hierarchy?

That Catholics, especially the elites, should accuse Obama of persecuting them should surprise no one. It's not a specifically Catholic tactic; even overwhelming majorities (gentiles, Christians, heterosexuals, whites) like to present themselves as endangered species, a pitiful few under siege from the powerful Jewish, secular, homosexual, Negro conspiracies to take over and remodel our society. Anyone who uses this tactic should be called on it, that's all.

I think Walsh gets some details wrong, though. True, as Walsh says, we secularists shouldn't judge all Catholics by the misconduct of the hierarchy; but when the hierarchy demands that they, and not the much greater numbers of the laity, be regarded as the standard for Catholicism, it's perfectly correct to judge the Church by them. Besides, even a more focused critique won't be welcome: focus on the bishops and the Pope (who was personally involved in the coverup of the child abuse scandal), and you'll still be called unfair. And I've often found that lay Catholics (including LGBT ones) who whine about mean outsiders picking on the Church don't hear it when I do distinguish between the elites and the laity; if I say "the Vatican," they hear "all Catholics." (Analogously, when I criticize antigay bigots, many people accusing me of lumping all heterosexuals together. In both cases, it's my critics who are doing the lumping.) I'm still staggered by the person I was debating online, who dismissed the Pope and the College of Cardinals as "marginal figures"; in a monarchical institution like the Church, such people are a numerical minority, but they are anything but marginal.

This is relevant when Walsh complains,

While the child abuse scandal makes most Catholics sick, sometimes even I wince when non-Catholics judge the whole church by the corruption of a comparative (though very powerful) few. I have cousins and uncles and aunts who’ve joined religious orders (though, truthfully, most of them left). I don’t like seeing all of them considered perverts or pedophiles, or people who cover up for predators.

First, it seems to me that a lot of this kind of overgeneralization, when it occurs, comes from Catholics, including lapsed Catholics, not non-Catholics. But again, when I've attacked the Vatican and the Bishops for protecting predator priests, Catholics tend to hear it as an attack on all Catholics -- that "circling the wagons" reflex Walsh mentioned. It's a perfectly natural, human reaction to get defensive in this way, but we shouldn't let it get past us. We who criticize Catholicism, or any sect, should be careful not to lump all its adherents together. Nor should we let Catholic apologists do it.

Another Quick One

This fits nicely with last night's post, I think.

Another Facebook friend, this one a feminist, presumably lesbian, with left politics, posted this link today, with her own comment:

The Republican Party is comparing President Obama to a man accused of manslaughter.

Reince Priebus, chair of the RNC, actually went on national TV and equated President Obama to the captain of the Italian cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, who is charged with manslaughter for killing 33 people. Priebus said, "In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Capt. Schettino, which is President Obama...."

This is not only an insult to the President, but it's incredibly insensitive to the victims of the disaster and to the people who are still missing loved ones. Demand that Priebus and ALL OTHER Republicans apologize to all victims and thier families for his/their misguided and hurtful rhetoric...

I commented, "That's ridiculous! President Obama has committed murder (of hundreds of civilians, including some American citizens), not manslaughter. The Republicans are totally out of touch with reality."

I could aim for balance by pointing out that George W. Bush -- who destroyed the US economy and then bailed, leaving the women and children behind to fend for themselves, makes a better match with Captain Francesco Schettino -- but you know, I'm getting tired of doing that. I'm tired of Democrats who blithely attack the Republicans in areas where they and their God-King are every bit as culpable, with no evident awareness of the fact. Besides, as a crummy political hack once remarked, we have only one president at a time, and it's the one we have now who deserves the scrutiny.

Which is why Joan Walsh's latest post at Salon.com, "Demonizing the decent guy who is president", sticks in my craw so much. (What, no capital P? This is an insult to the office!) She wrote:

I don’t agree with every move the president has made. But I think the more Republicans try to demonize him, the more most American voters will see the difference between the GOP caricature and the man they’ve come to know. I get more pro-Obama with each vicious anti-Obama attack. I’m sure the rest of his base does, too. That’s why Axelrod’s photo tweet, in its own way, became a small version of the Romney/Seamus story. Has there ever been a more decent, upstanding, all-American president, with his dog and his family and his Apollo Theatre song solos, treated more shamefully by his opponents? I’d be more horrified by the abuse if I wasn’t sure it was backfiring.

That first sentence is understatement, even for Walsh; she's been more critical of Obama than that in the past. I can almost agree with "I get more pro-Obama with each vicious anti-Obama attack," though not really: I don't even become less anti-Obama. I hope I am as critical of false attacks on Obama as I am of false defenses of the man by his devotees. It's possible to be hostile to both parties, after all. And I suspect that Walsh is right about the attacks backfiring; we saw that before with Bill Clinton.

But it doesn't make me any more sympathetic to Obama. The heat he's taking from the Republicans is excessive, but not much more so than their abuse of Clinton, and he did after all work very hard to get into the kitchen. It's even possible that there has never "been a more decent, upstanding, all-American president, with his dog and his family and his Apollo Theatre song solos," just because the bar is so low. What about Richard Nixon, who also had his dog and his family and appeared on Laugh-in? But we're talking about a President who joked about killing people with predator drones, who despite his recent shameless lies has killed many innocent people with missiles and predator drones, who has claimed and exercised the power to kill American citizens without due process, who has complacently covered up the abuse of Bradley Manning, and is now gearing up for a war of aggression against yet another Middle Eastern country. To pass over all this with "I don't agree with every move the president has made" is to display a truly warped sense of priorities.

The Power of Barackamania

As I've written before, though they perpetrate more than their share of outright falsehood, a lot of what is wrong with corporate media is distortion, tone, and viewpoint. Even Noam Chomsky, a harsh media critic, insists that many journalists are serious, professional, and competent; what gets in their way is the structure of corporate media -- though that structure does include hiring many incompetent hacks. Many media figures are determined to force the news into predetermined tracks, as shown by the remarkable video clip Joan Walsh posted at Salon today.

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As Walsh wrote, Matthews apparently expected her and Clarence Page to disagree with one another vehemently: that Walsh would call for bankers' heads on pikes and taxing the rich under the bridge, while Page would urge Obama to "compromise" with the Republicans -- "populism" versus "centrism", as Matthews put it. When that didn't happen, Matthews talked over both of them, complaining that he wasn't getting the ideological divide he wanted. Page said mildly that Obama "should be seen as getting something done or trying to get something done and if he fails at least he'll be able to say he fought hard." That's actually been Obama's strategy for most of his term so far, though I think Page had something more forceful in mind; Matthews interpreted it as "trying to cut a deal with Republicans", which is not what Page said.

Something weird, though: in a clip of Obama early in this segment, the President tells his audience:

If everyone just turned off your CNN, your Fox, your -- you know, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there instead of being in this echo chamber, where the topic is constantly politics. It is much more difficult to get a conversation on how are we going to help people than a conversation about how is this going to help or hurt someone politically? And that's part of what the American people are just sick of.

It's not really such a bad recommendation, but it seems to me that anyone who's watched Obama's performance as president would want to ask him why he doesn't take his own advice. His 'town hall meetings' are carefully staged spectacles for Obama the Man of the People, not for the People (Special Interests) to talk to him. And even more: as Walsh argues,

I happen to think it’s a phony dichotomy, asking whether the president should move to the center or the left, because it lets the GOP define the center. A majority of Americans, including moderates and independents, support raising taxes on the rich. In fact, according to “the Survey of Affluence and Wealth in America” conducted by the Hamilton group and sponsored by American Express, released Tuesday morning, three-quarters of wealthy Americans support increasing taxes on Americans making more than $1 million a year, and half support hiking them on those making $500,000.

A solid majority of Americans think Obama should have stuck with jobs and not pivoted to deficits last year. A larger majority opposes any effort, by either party, to trim Social Security or Medicare. A decisive majority thought he should have pushed back harder on the GOP during the debt-ceiling debacle – including a majority of the independents who Rendell and Penn think will be crucial in 2012. Even a majority of Republican-leaning independents wanted the president to fight harder. A fighting populist strategy is good policy, and good politics.

Today in comments at alicublog (under this post) someone wrote that Obama and John Boehner belong to different parties and have different goals. Different parties? Yes. Different goals? I don't believe so. Both Boehner and Obama have the same basic goal, to which everything else is subordinate: to be re-elected.

See, professional politics is a lot like pro wrestling. The principals have to pretend they're mortal enemies, so they learn to fake eye-gouging and body slams, and they strut around huffing and puffing and roaring to the stands about how they're going to terminate each other, and the opponent had better pray, because this time there will be no mercy. Another commenter extended the thought for me:

watcha gonna do, big boss boehner, when the barackster with the energy of all his little barackamaniacs behind him, steps into that squared circle tuesday night at the staples center for a steel cage match? you're gonna see the power of barackamania, and the prayers, the vitamins, and training is gonna run wild over you!

But it's really just a performance. After it's over they play golf together. It wouldn't do for them to take their combat in the ring personally; they have to work with each other, after all, and they have more in common with each other than they do with the chumps in the cheap seats. I imagine, though, that pro wrestlers spend more time among the general public than either the President of the United States or the Speaker of the House ever does.

Now, the White House is obsessed with the opinion polls. It is not possible that Obama and his people don't know what most Americans think and want. For that matter, the Republicans must know it too. So, when Obama sold out a public option in his health-insurance bill, when he put the deficit rather than jobs front and center, when he put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, when he extended and escalated US military adventures, he knew that if public opinion meant anything, he was chopping away at his chances of re-election with every budget cut. Yet he avowedly defied his base. Maybe he believes and hopes that he can spend his way into a second term; and maybe he can.

As I've written here a few times, many (most?) Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than vote against the corporate agenda. Judging by the 2010 elections, that is especially true of the so-called Blue-Dog Democrats. Ever since he took office Obama has made it clear that he's no exception. He might even have convinced himself that he's different, but actions speak louder than words.