Friday, December 14, 2012
Republican logic and rhetoric:
Ornstein and Mann say (1) the Republicans lied wholesale throughout the fall 2012 campaign and (2) the mainstream media was too worried about the appearance of impartiality to cover that story. Mark Hemingway's rebuttal (in The Weekly Standard) of Ornstein and Mann uses a curious strategy. Hemingway notes that Politifact, an important national fact-checker, found that Republicans lied about three times as egregiously as the Democrats did. He then uses this point as evidence that O&M are wrong--see, the story was covered--, ignoring that Politifact is corroborating the first half of O&M's claim. So Hemingway gets us to focus on one exception to the second half of O&M's thesis, and denies the whole first half, which he dismisses as an ideological disagreement rather than a case of outraged empiricism--which is exactly the core of what's at issue. This will presumably keep him in good standing with Republicans, but it also makes him complicit in their dishonesty.
We have had five years--or 200+ years--of this. In 2008 the most disheartening thing about Barack Obama's campaign was his readiness to throw truth under the bus. But most of his speeches and ads were mostly true--while half or more of Senator McCain's weren't. (See FactCheck and Politifact. Lots of "Pants on Fire" lies.) Again this year, judged by a standard of truthfulness, the President's campaign earned no honors. And again the Republicans were worse, far worse. I don't see what to do about it except not to do it and try to persuade others not to do it. Cite sources (real sources). Make concessions where appropriate. Don't demonize; stick to the record and the facts and the issues. "In war, truth is the first casualty" is an insight of millennias' standing. Too much of our politics is now conducted by the abysmal standards of war. There are many unanticipated and unrecognized consequences.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Granite State Priorities overview
We live in a state where (a) poor people pay an effective tax rate as a percentage of income four times as high as rich people; and where (b) the public sector is losing ground every day--our public schools are being devalued and underfunded; our higher education system is being underfunded; our public safety employees as well as our teachers are being criticized as though they were selfish people on the take from those who work hard; our environmental resources--Great Bay, our rivers, our ocean--are being gradually degraded; our neediest citizens, of whom there are many, are seeing diminished support systems that were not lavish in the first place. Meanwhile we continue not to tax estates, no matter how large, not to tax income, no matter how large. Instead the entire public sector is demonized, services are reduced, and people's property taxes continue to rise irrespective of their ability to pay them. Last year in my town (Exeter) dozens of people were threatened with eviction from their homes, many of them mobile homes, for non-payment of property taxes. This state of affairs is called The NH Advantage. Horsefeathers. NH's advantages are its people and its natural resources. These real advantages are under attack, typically under disguised attack.
NH needs revenue reform, and that is how GSP aims to address the issues we are thinking about today. We aim to change the conversation, so that it is less dominated by mythology and manipulation, and instead is characterized more often by transparency and information. If we are successful, the state will reconnect its tax bills more closely with the ability to pay them; we will sustain a public sector that performs many critical functions; and we will recover a sense of freedom that includes more than the right to self-defense and the right to stiff the community at tax time. Living free can mean and should mean not just the strength and capacity to defend ourselves and not just healthy self-reliance but compassion, fairness, and the ability to look beyond the present moment. If you want to live in a state with strong public schools, a state where communities are prepared to manage their own wastes, so that Great Bay can recover instead of becoming a clone of the Chesapeake, a state where people with disabilities can find help and all people can access a functional court system, a state where employees are not vilified for defending their own as well as the community's interests--in short, a state where freedom means more than resistance to tyranny and the right to shoot intruders in your home--take a look at gspriorities.org, and think about how you can join us in rebuilding the real NH advantage. We need letters to newspapers, emails and phone calls to legislators, some money, some help with the effective use of electronic media. "We" at the moment means the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the northern NE District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Friends Service Committee, the League of Women Voters, the National Education Association, the State Employees Association, Every Child Matters--and an increasing number of citizens at large. Join us.
NH needs revenue reform, and that is how GSP aims to address the issues we are thinking about today. We aim to change the conversation, so that it is less dominated by mythology and manipulation, and instead is characterized more often by transparency and information. If we are successful, the state will reconnect its tax bills more closely with the ability to pay them; we will sustain a public sector that performs many critical functions; and we will recover a sense of freedom that includes more than the right to self-defense and the right to stiff the community at tax time. Living free can mean and should mean not just the strength and capacity to defend ourselves and not just healthy self-reliance but compassion, fairness, and the ability to look beyond the present moment. If you want to live in a state with strong public schools, a state where communities are prepared to manage their own wastes, so that Great Bay can recover instead of becoming a clone of the Chesapeake, a state where people with disabilities can find help and all people can access a functional court system, a state where employees are not vilified for defending their own as well as the community's interests--in short, a state where freedom means more than resistance to tyranny and the right to shoot intruders in your home--take a look at gspriorities.org, and think about how you can join us in rebuilding the real NH advantage. We need letters to newspapers, emails and phone calls to legislators, some money, some help with the effective use of electronic media. "We" at the moment means the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the northern NE District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Friends Service Committee, the League of Women Voters, the National Education Association, the State Employees Association, Every Child Matters--and an increasing number of citizens at large. Join us.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
a novel to hang onto
I read C.E. Morgan's All the Living with two classes of eleventh graders this term, and my high regard for this book was reconfirmed by their discussions and essays. Not that everyone loved it; but only deep imaginative engagement could have produced the essays that explored it.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Tribute to Mudslide
Tribute to Mudslide
(for Charles Pratt)
Mr. Loomis was already in Sag Harbor with his wife,
the writer Hilary Mills, and their 8-year-old chocolate
Lab, Mudslide. The New York Times
Without pretense or vanity the name says
that all three are unspeakably wonderful; it pushes
back against the malevolent chances
and grim certainties of the world. Does Mudslide
hurtle drunkenly down the bank like an otter?
If present at a disaster would he help find
victims under the fallen hillsides? As a chosen
name it proclaims: here is anarchic energy
restrained, disciplined, domesticated.
Mr. Loomis, newly retired, is 84,
Ms. Mills' age not given. In naming they do not
overlook love's daily melding of effort and gift,
forgiveness and delight. As though knowing that mud
is hard to wash off or vaccuum, Mudslide too must
honor the customs of the house much of the time.
May he do so gladly, and may it be so
with his people, and with us.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
letter to editor in Exeter, Portsmouth papers 8/11
The logic of being an Independent
Aug. 12 — To the Editor:
Last week, I went down to the town clerk's office and changed my party affiliation of nearly 50 years. I am now an independent. In New Hampshire, all voters are entitled to vote in any party's primary. Changing your affiliation is mostly symbolic, but it can also represent a new perspective.
In the 2008 primary, there was some speculation about exactly who was voting for Hillary Clinton, who for Barack Obama, and why. The downside of the open primary is that it provides an opportunity, even a motive, for voting in bad faith. If you were planning to vote Republican in November 2008, and thought that Clinton would be harder to beat in November, perhaps you voted for Obama in the primary, even if you had zero intention of supporting him in the general election.
I think there is another reason, one that trumps partisan strategy, for voting for a Republican. It is a reason that applies even if you share my opinion that that party has disqualified itself for leadership both nationally and in New Hampshire. As things stand, the primaries are all but owned by activists and ideologues, by each party's presumed base. At the moment, this is especially true in the Republican Party.
But if 10,000 New Hampshire Democrats voted for a relatively centrist Republican, and if moderate Republicans turned out for the primary, those votes would undermine the dominance of the hard-liners. Perhaps in 2016 the same logic would point toward a similar protest vote in the Democratic primary.
As for races at the state level, the puzzle is more intricate. While New Hampshire has its share of Washington's paralysis and denial, its decades-long servitude to a toxic pledge — The Pledge — against all broad-based taxes (except the property tax) has poisoned our political culture. We now have a widespread presumption that the entire public sector is inherently wasteful, not a means of collective action for the common good. The state's overreliance on property taxes causes its own resistance even to fundamental actions like the compliance of our communities with the Clean Water Act. Another result is that we have a system in which the poor pay taxes at an effective rate four times that of the rich; the middle pays at twice the rate of the rich; and the rich have what is almost a tax sanctuary; accumulated wealth is not taxed, even at death; capital gains are not taxed; high incomes are not taxed; lavish consumption is not taxed. Meanwhile, in the absence of realistic revenues, this generally prosperous state cannot maintain its courts or its colleges and universities, cannot provide even minimal assistance to many citizens who suffer from disabilities, cannot effectively support its schools and teachers and other public servants, cannot keep faith with our hospitals, and cannot protect even those environmental resources that are fundamental to our economy. What is a voter to do?
When the national economy fell apart in 2008, the state's already inadequate revenue stream dwindled, and New Hampshire Republicans sold the resulting expanded deficit to the voters as a result of out-of-control spending in Concord. The Democrats are now hoping to return to power because the voters have seen how the new Republican majorities, especially in the House, relish the cutting of essential investments like higher education. So the voters have one major party celebrating the supposed discipline and responsibility of abandoning wise investments that would require more revenue. And the other major party simply promises to manage the state's inadequate resources in a less ideological and more rational way. Neither major party faces the issue that we are dependent on the wrong taxes.
Because the state's financial crisis is now visible at a new level, and because we have open primaries, we should be able to nominate candidates who dissent from the orthodoxies of both major parties. A voter does have to choose one party ballot or the other, however. So as an independent, for the foreseeable future, I am going to be looking in a non-partisan spirit for state House and Senate candidates who refuse to sign The Pledge. If there are none, I will abstain from voting for state-level candidates. Or perhaps it's time for some write-ins, like Jane or John No.
Aug. 12 — To the Editor:
Last week, I went down to the town clerk's office and changed my party affiliation of nearly 50 years. I am now an independent. In New Hampshire, all voters are entitled to vote in any party's primary. Changing your affiliation is mostly symbolic, but it can also represent a new perspective.
In the 2008 primary, there was some speculation about exactly who was voting for Hillary Clinton, who for Barack Obama, and why. The downside of the open primary is that it provides an opportunity, even a motive, for voting in bad faith. If you were planning to vote Republican in November 2008, and thought that Clinton would be harder to beat in November, perhaps you voted for Obama in the primary, even if you had zero intention of supporting him in the general election.
I think there is another reason, one that trumps partisan strategy, for voting for a Republican. It is a reason that applies even if you share my opinion that that party has disqualified itself for leadership both nationally and in New Hampshire. As things stand, the primaries are all but owned by activists and ideologues, by each party's presumed base. At the moment, this is especially true in the Republican Party.
But if 10,000 New Hampshire Democrats voted for a relatively centrist Republican, and if moderate Republicans turned out for the primary, those votes would undermine the dominance of the hard-liners. Perhaps in 2016 the same logic would point toward a similar protest vote in the Democratic primary.
As for races at the state level, the puzzle is more intricate. While New Hampshire has its share of Washington's paralysis and denial, its decades-long servitude to a toxic pledge — The Pledge — against all broad-based taxes (except the property tax) has poisoned our political culture. We now have a widespread presumption that the entire public sector is inherently wasteful, not a means of collective action for the common good. The state's overreliance on property taxes causes its own resistance even to fundamental actions like the compliance of our communities with the Clean Water Act. Another result is that we have a system in which the poor pay taxes at an effective rate four times that of the rich; the middle pays at twice the rate of the rich; and the rich have what is almost a tax sanctuary; accumulated wealth is not taxed, even at death; capital gains are not taxed; high incomes are not taxed; lavish consumption is not taxed. Meanwhile, in the absence of realistic revenues, this generally prosperous state cannot maintain its courts or its colleges and universities, cannot provide even minimal assistance to many citizens who suffer from disabilities, cannot effectively support its schools and teachers and other public servants, cannot keep faith with our hospitals, and cannot protect even those environmental resources that are fundamental to our economy. What is a voter to do?
When the national economy fell apart in 2008, the state's already inadequate revenue stream dwindled, and New Hampshire Republicans sold the resulting expanded deficit to the voters as a result of out-of-control spending in Concord. The Democrats are now hoping to return to power because the voters have seen how the new Republican majorities, especially in the House, relish the cutting of essential investments like higher education. So the voters have one major party celebrating the supposed discipline and responsibility of abandoning wise investments that would require more revenue. And the other major party simply promises to manage the state's inadequate resources in a less ideological and more rational way. Neither major party faces the issue that we are dependent on the wrong taxes.
Because the state's financial crisis is now visible at a new level, and because we have open primaries, we should be able to nominate candidates who dissent from the orthodoxies of both major parties. A voter does have to choose one party ballot or the other, however. So as an independent, for the foreseeable future, I am going to be looking in a non-partisan spirit for state House and Senate candidates who refuse to sign The Pledge. If there are none, I will abstain from voting for state-level candidates. Or perhaps it's time for some write-ins, like Jane or John No.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
The City Dark
This thoughtful and playful film by Ian Cheney adds to the admiration I have for him (and Curt Ellis) based on King Corn. It treats the direct observation of a cloudless and not too polluted night sky as a core experience of the natural world. It contemplates the ways in which most people alive today are impeded in any attempt they may happen to make at obtaining such an experience. The film includes images of night skies from Maine to Brooklyn and beyond and also has funny and impassioned interviews with Neal Tyson and other students and lovers of the stars. It's lovely work.
unfair and misleading reviews of a great book
Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice is, for anyone who cares about Shakespeare's plays, a great read, a source of insight, and a shared celebration. People who have not yet seen the book but have read Garry Wills' perverse and misleading review in the NYTBR (4/17/2011)or have seen only Andrea Campana's dismissive and misleading letter (5/8/2011) will have no idea of Yoshino's strengths or of his purposes. Here then is a simple challenge: read either the Introduction to Yoshino's book or, say, his chapter on King Lear. Then either ignore Wills and Campana (and read the rest of A Thousand Times More Fair) or test what you have read of Yoshino against their complaints. In my opinion Wills--and the Times--should be embarrassed. It's one thing to disparage a book if you describe it accurately in doing so. It's another to build your thesis on a misrepresentation.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
quality alert
Charles W. Pratt's new book, From the Box Marked 'Some Are Missing,'is now available. It brings together most of his strongest poems from several decades. It puts me in mind of Richard Wilbur, of Frost, of Seamus Heaney. If you think that's hyperbolic, look at the book. Start, perhaps, with "Winter Squash," "For Sarah," and "The Merger"--though I could as easily name a dozen, two dozen, more, others. www.hobblebush.com
Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice will be released in April (ECCO). It has wonderful, original, convincing readings of Othello, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Hamlet, others. Along the way Yoshino reviews and clarifies a few analogical contemporary events, esp. the Simpson trial and Bill Clinton's (actionable) spinning of the truth in his sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case. But the book is mostly and even more memorably about Shakespeare.
Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice will be released in April (ECCO). It has wonderful, original, convincing readings of Othello, Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Hamlet, others. Along the way Yoshino reviews and clarifies a few analogical contemporary events, esp. the Simpson trial and Bill Clinton's (actionable) spinning of the truth in his sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case. But the book is mostly and even more memorably about Shakespeare.
Friday, September 24, 2010
writing
Some years ago Chang-Rae Lee visited one of my classes and remarked, "I'm a writer; I like sentences." I'm a reader and editor, and I like sentences too. I thought of Chang's remark as I finished Willa Cather's My Antonia today, which ends with this:
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
Saturday, May 29, 2010
brief view of Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood
Enter not, ye who read for fun. The strands of this transhistorical story include the Holocaust; the ignorant and savage European persecution of Jews that predates Hittler by four hundred years; and racism as well as anti-Semitism. As a cover blurb says, "He finds humanity everywhere," but the humanity is not always or even mostly redemptive. 'What can be done on the earth to cleanse it after this?' Hell of a question. It's a tremendously ambitious book and yet also one that is informed by humility: it's not about him.
The final scenes are set in fledgling Israel. They too are unsentimental and unromantic, but they do honor the new country for its commitment to survival. Yet the sense I got was of Act VI of a tragedy, one more like the comprehensive desolation of The Trojan Women than like Othello (a version of which is part of the novel), where some semblance of justice has been re-established.(Though I suppose one could say that just as Iago is exposed and captured, so Hitler has been defeated.) In the novel life does endure, but Phillips doesn't make great claims for where it is headed. He only shows us what his somber vision sees.
The final scenes are set in fledgling Israel. They too are unsentimental and unromantic, but they do honor the new country for its commitment to survival. Yet the sense I got was of Act VI of a tragedy, one more like the comprehensive desolation of The Trojan Women than like Othello (a version of which is part of the novel), where some semblance of justice has been re-established.(Though I suppose one could say that just as Iago is exposed and captured, so Hitler has been defeated.) In the novel life does endure, but Phillips doesn't make great claims for where it is headed. He only shows us what his somber vision sees.
Monday, May 10, 2010
short journal entry on The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien's claim in "On the Rainy River" (the fourth chapter of The Things They Carried)that going to the war was an act of cowardice is paradoxical, but it's also his claim to make. Physical courage is not the only species of courage; moral courage is often less concrete but may be as fundamental, as essential, to the survival of the self as physical courage is. How many memoirists 'go there'? Of course The Things They Carried isn't a memoir. But then why is Tim O'Brien such a major character in it, both as platoon member and, much more, as self-conscious narrator? Suppose one took "Tim O'Brien" out of the book. Then it could no longer be the story of his keeping Timmy alive; and it would miss the particular kind of authenticity (as well as the particular kind of story-telling) that it now "performs," as some of my younger college-schooled friends say. Every time I read this book, I want to write about it, much more than this post implies.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
public images
According to William Rhoden ( NYT Feb. 21), it is folly to believe in "manufactured images" based on sports marketing. Who could disagree? But not every public image is inauthentic. We sometimes believe, as millions did with Tiger, in a public figure as being genuine in his or her respect for a profession, even for politics, or for a sport. In this sense I still believe, for instance, in Rafa Nadal, in Kim Clijsters, in Paul Farmer, in Meryl Streep. I believe in golfers like Graeme McDowell (NYT March 6) who call penalties on themselves when they could almost certainly get away with a technical infraction. I believe in Derek Jeter even though I'm not much of a baseball fan. Tiger himself may well have lived up to that standard on the golf course.
We can also believe in such figures as adhering to normal if not elevated standards of good faith in private behavior as well as in their professional sphere. We can even hope that their private standards are higher than that: Roberto Clemente, Arthur Ashe. In this sense too I believe in Nadal, Clijsters, Farmer, Streep. "Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,/Yet grace must still look so."
Rhoden seems to say that since everyone is fallible, it is naive or hypocritical or both to believe in anyone in this sense. I may be as unwilling as Rhoden to believe again in Tiger (or in John Edwards and many others) in this sense. But to make that deep recoil a universal principle is a form of refusing to care because one may be hurt. That way lies the desert. It's not the only available habitat for people in general, nor for sports fans.
We can also believe in such figures as adhering to normal if not elevated standards of good faith in private behavior as well as in their professional sphere. We can even hope that their private standards are higher than that: Roberto Clemente, Arthur Ashe. In this sense too I believe in Nadal, Clijsters, Farmer, Streep. "Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,/Yet grace must still look so."
Rhoden seems to say that since everyone is fallible, it is naive or hypocritical or both to believe in anyone in this sense. I may be as unwilling as Rhoden to believe again in Tiger (or in John Edwards and many others) in this sense. But to make that deep recoil a universal principle is a form of refusing to care because one may be hurt. That way lies the desert. It's not the only available habitat for people in general, nor for sports fans.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
While I'm Falling
I have found Laura Moriarty's writing convincing and moving since I first encountered it in a personal essay she read aloud at Exeter in the fall of 2001, a piece that I continue to cherish and that I think of together with Scott Sanders' "The Inheritance of Tools" and Chang-Rae Lee's "Coming Home Again." Since then I've read her first novel, The Center of Everything, which I loved and will read again, and now While I'm Falling, whose characters I half expect to meet sometime.
While I'm Falling is in one way very narrow in scope: it is the story mainly of a college student, Veronica, whose parents have just divorced, and secondarily of the student's mother, Natalie. The setting, in Kansas, has a radius of perhaps fifteen miles. But in another way the story conveys intimations of universality. Grace Paley said she wanted her characters to have "the open destiny of life," and Moriarty's characters share this with them. Life in her stories is uncertain and fluid; but its vicissitudes allow for recoveries as well as disasters. The outcomes of every kind all seem equally probable. As I read I sense no agenda besides truth. I swear I would recognize Veronica and Natalie if I met them on the street, and I would be glad to see them.
While I'm Falling is in one way very narrow in scope: it is the story mainly of a college student, Veronica, whose parents have just divorced, and secondarily of the student's mother, Natalie. The setting, in Kansas, has a radius of perhaps fifteen miles. But in another way the story conveys intimations of universality. Grace Paley said she wanted her characters to have "the open destiny of life," and Moriarty's characters share this with them. Life in her stories is uncertain and fluid; but its vicissitudes allow for recoveries as well as disasters. The outcomes of every kind all seem equally probable. As I read I sense no agenda besides truth. I swear I would recognize Veronica and Natalie if I met them on the street, and I would be glad to see them.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
King Corn
Last night I got to see the whole of King Corn and to hear Ian Cheney respond to questions about it. Previously I had seen an abridged version and heard Curt Ellis do Q&A. Nothing but pleasure in both events.
It's wonderful as a piece of film-making and makes me want to see their other work. (Go to www.wickedelicate.com.)And it also pushes back against our contemporary political culture, so full of misrepresentations and acrimony. In King Corn there are two major interviews with people whose views are antithetical to Ian and Curt's--but the interviewees are treated respectfully, even empathically. Not only does this
aspect of the film make it deeper and more humane; it also makes it more persuasive. I'm tempted to show it to my students in relation to their choice of rhetorical strategies. Another achievement of King Corn is that even though it is topical and explores public issues that are hugely consequential, it is never shrill and always immensely entertaining. It's playful, for God's sake.
It's wonderful as a piece of film-making and makes me want to see their other work. (Go to www.wickedelicate.com.)And it also pushes back against our contemporary political culture, so full of misrepresentations and acrimony. In King Corn there are two major interviews with people whose views are antithetical to Ian and Curt's--but the interviewees are treated respectfully, even empathically. Not only does this
aspect of the film make it deeper and more humane; it also makes it more persuasive. I'm tempted to show it to my students in relation to their choice of rhetorical strategies. Another achievement of King Corn is that even though it is topical and explores public issues that are hugely consequential, it is never shrill and always immensely entertaining. It's playful, for God's sake.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
read this book
Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) has been well recognized among American historians and was well reviewed, but I hadn't heard of it til my daughter Anya gave it to me for Christmas. I finished it tonight.
One of the extraordinary things about this book is the voice in which Tyson chose to write it, which makes me want to speak more personally than I normally would in even an informal review; but first--
his book is a personal history, a family history, a community history (of Oxford, NC, in 1970,disclosing the antecedents and consequences of a racial murder), a state history (esp. 1898-1980), and a reflection on national history as it has been shaped by slavery and white supremacy. It is powerful conceptually, thematically, linguistically, and philosophically; and it is unpretentious to boot. It's both original and brave--professionally speaking it would have been safer to write in a more orthodox mode. But its personal voice is both appealing and, I finally saw, indispensable. In that way it reminds me of Kenji Yoshino's Covering, another remarkable work that most people would have done a different way (and so would have been unable to do).
The book begins with a day in 1970 when Tyson, then ten, is told by a neighbor that his (the neighbor's) father and brothers have just killed a ... black man. (The other boy uses the inevitable, dehumanizing term in the context; Tyson uses real names throughout.) The book unravels the story factually and emblematically.
When I was a graduate student at Cornell in this period (1967-1970), no one was murdered on campus, but there were guns whose relevance was racial, as a famous Newsweek cover photo showed (in one light). It's been a long time, but Tyson's book has stirred the memories. I'll see if I can write about them (separately). Whether or not I can do that, I gratefully salute Timothy Tyson.
One of the extraordinary things about this book is the voice in which Tyson chose to write it, which makes me want to speak more personally than I normally would in even an informal review; but first--
his book is a personal history, a family history, a community history (of Oxford, NC, in 1970,disclosing the antecedents and consequences of a racial murder), a state history (esp. 1898-1980), and a reflection on national history as it has been shaped by slavery and white supremacy. It is powerful conceptually, thematically, linguistically, and philosophically; and it is unpretentious to boot. It's both original and brave--professionally speaking it would have been safer to write in a more orthodox mode. But its personal voice is both appealing and, I finally saw, indispensable. In that way it reminds me of Kenji Yoshino's Covering, another remarkable work that most people would have done a different way (and so would have been unable to do).
The book begins with a day in 1970 when Tyson, then ten, is told by a neighbor that his (the neighbor's) father and brothers have just killed a ... black man. (The other boy uses the inevitable, dehumanizing term in the context; Tyson uses real names throughout.) The book unravels the story factually and emblematically.
When I was a graduate student at Cornell in this period (1967-1970), no one was murdered on campus, but there were guns whose relevance was racial, as a famous Newsweek cover photo showed (in one light). It's been a long time, but Tyson's book has stirred the memories. I'll see if I can write about them (separately). Whether or not I can do that, I gratefully salute Timothy Tyson.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Female Sports Violence
Female Sports Violence: Choosing a Context
The furor over Elizabeth Lambert's rough play in her Mountain West Conference women's soccer semifinal has so far been mostly about gender roles. It offers a chance for a second conversation, one about the ethics of sports--individual sports and sports as a whole. Both conversations also have a bearing on many other professional workplaces. If you haven't seen what Lambert did and would like to have that as background, here is a three-minute clip: newsy.com
Different sports (and other professions) have different cultures. Some but not all of these differences are about violence. Others are about cheating.
In contact sports what levels of roughness are acceptable or even desirable are a matter of continuous debate and adjustment, as in the relatively new rules designed to protect football quarterbacks. When refs may penalize players (and thus teams) for "unnecessary roughness" or "flagrant fouls," they make judgment calls. Where these sports--basketball, soccer, others--include women, conceptions of gender may well be involved. (Conceptions of maleness may be involved even in the absence of women.) That conversation is worthwhile.
But there is a broader conversation that the country generally avoids, a conversation about the idea and not just the rules of sports. In football and baseball, players often seek to deceive referees and umpires about whether they have actually caught a pass just above the ground or a foul ball that the player has chased into the first rows of spectators. Modern television technology provides something of a reality check, but the culture of the sport usually endorses the attempted trickery. Suppose a professional player admitted--on the field, in the moment of decision-- to having only trapped a pass or caught the baseball on a bounce off a seat. Does anyone think he would be celebrated by his teammates for his sportsmanship?
At the other end of the ethical spectrum is golf, where players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in situations where they would be unlikely to be caught or would at least have a plausible defense. These penalties may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Golf is usually an individual sport, so the players are not typically up against the potential mockery or anger of teammates. But given the generous way players usually talk about their opponents, and the way they habitually respect the game itself, it seems likely that their behavior would be the same--and would not be faulted--even in a team context. It is a sport whose culture does not change when one shifts from the amateur to the professional level. If anything, its ethics become more formal, more distinct, and more deeply consensual.
Tennis--admittedly, another non-contact sport--is an interesting case of a sport where standards of behavior are visibly up for grabs. After a period in which verbal abuse of umpires was routinely tolerated, there are now fines, though not always significant ones. The New York Times ran an op-ed this summer whose writer, an economist, urged players to exploit the new challenge rules in bad faith for competitive advantage. (He did not urge them to break the rules.) In a televised match a few weeks before, Nowak Djokovic essentially conceded a key point to Andy Roddick because Djokovic knew the call, which had gone against Roddick, had been in error. Roddick won the point, the game, and the match. Was Djokovic a fool, or was he someone who wants to play a game in which victory and money are not the only values? Can you imagine Rafa Nadal cheating, or abusing his opponent?
These two sets of issues--levels of roughness and respect for the meaning and function of rules--are not unrelated. Both involve continuous choices in situations where a player may not be able to simultaneously maximize both the chance of victory and his--or her--loyalty to the sport itself. The people--men and women--now engaged in assessing Elizabeth Lambert's rough play would serve the country well if they broadened the discussion. So would bankers and investment professionals.
The furor over Elizabeth Lambert's rough play in her Mountain West Conference women's soccer semifinal has so far been mostly about gender roles. It offers a chance for a second conversation, one about the ethics of sports--individual sports and sports as a whole. Both conversations also have a bearing on many other professional workplaces. If you haven't seen what Lambert did and would like to have that as background, here is a three-minute clip: newsy.com
Different sports (and other professions) have different cultures. Some but not all of these differences are about violence. Others are about cheating.
In contact sports what levels of roughness are acceptable or even desirable are a matter of continuous debate and adjustment, as in the relatively new rules designed to protect football quarterbacks. When refs may penalize players (and thus teams) for "unnecessary roughness" or "flagrant fouls," they make judgment calls. Where these sports--basketball, soccer, others--include women, conceptions of gender may well be involved. (Conceptions of maleness may be involved even in the absence of women.) That conversation is worthwhile.
But there is a broader conversation that the country generally avoids, a conversation about the idea and not just the rules of sports. In football and baseball, players often seek to deceive referees and umpires about whether they have actually caught a pass just above the ground or a foul ball that the player has chased into the first rows of spectators. Modern television technology provides something of a reality check, but the culture of the sport usually endorses the attempted trickery. Suppose a professional player admitted--on the field, in the moment of decision-- to having only trapped a pass or caught the baseball on a bounce off a seat. Does anyone think he would be celebrated by his teammates for his sportsmanship?
At the other end of the ethical spectrum is golf, where players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in situations where they would be unlikely to be caught or would at least have a plausible defense. These penalties may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Golf is usually an individual sport, so the players are not typically up against the potential mockery or anger of teammates. But given the generous way players usually talk about their opponents, and the way they habitually respect the game itself, it seems likely that their behavior would be the same--and would not be faulted--even in a team context. It is a sport whose culture does not change when one shifts from the amateur to the professional level. If anything, its ethics become more formal, more distinct, and more deeply consensual.
Tennis--admittedly, another non-contact sport--is an interesting case of a sport where standards of behavior are visibly up for grabs. After a period in which verbal abuse of umpires was routinely tolerated, there are now fines, though not always significant ones. The New York Times ran an op-ed this summer whose writer, an economist, urged players to exploit the new challenge rules in bad faith for competitive advantage. (He did not urge them to break the rules.) In a televised match a few weeks before, Nowak Djokovic essentially conceded a key point to Andy Roddick because Djokovic knew the call, which had gone against Roddick, had been in error. Roddick won the point, the game, and the match. Was Djokovic a fool, or was he someone who wants to play a game in which victory and money are not the only values? Can you imagine Rafa Nadal cheating, or abusing his opponent?
These two sets of issues--levels of roughness and respect for the meaning and function of rules--are not unrelated. Both involve continuous choices in situations where a player may not be able to simultaneously maximize both the chance of victory and his--or her--loyalty to the sport itself. The people--men and women--now engaged in assessing Elizabeth Lambert's rough play would serve the country well if they broadened the discussion. So would bankers and investment professionals.
Monday, November 2, 2009
movie journal: An Education (third draft)
A teacher myself, and someone of a certain age, I found myself more interested in this film by a minor character, Jenny's English teacher Miss Stubbs, than by its young protagonist (Jenny herself). I don't think that this was all about age.
For its first hour and more, "An Education" is a fable of romantic rebellion against loving but conventional parents, who see their daughter's striking academic talents only as a means by which she can enter Oxford in search of an economically promising husband. Jenny herself wants a wider space for passion, for life; in her revulsion against her parents' utilitarian aspirations she thinks she has found a glorious mentor in a handsome and charming man, David, who, as she soon knows, obtains money fraudulently and who, as at first she doesn't know, already has a wife and child and a history of affairs with pretty innocents. The sexual initiation he provides her on her seventeenth birthday is gentle but, apparently (the scene is discreet, all but skipped over), mechanical and short-lived. But she remains dazzled by his other gifts--art auctions, trips to Paris, a veneer of chic fashion and the trappings of culture. When she sacrifices her school work to pursue this affair, she is expelled; and suddenly she has to contemplate Oxford as likely to be unreachable rather than as a vague invitation to social advancement. When it seems to be gone, she begins to understand what else it might be.
Her changed perspective is close to arriving too late. Her headmistress is scornful and unforgiving. But Jenny has the wit and the honesty to submit herself to the authority of Miss Stubbs, an unmarried, thirty-something exemplar of intellectual independence and personal integrity. In the full early glow of her infatuation with David, Jenny has rejected Miss Stubbs, to her beautiful face, as 'dead,' when the teacher tried to call her to something more substantial than seduction. But now, and especially once she has seen Miss Stubbs' modest but stylish apartment, full of real books, Jenny is quick to see how uncomprehending she herself has been. When she asks for help, Miss Stubbs is relieved rather than reproachful, and apparently she also has practical abilities and resources, since the scene soon shifts to Oxford.
It is there that in a voiceover Jenny allows us and herself to see that deep ambiguities remain. While her idea of an education has grown and deepened, she has acquired a certain ruthlessness in her pursuit of it. She tells an undergraduate suitor that she would be thrilled to discover Paris in his company, lying to him in order to encourage his advances and advance the trip. (By this time though she sees things through such new eyes that her words are not far from the truth.) One wonders whether Miss Stubbs, when younger, had to work through similar temptations, and whether her solitary life expresses the cost of her decision, her choices, as well as being the form she has found for her freedom, depth, and authenticity. What sort of liberation will Jenny choose? It will in any case be clear-eyed, and it will be an adult choice. But there is no guarantee that it will be one that will make her a soul-mate of Miss Stubbs. The film ends before we can know; we can only hope for Jenny that a university education will have given her enough of a grounding in the contemporary world and the world of ideas to let her choose an authentic future that matches her vibrancy and openness to growth.
Both characters have some real complexity, but I was moved most deeply by Miss Stubbs's willingness to serve Jenny without hesitation or reproach--indeed with relief, even joy--despite having been savaged by her earlier in the film. Part of the scene's power for me stemmed from Olivia Williams' entirely natural representation of Miss Stubbs, her ability not to overshadow Jenny (whose story it is) or insist in any way on her own virtue. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem of vocation, not just profession. It's not about her. My gratitude for this moment will stay with me long after the rest of the film, good as it is, has faded.
For its first hour and more, "An Education" is a fable of romantic rebellion against loving but conventional parents, who see their daughter's striking academic talents only as a means by which she can enter Oxford in search of an economically promising husband. Jenny herself wants a wider space for passion, for life; in her revulsion against her parents' utilitarian aspirations she thinks she has found a glorious mentor in a handsome and charming man, David, who, as she soon knows, obtains money fraudulently and who, as at first she doesn't know, already has a wife and child and a history of affairs with pretty innocents. The sexual initiation he provides her on her seventeenth birthday is gentle but, apparently (the scene is discreet, all but skipped over), mechanical and short-lived. But she remains dazzled by his other gifts--art auctions, trips to Paris, a veneer of chic fashion and the trappings of culture. When she sacrifices her school work to pursue this affair, she is expelled; and suddenly she has to contemplate Oxford as likely to be unreachable rather than as a vague invitation to social advancement. When it seems to be gone, she begins to understand what else it might be.
Her changed perspective is close to arriving too late. Her headmistress is scornful and unforgiving. But Jenny has the wit and the honesty to submit herself to the authority of Miss Stubbs, an unmarried, thirty-something exemplar of intellectual independence and personal integrity. In the full early glow of her infatuation with David, Jenny has rejected Miss Stubbs, to her beautiful face, as 'dead,' when the teacher tried to call her to something more substantial than seduction. But now, and especially once she has seen Miss Stubbs' modest but stylish apartment, full of real books, Jenny is quick to see how uncomprehending she herself has been. When she asks for help, Miss Stubbs is relieved rather than reproachful, and apparently she also has practical abilities and resources, since the scene soon shifts to Oxford.
It is there that in a voiceover Jenny allows us and herself to see that deep ambiguities remain. While her idea of an education has grown and deepened, she has acquired a certain ruthlessness in her pursuit of it. She tells an undergraduate suitor that she would be thrilled to discover Paris in his company, lying to him in order to encourage his advances and advance the trip. (By this time though she sees things through such new eyes that her words are not far from the truth.) One wonders whether Miss Stubbs, when younger, had to work through similar temptations, and whether her solitary life expresses the cost of her decision, her choices, as well as being the form she has found for her freedom, depth, and authenticity. What sort of liberation will Jenny choose? It will in any case be clear-eyed, and it will be an adult choice. But there is no guarantee that it will be one that will make her a soul-mate of Miss Stubbs. The film ends before we can know; we can only hope for Jenny that a university education will have given her enough of a grounding in the contemporary world and the world of ideas to let her choose an authentic future that matches her vibrancy and openness to growth.
Both characters have some real complexity, but I was moved most deeply by Miss Stubbs's willingness to serve Jenny without hesitation or reproach--indeed with relief, even joy--despite having been savaged by her earlier in the film. Part of the scene's power for me stemmed from Olivia Williams' entirely natural representation of Miss Stubbs, her ability not to overshadow Jenny (whose story it is) or insist in any way on her own virtue. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem of vocation, not just profession. It's not about her. My gratitude for this moment will stay with me long after the rest of the film, good as it is, has faded.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Ego's Two Voices
Dr. Hatchet and Mr. Kind: The Two Voices of the Ego (under revision)(26' without the Chinese temple scene)[see Buddhist teaching from Amy Schwartz's teacher at end]
In an intramural touch football game in, ah, 1964, I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my fraternity teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A touchdown in an informal pick-up game between two college fraternities carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment was for me an experience of healing. It changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. It was somehow more encouraging than my having set a school record in track at my high school a few years before.
Still, the value of this chance, inconsequential acclaim has long been overshadowed by the continuing vitality of demons I share with millions or billions of others: these bad advisors murmur softly but insidiously and ceaselessly. Among their many unsettling concerns are professional achievement; social status; economic class; and age, or what I think of as perceived distance from death. They say things like, "Imply something uncomplimentary about a colleague whom students are drawn to." "Earn more money so you can do whatever and display more upscale stuff." These ugly songs are hard to ignore but are also hard to catch in the act, let alone to silence.
No matter how improbably and absurdly, the catch and touchdown helped me listen to those harsh strains less attentively, to feel less inadequate, to feel approximately as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my predictable and embarrassing need at the time to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the set of self-protective lenses through which I viewed the world. Other layers, of course, remained.
In my second or third year here, now almost forty years ago, I was living in Wentworth and wondering how we were going to help a new Lower who seemed almost beside himself with anxiety, especially in dealing with adults. Finally the dorm head, Don Schultz, and I decided we would have a friendly chat with the student in which we would play not good cop/bad cop but good guy/good guy and change his perception of authority figures from Old Testament God to Barney. Mr. Schultz was a kindly person, compassionate and humorous, though the students sometimes called him "The Butcher" because on occasion he could be cheerfully hardline about things like being late for check-in.
When the conversation took place, everything seemed to go well. We sat in comfortable chairs in Don's apartment. He and I told endearing stories and explained our benign philosophy. The student was, if not relaxed, then at least polite and calm. Afterwards Don and I congratulated ourselves and exchanged hopes for a successful outcome.
Later that evening there was a knock on my door. It was Cary Staller, one of our proctors. He was very direct. "What did you do to [the new Lower]?" he asked. "The guy is sitting in his room, trembling."
I still recognize this as a substantial failure, but I no longer feel too guilty about it. Still this experience showed me how the ego can color almost everything one does. On that night my investment in a vision of myself as a person of good will kept me from seeing what the student was experiencing. I think--I hope–-I learned something from this experience about listening, but it remains a work in progress, a discipline for which the occasion never expires.
So I have been thinking about the contradictory claims of the ego, a puzzle that has engaged people for centuries, one that seems to be built into the nature of human experience at a pretty deep level. It was posed a couple of millennia ago by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The ego--a durable sense of self, necessary for love and art and meaningful service--gives us Whitman and Emerson; it is a chamber in the heart of all those with the courage to face down tyranny, whether political or cultural: Bishop Gene Robinson, Wangari Maatthai in Kenya, Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala, martyred Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, Nelson Mandela.
And yet the ego--the precarious sense of self that is inclined to see difference from itself as threatening or loathsome--tries to lead many of us down dark back alleys, where we can avoid or stealthily attack the Other (with a capital O). This version or part of the ego is driven to compare, endlessly, and then to congratulate itself if the comparison is flattering, and to hiss and throw tomatoes, or worse, if it isn't. For most of us freedom from this need and its well disguised or denied meanness is a lifelong challenge.
The ego in this second sense is mercurial, volatile, and insatiable. Unconsciously we try, often ruthlessly, to shore up its defenses--for instance, through projection, the defense mechanism in which we attribute to someone else what we least like or most fear about ourselves. These defenses are irrational and intrinsically flimsy, but we keep returning to them. Without them we would have to reconstruct our sense of who we are--that is, to change and grow.
A friend of mine, a writer, said once, "To know what one truly feels is a lifetime's learning." Part of that learning, that work, really, is coming to know what the self-protective lenses are and how they distort one's perceptions.
These are themes that have been searchingly explored in literature. In William Carlos Williams' unforgettable autobiographical story "The Use of Force," Williams, a physician, uses a large metal spoon and excessive force to obtain a throat culture from a child whose life is threatened by diphtheria. The story is about the ways in which the ego dresses up behavior that is socially justifiable but morally unsettling. In "The Outstation," by Somerset Maugham, one of the great stories in the language, two Englishmen serving their country's empire in the far East become trapped in a war of egos. Each calls or rather conceptualizes the other as the Other, while the story ironically shows us the core commonality between them, the defense of the fragile self that has invested so naturally and so rashly and in this case so fatally in its disguises. One sees the other as a moneyed prig; the other views him as a lower-class boor, an unmannerly slob. Both are lonely and vulnerable. At the end one is dead, and the ego of the survivor enjoys a festival of self-congratulation.
I recognized an opposing example of the ego's reach--a case where it is generous rather than perverse--in an English film I saw in October, "An Education." Near the end of that film the protagonist, Jenny, who is shamefacedly recovering from a heedless affair with a handsome, charming, and deeply dishonest older man, needs help, since by this time she has been expelled from school and seems to have lost her way, certainly her way to Oxford. She goes to see her former English teacher, Miss Stubbs, a woman whom earlier Jenny called (to her face) 'dead' when the teacher tried to get Jenny to discipline herself and become a real student. Now when Jenny asks for Miss Stubbs' help, it is freely given, without a trace of resentment or reproach or hesitation. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem not only of someone with a profession and its attendant expectations and ethics, but of vocation, of a true calling. She understands, and acts--joyfully--on the understanding, that the moment is about Jenny, not about her. As a physician said years ago on accepting the John Phillips Award, "We are privileged to serve."
I find that my ability to take off and set aside my own defensive lenses is enlarged by experiences that nourish my ego in a healthy way, as my touchdown catch paradoxically did. Perhaps the most important strengthening influence on me, certainly a fundamental one, was my mother, who did not put such lenses on, a claim I would make for very few people. My mother had her limitations, God knows, but defensive nastiness wasn't one of them. For instance: she and my father were divorced when I was five, but I never heard her speak ill of him, only sorrowfully or respectfully, even though she never regretted the divorce. When she wanted to push someone's buttons, especially her own father's or her Republican brother's, she did so not with anger but with a sort of anarchic humor, a certain impish joy. Here is a short piece I wrote about her recently. She died four years ago in her mid-nineties.
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess and has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity[color and variety]: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. She became a candidate for Justice of the Peace; her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. The descendant of white people who settled New Haven in the seventeenth century, she was an officer in the Danbury, CT, chapter of the NAACP. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. So her dreams remained catholic (with a small c).
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad ethnicities and economic circumstances, a crowd as protean [irreducibly diverse] as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: she rejoiced in the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
. . . . . . . .
When Ilo and I became parents, we hoped for our child, Anya, that she would be honest and fair and also that she would like herself without needing to draw her self-love from the putting down of others. An early sign of success, sort of, came when she was about four. This is a brief journal entry I wrote at that time:
Ilo tried to give Anya a moral lesson today. Anya had been repeatedly nasty to her friend and neighbor Jay, and Ilo was looking for a winning mix of criticism and encouragement. "You'll feel a lot better about yourself when you do what you should be doing," she suggested. But Anya's prompt response showed what a queenly serenity her fledgling conscience is up against: "Mom, I always feel good about myself, when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
As one gets older, the ego has to enlarge its skill set. Over time we learn, often by hurting others or by being hurt ourselves, how to avoid giving offense and how to create the win-win strategies that 'non sibi' implies. But we need to be wary about which groups and goals we invest in. It's often hard to tell whether a particular goal is speaking to the ego that gives you kindness or the one that at bottom gives you only ruthless vanity. Winning things--cross-country championships, admission to college, even tenure here--, e.g.: Are such concrete, pleasant achievements fundamental to the self? Or are they just clever seductions that clothe narcissism in stylish garments? The question is in no way rhetorical.
These riddles apply not to just to the ego in isolation but to group identities as well. When we join or remain in a group, the ego, or both egos, have a stake in the decision. Say we join a church. Even the great faith traditions, which should encourage us in the growth of empathy, often seem to focus their benevolence quite inwardly rather than universally, to promote self-identification within what Erik Erickson called 'the pseudo-species.' Southern Baptists and Catholics, for instance, have been known to have trouble with extending equal respect to non-believers; and so, if the truth be faced, have members of liberal churches, who often define religious conservatives as the Other (with a capital O). Can we distinguish between collective identities that are simply affirmative and those that seem to thrive on devaluing someone else?
Occasionally a great spirit will share a vision of absolute inclusiveness, which invites us to give up the part of the ego that wants the confining but seductive safety of a tribe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that the most radical theme of Christianity is found in Jesus' embrace of "all, all, all, all, all, all."
Tutu reminds us that the most obvious resolution of the riddle of the ego, its capacity for both generosity and exclusion, is love. Certainly it is better by far to make commitments of love within a family, a group of friends, a team, a dorm, a school, a faith community than not at all. When we are driven, or carried, by love, we are likelier to be outside the small box of the self. Sometimes the box itself seems to be becoming larger.
Most of the time love is the deepest transcendence I can reach, transcendence of the anxieties, frustrations, and self-declared triumphs of the self. But once in a while I glimpse something beyond even love. It does not nullify or trivialize love, but it contains it. For me this larger reality seems to be located most often in nature and in art. Last spring Ilo and I and two close friends went to see The Alvin Ailey Dance Company's 50th anniversary performance in Boston. They did their signature piece, Revelations, in which color, form, the music of spirituals, and the unimaginable athleticism and grace of the dancers reenact survival and joy in the context of African-American history. Whenever I watch that brilliant company perform that great piece, or when I listen to Schubert's string quintet, or when I look at some of the paintings of Velasquez or Rembrandt, or when I attend a great play, for the moment my human self, its best version as well as its hobbled ones, is left behind.
There are other routes as well. In my rudimentary understanding of Buddhism we are all urged to seek detachment from desire as a route to enlightenment; but once when I stood in a Buddhist monastery in Szechuan, China, I watched my grown daughter, then a Peace Corps volunteer, kneel and bow three times before an eight-foot human figure of mercy, a boddhisatva, a spiritually advanced person understood to have set aside enlightenment in order to be able to retain a role of consolation within the human framework. After each bow a monk struck a gong, and at the end he struck it a fourth time, for closure.
Anya's friend Kang-Le and I had walked on that oppressively hot July day for perhaps a mile along a muddy riverbank and then had taken an ancient ferry across to the monastery, a small one. Later, after the bows to the boddhisatva, in a nearby, deeply shaded enclosure a couple of young monks asked us to sit with them at some lovely stone tables a few feet away.
When they asked about our relationships, Anya said that I was her father, Kang-Le her friend. 'We are all friends,' one of the monks said, not in correction but as a sign of our part in a universal friendship. When Kang-Le asked them whether they practiced any of the martial arts, the monk said, again gently, 'Sitting here is a martial art'--that is, he embraced every detail of life as a spiritual discipline. Soon Anya, mindful of a date for supper at which we would be guests, observed that it was five o'clock and we would have to go, and one of the monks said, 'You live so fast.'
I do not breathe air of such purity very often, but this past summer I stood on Horsethief Butte, overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon. A friend and I had driven for ninety miles, first through a densely forested gorge with a series of distinctive waterfalls and then on into high desert, where the basaltic [ck. this] rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro, great presences I have known only through photographs and paintings.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest we saw astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many of these with tiny blossoms of white or pink. The plant life was sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way felt more precious, appearing as it did in places that seemed, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves did not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggest a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent [pervasively present] in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus, since the variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one. Are these neighboring spirits all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence, and in their physical presence the noise of the ego--of both its voices--faded for a time into perfect silence.
[from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel]
When we take our experience to heart it really works against the ego because the ego doesn’t want to be touched by life basically. The ego wants to hold everything at bay. All the ego wants from life is to get what it wants, and get rid of what it doesn’t want, and use everything to cherish, and protect itself. The ego is brilliant at keeping life at a distance. And blame is the perfect way of doing this, keeping life at a distance. It’s not “your” life. Somebody’s doing something “to” you. Life is unfair “to you”. When we do it like this we don’t have to change at all. We could just stay the same. We don’t have to self-reflect. We don’t have to let the world touch us, and change us. Even though this is a really painful way to live, we’re comfortable living this way, and we’re very habituated at times to living this way.
In an intramural touch football game in, ah, 1964, I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my fraternity teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A touchdown in an informal pick-up game between two college fraternities carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment was for me an experience of healing. It changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. It was somehow more encouraging than my having set a school record in track at my high school a few years before.
Still, the value of this chance, inconsequential acclaim has long been overshadowed by the continuing vitality of demons I share with millions or billions of others: these bad advisors murmur softly but insidiously and ceaselessly. Among their many unsettling concerns are professional achievement; social status; economic class; and age, or what I think of as perceived distance from death. They say things like, "Imply something uncomplimentary about a colleague whom students are drawn to." "Earn more money so you can do whatever and display more upscale stuff." These ugly songs are hard to ignore but are also hard to catch in the act, let alone to silence.
No matter how improbably and absurdly, the catch and touchdown helped me listen to those harsh strains less attentively, to feel less inadequate, to feel approximately as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my predictable and embarrassing need at the time to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the set of self-protective lenses through which I viewed the world. Other layers, of course, remained.
In my second or third year here, now almost forty years ago, I was living in Wentworth and wondering how we were going to help a new Lower who seemed almost beside himself with anxiety, especially in dealing with adults. Finally the dorm head, Don Schultz, and I decided we would have a friendly chat with the student in which we would play not good cop/bad cop but good guy/good guy and change his perception of authority figures from Old Testament God to Barney. Mr. Schultz was a kindly person, compassionate and humorous, though the students sometimes called him "The Butcher" because on occasion he could be cheerfully hardline about things like being late for check-in.
When the conversation took place, everything seemed to go well. We sat in comfortable chairs in Don's apartment. He and I told endearing stories and explained our benign philosophy. The student was, if not relaxed, then at least polite and calm. Afterwards Don and I congratulated ourselves and exchanged hopes for a successful outcome.
Later that evening there was a knock on my door. It was Cary Staller, one of our proctors. He was very direct. "What did you do to [the new Lower]?" he asked. "The guy is sitting in his room, trembling."
I still recognize this as a substantial failure, but I no longer feel too guilty about it. Still this experience showed me how the ego can color almost everything one does. On that night my investment in a vision of myself as a person of good will kept me from seeing what the student was experiencing. I think--I hope–-I learned something from this experience about listening, but it remains a work in progress, a discipline for which the occasion never expires.
So I have been thinking about the contradictory claims of the ego, a puzzle that has engaged people for centuries, one that seems to be built into the nature of human experience at a pretty deep level. It was posed a couple of millennia ago by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The ego--a durable sense of self, necessary for love and art and meaningful service--gives us Whitman and Emerson; it is a chamber in the heart of all those with the courage to face down tyranny, whether political or cultural: Bishop Gene Robinson, Wangari Maatthai in Kenya, Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala, martyred Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, Nelson Mandela.
And yet the ego--the precarious sense of self that is inclined to see difference from itself as threatening or loathsome--tries to lead many of us down dark back alleys, where we can avoid or stealthily attack the Other (with a capital O). This version or part of the ego is driven to compare, endlessly, and then to congratulate itself if the comparison is flattering, and to hiss and throw tomatoes, or worse, if it isn't. For most of us freedom from this need and its well disguised or denied meanness is a lifelong challenge.
The ego in this second sense is mercurial, volatile, and insatiable. Unconsciously we try, often ruthlessly, to shore up its defenses--for instance, through projection, the defense mechanism in which we attribute to someone else what we least like or most fear about ourselves. These defenses are irrational and intrinsically flimsy, but we keep returning to them. Without them we would have to reconstruct our sense of who we are--that is, to change and grow.
A friend of mine, a writer, said once, "To know what one truly feels is a lifetime's learning." Part of that learning, that work, really, is coming to know what the self-protective lenses are and how they distort one's perceptions.
These are themes that have been searchingly explored in literature. In William Carlos Williams' unforgettable autobiographical story "The Use of Force," Williams, a physician, uses a large metal spoon and excessive force to obtain a throat culture from a child whose life is threatened by diphtheria. The story is about the ways in which the ego dresses up behavior that is socially justifiable but morally unsettling. In "The Outstation," by Somerset Maugham, one of the great stories in the language, two Englishmen serving their country's empire in the far East become trapped in a war of egos. Each calls or rather conceptualizes the other as the Other, while the story ironically shows us the core commonality between them, the defense of the fragile self that has invested so naturally and so rashly and in this case so fatally in its disguises. One sees the other as a moneyed prig; the other views him as a lower-class boor, an unmannerly slob. Both are lonely and vulnerable. At the end one is dead, and the ego of the survivor enjoys a festival of self-congratulation.
I recognized an opposing example of the ego's reach--a case where it is generous rather than perverse--in an English film I saw in October, "An Education." Near the end of that film the protagonist, Jenny, who is shamefacedly recovering from a heedless affair with a handsome, charming, and deeply dishonest older man, needs help, since by this time she has been expelled from school and seems to have lost her way, certainly her way to Oxford. She goes to see her former English teacher, Miss Stubbs, a woman whom earlier Jenny called (to her face) 'dead' when the teacher tried to get Jenny to discipline herself and become a real student. Now when Jenny asks for Miss Stubbs' help, it is freely given, without a trace of resentment or reproach or hesitation. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem not only of someone with a profession and its attendant expectations and ethics, but of vocation, of a true calling. She understands, and acts--joyfully--on the understanding, that the moment is about Jenny, not about her. As a physician said years ago on accepting the John Phillips Award, "We are privileged to serve."
I find that my ability to take off and set aside my own defensive lenses is enlarged by experiences that nourish my ego in a healthy way, as my touchdown catch paradoxically did. Perhaps the most important strengthening influence on me, certainly a fundamental one, was my mother, who did not put such lenses on, a claim I would make for very few people. My mother had her limitations, God knows, but defensive nastiness wasn't one of them. For instance: she and my father were divorced when I was five, but I never heard her speak ill of him, only sorrowfully or respectfully, even though she never regretted the divorce. When she wanted to push someone's buttons, especially her own father's or her Republican brother's, she did so not with anger but with a sort of anarchic humor, a certain impish joy. Here is a short piece I wrote about her recently. She died four years ago in her mid-nineties.
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess and has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity[color and variety]: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. She became a candidate for Justice of the Peace; her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. The descendant of white people who settled New Haven in the seventeenth century, she was an officer in the Danbury, CT, chapter of the NAACP. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. So her dreams remained catholic (with a small c).
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad ethnicities and economic circumstances, a crowd as protean [irreducibly diverse] as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: she rejoiced in the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
. . . . . . . .
When Ilo and I became parents, we hoped for our child, Anya, that she would be honest and fair and also that she would like herself without needing to draw her self-love from the putting down of others. An early sign of success, sort of, came when she was about four. This is a brief journal entry I wrote at that time:
Ilo tried to give Anya a moral lesson today. Anya had been repeatedly nasty to her friend and neighbor Jay, and Ilo was looking for a winning mix of criticism and encouragement. "You'll feel a lot better about yourself when you do what you should be doing," she suggested. But Anya's prompt response showed what a queenly serenity her fledgling conscience is up against: "Mom, I always feel good about myself, when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
As one gets older, the ego has to enlarge its skill set. Over time we learn, often by hurting others or by being hurt ourselves, how to avoid giving offense and how to create the win-win strategies that 'non sibi' implies. But we need to be wary about which groups and goals we invest in. It's often hard to tell whether a particular goal is speaking to the ego that gives you kindness or the one that at bottom gives you only ruthless vanity. Winning things--cross-country championships, admission to college, even tenure here--, e.g.: Are such concrete, pleasant achievements fundamental to the self? Or are they just clever seductions that clothe narcissism in stylish garments? The question is in no way rhetorical.
These riddles apply not to just to the ego in isolation but to group identities as well. When we join or remain in a group, the ego, or both egos, have a stake in the decision. Say we join a church. Even the great faith traditions, which should encourage us in the growth of empathy, often seem to focus their benevolence quite inwardly rather than universally, to promote self-identification within what Erik Erickson called 'the pseudo-species.' Southern Baptists and Catholics, for instance, have been known to have trouble with extending equal respect to non-believers; and so, if the truth be faced, have members of liberal churches, who often define religious conservatives as the Other (with a capital O). Can we distinguish between collective identities that are simply affirmative and those that seem to thrive on devaluing someone else?
Occasionally a great spirit will share a vision of absolute inclusiveness, which invites us to give up the part of the ego that wants the confining but seductive safety of a tribe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that the most radical theme of Christianity is found in Jesus' embrace of "all, all, all, all, all, all."
Tutu reminds us that the most obvious resolution of the riddle of the ego, its capacity for both generosity and exclusion, is love. Certainly it is better by far to make commitments of love within a family, a group of friends, a team, a dorm, a school, a faith community than not at all. When we are driven, or carried, by love, we are likelier to be outside the small box of the self. Sometimes the box itself seems to be becoming larger.
Most of the time love is the deepest transcendence I can reach, transcendence of the anxieties, frustrations, and self-declared triumphs of the self. But once in a while I glimpse something beyond even love. It does not nullify or trivialize love, but it contains it. For me this larger reality seems to be located most often in nature and in art. Last spring Ilo and I and two close friends went to see The Alvin Ailey Dance Company's 50th anniversary performance in Boston. They did their signature piece, Revelations, in which color, form, the music of spirituals, and the unimaginable athleticism and grace of the dancers reenact survival and joy in the context of African-American history. Whenever I watch that brilliant company perform that great piece, or when I listen to Schubert's string quintet, or when I look at some of the paintings of Velasquez or Rembrandt, or when I attend a great play, for the moment my human self, its best version as well as its hobbled ones, is left behind.
There are other routes as well. In my rudimentary understanding of Buddhism we are all urged to seek detachment from desire as a route to enlightenment; but once when I stood in a Buddhist monastery in Szechuan, China, I watched my grown daughter, then a Peace Corps volunteer, kneel and bow three times before an eight-foot human figure of mercy, a boddhisatva, a spiritually advanced person understood to have set aside enlightenment in order to be able to retain a role of consolation within the human framework. After each bow a monk struck a gong, and at the end he struck it a fourth time, for closure.
Anya's friend Kang-Le and I had walked on that oppressively hot July day for perhaps a mile along a muddy riverbank and then had taken an ancient ferry across to the monastery, a small one. Later, after the bows to the boddhisatva, in a nearby, deeply shaded enclosure a couple of young monks asked us to sit with them at some lovely stone tables a few feet away.
When they asked about our relationships, Anya said that I was her father, Kang-Le her friend. 'We are all friends,' one of the monks said, not in correction but as a sign of our part in a universal friendship. When Kang-Le asked them whether they practiced any of the martial arts, the monk said, again gently, 'Sitting here is a martial art'--that is, he embraced every detail of life as a spiritual discipline. Soon Anya, mindful of a date for supper at which we would be guests, observed that it was five o'clock and we would have to go, and one of the monks said, 'You live so fast.'
I do not breathe air of such purity very often, but this past summer I stood on Horsethief Butte, overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon. A friend and I had driven for ninety miles, first through a densely forested gorge with a series of distinctive waterfalls and then on into high desert, where the basaltic [ck. this] rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro, great presences I have known only through photographs and paintings.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest we saw astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many of these with tiny blossoms of white or pink. The plant life was sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way felt more precious, appearing as it did in places that seemed, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves did not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggest a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent [pervasively present] in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus, since the variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one. Are these neighboring spirits all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence, and in their physical presence the noise of the ego--of both its voices--faded for a time into perfect silence.
[from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel]
When we take our experience to heart it really works against the ego because the ego doesn’t want to be touched by life basically. The ego wants to hold everything at bay. All the ego wants from life is to get what it wants, and get rid of what it doesn’t want, and use everything to cherish, and protect itself. The ego is brilliant at keeping life at a distance. And blame is the perfect way of doing this, keeping life at a distance. It’s not “your” life. Somebody’s doing something “to” you. Life is unfair “to you”. When we do it like this we don’t have to change at all. We could just stay the same. We don’t have to self-reflect. We don’t have to let the world touch us, and change us. Even though this is a really painful way to live, we’re comfortable living this way, and we’re very habituated at times to living this way.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
on gay marriage and NH legislation
statement prepared for a service at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Exeter (FUUSE):
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
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