Land of the free-to-blow-your-neighbor’s-brains-out

. . . home of the not-quite-brave-enough-to-overcome-your-paranoid-fantasies-without-hiding-behind-a-gun.

In case you hadn’t heard, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, ruled yesterday that the Second Amendment protects your right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense, overturning the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns.

I’m not going to get into the parsing of the Second Amendment and what its various eighteenth-century commas mean or don’t mean—that ground has already been plowed (if you care about this and you’re not already familiar with the arguments, see Adam Freedman’s piece, “Clause and Effect,” from late last year). But I do think we need to ask the question of whether we Americans care more about human life (even if it’s just our own) or the right to be able to take life with one pull of a trigger. (My wife and I are expecting our first child in a few months; I’m not sure whether to hope it’s a boy or a girl or a Smith & Wesson M&P Compact .357 Sig.)

So I’ll admit it: if there’s a correct interpretation of the Second Amendment, I don’t care what it is as long as there are someday enough reasonable Supreme Court justices to overturn yesterday’s ruling. In that light, here’s one last thing to think about: as the New York Times editorial page put it today,

“This audaciously harmful decision, which hands the far right a victory it has sought for decades, is a powerful reminder of why voters need to have the Supreme Court firmly in mind when they vote for the president this fall.”

 

When the metaphor becomes the thing it represents

Marines in the cargo hold of a commercial plane at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, preparing the coffin of Second Lt. James J. Cathey to descend on the luggage conveyor belt to his family. (Photo and caption from a book review in today’s New York Times. No need to comment; just think.)

 

Conservatives and liberals, straight from the horse’s mouth

George Will, op-ed columnist and polite T.V. talking head, appeared on The Colbert Report the other night. Now, I’m not one of those people who relies on Mr. Colbert and Jon Stewart for my news, but in response to the question, “What do you think the difference is between conservatives and liberals?” Mr. Will replied with a clear and concise answer that was, in my view, newsworthy for its honesty:

“The competing values are freedom and equality. . . . Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequality as an outcome from a free market. Liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice and circumscribe freedom in order to get it.”

Now, I’d go so far as to suggest that this qualifies as “something we always new but could never get anybody to admit.” Given Mr. Will’s air-tight conservative credentials (which of course may be a tad weaker today, owing to his aforementioned honesty and his confession later in the interview of religious agnosticism!), can we enter it into the record that that “something we always knew” has finally been admitted?

Anyhow, leaving aside for the moment the argument over whether freedom or equality is the higher aim (and whether freedom must in fact be sacrificed and circumscribed for the sake of equality), can we at least expect that millions of people will now wake up, smell the Perrier-Jouet 2000 Belle Epoque, and realize what they’ve been voting for for the last forty years?

 

So sad . . .

From an article in today’s New York Times:

“. . . in a humbling admission that the S.U.V. era is all but over, [General Motors], Detroit’s leading automaker, said it was considering selling the gas-guzzling Hummer brand it once regarded as a pillar of future growth.”

And we thought G.M. had America’s bright shiny future all figured out!

 

A mid-year new year’s resolution

We all know how reliable new year’s resolutions are, but anyhow. . . .

If Psalm 72 were ascribed not to some ancient Israelite king but to the likes of us (whoever “us” is):

Give us your justice, O God,
and plant your righteousness in us.
May we deal honestly with your sisters and brothers,
and may we seek justice for your poor.
In our words and actions;
our letters, phone calls, and votes;
in our gifts of time and treasure and the way we spend our money,
may we defend the cause of the poor,
give deliverance to the needy,
and break the powers that oppress.

May we live now,
while the sun shines and as long as the moon lasts,
not waiting for them to burn out and fall from the sky.
May we be bearers and spreaders of your grace,
like rain on the fresh-cut grass,
like showers on a summer afternoon.
In our days may righteousness flourish and peace abound,
and if they don’t may we stand up and shout about it.

May your commonwealth of justice and peace
have dominion from sea to sea,
and may artificial borders crumble from here to the ends of the earth.
May the nations look up and take note that, through you,
we deliver the needy when they call,
the poor and those who have no helper.
Grant us empathy for the weak and the needy,
and save their lives for the here and now as well as for the life to come.
From oppression and violence redeem their lives,
and don’t let us forget that their blood is precious your sight.

Long may we live and move and be!
Teach us the meaning of abundant and eternal life.
May there be abundance of grain in the land;
may it wave on the tops of the mountains;
may its fruit be like an apple orchard after a warm and wet spring;
and may your children blossom in the cities like grass in the park.

May your name endure forever,
and may we proclaim your fame as long as the sun shines.
May all the nations and their peoples be blessed,
and may their happiness be infectious.

Blessed be the God of all creation,
who alone does wondrous things.
And may some of God’s wondrous deeds be done through us,
so that the deep breath and exhalation of God’s justice
might fill the whole earth.
Amen and Amen.

(© 2008, D.C.)

[Originally published on 6 January 2008 in the defunct blog On the nature of . . . .]

 

Nineteen days after I was born

There’s a conference on youth ministry going on this week at Montreat, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) conference center near Asheville, N.C.,—but that’s not really what this post is about.

Yesterday was the U.S. holiday that commemorates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and because Dr. King spoke at Montreat in the summer of 1965, shortly after the Watts riots, the audiotape of his address was played last night for anyone attending the youth ministry conference who cared to come and listen.

Dr. King’s speech, delivered in Montreat’s Anderson Auditorium on the afternoon of 21 August, was obviously one he had delivered many times, but it was no less powerful for that. It contained many of the famous lines—we might call them sound bites—for which Dr. King is remembered:

• “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
• “Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
• And the stirring peroration: “. . . This will be a great day. It will not be the day of the white man; it will not be the day of the black man; it will be the day of man as man. And this will be the day that all over this great nation, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and sing, in the words of the old Negro spritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

What’s so interesting and powerful about hearing these famous lines in the context of an hour-long speech, though, is that you realize they were more than sound bites—that they were in fact tightly linked building blocks in an amazingly tightly constructed argument.

The address had three major parts: (i) a call for an end to racial segregation; (ii) a deconstruction of racial prejudice; and (iii) a defense of social action—an emphasis on the here and now rather than on the great hereafter—by Christian churches. Indeed, running through all three parts of the speech was a call for the church to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—no small thing, and certainly not a proposition that Dr. King or anyone else in 1965 could have taken for granted. (It’s also notable that Dr. King clearly felt that the church did in fact have the power to make a difference in society, whether for good or evil—not necessarily something that we might assume in our “postmodern” context, forty-three years later.)

Dr. King concluded by building and sharing a vision of the “beloved community,” grounded in love of enemies and an embrace of the philosophy of nonviolent resistance (a particularly salient point in light of Watts). Hearing Dr. King’s elaboration on the concept of nonviolence was another reminder of how we today may not understand his ideas and his approach as well as we might think, for this nonviolence was in no way passivity or weakness or submission—rather, it was both strategy and tactic, and it was aggressive in an entirely counter-cultural way: you can beat us up, but we’re going to keep loving you until we wear you down.

And so there we were, a bunch of privileged (mostly white) people, conscious, thanks to a lecture we’d all heard earlier in the day, of how little we’d accomplished so far in our lives, in a conference room with the lights turned down low, listening to the scratchy, somewhat muffled audio record of a piece of history that too many of us think of as, well, history. But it’s history that happened nineteen days after I was born, in the state where I was born, in a room whose toilets I’ve scrubbed—and to my mind, at least, those elements of closeness brought those events out of history’s fog, if only for a day.

[Originally published on 22 January 2008 in the defunct blog On the nature of . . . .]

 

Xmas with a capital “X”

Maybe you’re one of the 4,485,370 people who have seen the “video” (slide show is a better description, as pointed out by my friend Skunk Ape in a Kilt) called “Christmas with a Capital ‘C’,” based on the song of the same name by a band called the Go Fish Guys. You probably have seen it, because I have seen it, and I’m on very few people’s e-mail forwarding list (for which I’m thankful).

Anyhow, this slide-show-with-a-soundtrack is the latest defensive shot in the seemingly endless backlash against the “War against Christmas”—guess you’d call it the “War for Christmas.” (Lord knows war is the first thing I think of when I think of Christmas.) Here’s a sample from “Christmas with a Capital ‘C’”:

“God’s got a law and we pretty much destroyed it.
We’re gonna get judged, There’s no way to avoid it.
But Jesus came down to take the punishment for me;
He did it for you too, so maybe you can see why . . .

“It’s called Christmas, what more can I say?
It’s about the birth of Christ, and you can’t take that away.
You can call it something else, but that’s not what it will be.
It’s called Christmas with a capital ‘C’.”

(There’s that substitutionary atonement thing again, by the way. . . .)

Now, I have to admit that I do find the whole “happy holidays” thing a bit annoying—but only when I’m trying to find a box of Christmas cards that doesn’t have “Season’s Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” preprinted on the inside. (I know, I should make my own.). However, if one is saying “happy holidays” because one is aware that not everyone is Christian, then isn’t “happy holidays” perfectly appropriate?

I guess the thing that really bugs me about the pro-Christmas side in the Culture Wars is that they always seem so stinkin’ angry. Seems like what the “Christmas with a Capital ‘C’” crowd is really saying when they wish you a merry Christmas is “Merry F@#&*@$ Christmas, You A@$-&*@$!” What about “good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2.10)?

And for that matter, any chance the Go Fish Guys could have used the time and energy they spent on their angry little hymn to do some good in the world (i.e., maybe follow Jesus rather than turn people off to Jesus)?

* * *

A couple of post-scripts:

I’m really proud of the title of this post, but I’ve been afraid to do a Google search of it because I’m sure I didn’t think of it first.

Also, one of the comments posted on YouTube says what I’ve tried to say above much better, and in only four words: “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Happy Christmas.

[Originally published on 5 December 2007 in the defunct blog On the nature of . . . .]

 

Where it all begins (or so you might think if you live around here)

If you live in the South (or in a “red” state, or maybe in any state in the States), you routinely come across all sorts of public expressions of religiosity. Around Asheville, N.C., somebody apparently has pretty steady work setting up life-size (”Crucify up to a 350-pound man right in your own back yard!”) talking crosses in church yards and along roadsides. A variation on “Jesus Saves” seems to be the most popular message, but my personal favorite is “Blood-Secured Redemption” (unfortunately, the “Blood-Secured Redemption” cross isn’t as photogenic as the one pictured above).

Now, these crosses are great as roadside folk art–but as theology, needless to say (I hope), they leave a little to be desired. Yes, according to the culturally dominant line of “atonement theory” (the branch of theology that deals with how salvation “works”), Jesus’s blood does indeed save: Jesus’s death pays the penalty for our sin, satisfying the blood-lust of a wrathful God who would cast us all into the fiery pit had Jesus not come along to take our place on the cross, &c.

Logically, legalistically, and mathematically, this so-called substitutionary atonement makes sense. But it raises some questions, chief among them this: If God is so blood-thirsty and angry as to require the death penalty for human sin, why would God send Jesus to save us in the first place?

Obviously you can get trapped in all sorts of circular arguments when you start thinking about these things, but maybe the problem lies simply in starting with these things–-i.e, starting with what’s in it for us. Maybe instead we should start where the ancient Hebrews started:

To begin with, God . . .

[Originally published on 26 September 2007 in the defunct blog On the nature of . . . .]

 

The end for the underdog (so what else is new?)

As one who (i) holds an M.R. degree from Davidson College and (ii) is and always will be hopelessly and (to those who know me well) tiresomely smitten with the underdog in every possible situation, the outcome of yesterday’s N.C.A.A. Tournament game between Davidson and Kansas was sadly familiar.

Should the Cats have drawn up a final play designed to have Jason Richards feed Stephen Curry or, if that didn’t pan out, drive the lane for the tie? Maybe. Should Davidson have picked a different game to shoot 5 of 12 from the free-throw line? Duh.

But of course in the end it wouldn’t have mattered, because the underdog always ends up cold and lonely, tied to a rusty chain in the backyard–while the overdogs head to Texas for an unbelievably boring match-up of four no. 1 seeds. (Yes, I realize that I’m probably the only person in the country who finds a Carolina-U.C.L.A.-Kansas-Memphis Final Four boring, but I never claimed to be rational–only sentimental. Just ask my dad.)

 

Bloated carcass

So I saw one of these on the road the other day:

Ever notice bloated roadkill on the side of the road on a bright hot day? (Anybody remember “Double-Yellow Brand Sun-Dried Possum,” canned at “one of our many roadside canning stations along U.S. 460 in Southside Virginia”?) That’s what this thing–the 2008 Toyota Sequoia–reminds me of.

I mean, c’mon Toyota–it’s nice that you make the Prius and all, but it’s hard to take you seriously when you also make crap like this.