Less a Tragedy Than a Deadly Farce, or, That's One Dead Phoenix!

I keep waiting for the glimmer of hope, the silver lining. In fact, I am often promised it, but it is so rarely delivered.

I am speaking of the recent spate of "Is America Doomed?" articles that have cropped up of late as our government has so clearly demonstrated its uselessness, cowardice, gluttony, laziness, and short-sightedness, aided and abetted by a media with that covers the goings-on with all the depth of middle school cafeteria gossip.

Two of these doom articles come to mind; both of them espouse hope, and then offer none. I'll go easier on the first, Paul Krugman's piece in today's New York Times. The false hope is probably more the fault of editors, or because he is trying for a pithy title that fits the thesis of his piece. Entitled "America is Not Lost," one might think that Mr. Krugman intends to buck us up. Alas.

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. . . . Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it. 

Well, that hurt. Mostly, I am disappointed with the promise offered by The Atlantic's James Fallows for his cover piece which boldly claims to know "How America Can Rise Again." Hooray! Like the phoenix, we can rise again!

Only Fallows' piece offers no evidence at all to support the cheery headline. If anything, Fallows makes clear why America is not "rising" any time soon, and that the best we can hope for is to muddle through by gnawing away at the edges of policy, stepping around the cracks and mines, and hope America doesn't turn into Mad Max. Despite some tepid examples of America's toughing it out in rough times and coming out mostly better for it, the real points we are left with are that a) our institutions are incapable of addressing the serious, grave, imminent threats to our security and well-being and b) we haven't the leaders, national will, or existing mechanisms to do anything about it. Rise again!!!

Lawrence Lessig's major piece on changing Congress in The Nation offers no solace, for even though it is supposed to be a prescription to saving us from ourselves (or, more to the point, saving Congress from itself), it is clear that the changes he would like to see enacted could never, ever be passed by the very Congress he damns. Rise again!!!

Look. The Democratic Party is feckless, disjointed, and several vertebra short of a spinal column. The Republican Party is not only unserious about governance, but it's greedy, and at times downright malicious and vengeful to boot. The Tea Party movement, regardless of how it is being portrayed lately by the mainstream media, as some "genuine" uprising of concerned citizens, is an excuse to celebrate willful ignorance, xenophobia, racism, and religious intolerance--why this is not completely obvious is beyond me. The progressive movement can't decide whether to prop up the Democratic Party's festering corpse and engage in a generation-long retelling of Weekend at Bernie's or to nobly go down with the ship of state saying, "Well, at least we tried." What, out of this morass, is supposed to rise up and save us all?

I was among the millions who thought it might be Obama. As the man we sort-of-re-elected president with 52% of the popular vote once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you...y'fool me, can't get fooled again."

...!!!

Hypoliteracy

I am not reading a book.

Washington, DC is shut down today, and besides doing some catch-up work here and there, I essentially have a bonus day off. Hooray! What a rare and often-wished-for opportunity to do some quiet, relaxed book reading! Visit my Goodreads page and you can see that I am juggling several books that I have yet to complete, and I have a list a mile long of "to-reads" as yet un-attempted. The baby is sleeping (scratch that, back in a second...)

[Two hours later]

Anyway. The point being, on this snow-blanketed day, there's far more time than usual to engage in some literary imbibing. But here I am on the Web, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, poking around the RSS reader, etc. I know that the act of reading doesn't require a herculean effort, but lately the energy, attention span, and patience it requires has eluded me. And I love reading (once I'm into it)! It's that kick-start that is so difficult, particularly if I'm not totally enthralled by my current book.

There's just so much *other* reading to be done! Not only is there blog and article reading online, but there are tweets (that lead to more blogs and articles), my various magazine subscriptions (which, since I am paying for them, I feel obliged to read), and since I do communications for a lobbying organization, I have to step up the pace on regular news consumption (major newspapers, aggregators, etc.). The latter one alone takes whatever quiet time my rain ride to work allows me.

While I genuinely love the act of reading, books are falling by the wayside. I own a Kindle (which I adore), I have a slew of books in my library I'm dying to get to, myriad Christmas and birthday-gifted books that others thought I'd enjoy, so I have to get to those, plus the backpack-full of books I'm still in the middle of. Meanwhile, I read about people who read several books a week, and my friend Ryan is doing a blog project on reading 100 books in a year. Another friend I have through Twitter is doing only about half that, a book a week for a year. I could never do that!

Part of it, I imagine, is that I don't read much fiction. Anecdotally, I hear that fiction goes by more quickly than nonfiction, but I can hardly put that to the test, as I have as my current fiction selection War and Peace, and I've resolved, for no other reason than the novelty of it, to read it entirely on the iPhone--I wanted to really see if there was truth to the iPhone-as-e-reader cliché that says, yes, the iPhone is great for reading, "...but you wouldn't want to read War and Peace on it!"

I'm getting off-track somewhat. Even when I do get to reading a book, it's sparse. Too often, I read 10 or so pages before I get too sleepy, or I'm distracted by email/baby/life. And let's be honest, even those magazines often don't get the attention their subscription prices deserve, and the newspaper is often merely scanned and discarded. I think that in terms of word count, I read more from blog posts and articles about reading, ebooks, and publishing (a recent but I think enduring fascination of mine) than I do from actual books themselves.

One might think, well, Paul, you just don't like books that much. But I know that's not true--I know that good books move and enrich me more than just about any other medium I consume (perhaps tied with music, something else that has suffered since I stopped being a twenty-something). Perhaps part of the problem is the commitment of time necessary to complete a book, but I mainly mean those books that turn out to be only okay. I recently read A Tale of Two Cities for the first time (part of my attempt to catch up with all those books I was assigned in high school and fobbed off due to my shameful degree of laziness) and I couldn't put it down. It was one of those moments in life when a piece of art truly changes you and affects you at your core. That's not happening with any of the books I have in the pipeline right now, but nor should I expect so. Some books--most books that I pick up, thankfully--are "just good." And that should be good enough to keep me at it.

Which, of course, still lands me into conflict with the realities of how many hours there are in a day and all the other text-based commitments I already have.

I'm not like those who lament the "shortening" of certain types of discourse through technology. Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic (one of those aforementioned subscribed-to magazines) recently explained to Michael Kinsley what his reading day is like, and it rang familiar to me to a certain extent. Though I don't rely on Twitter nearly to the degree Ambinder does, I still understand how valuable it has become, and I certainly value the relationships--new kinds of relationships--that I have developed on that platform. As I noted, Twitter is not really about short bursts of blather for me (though it is also that), but the tweets serve as little windows into deeper reading I would otherwise miss, and a chance for me to share with my 1000+ followers the work I am doing and writing by others that I find compelling enough to warrant others' attention. Facebook is similar for me, though more lighthearted and social in nature. [Follow me on Twitter here!]

But maintaining these gardens takes time, it takes thought. I enjoy the back-and-forth flow of information so much that I have felt compelled to start a Tumblr blog just to catch the things I don't know what else to do with (a quote that is too long for Twitter, an article that doesn't suit my blog or my Facebook audience, etc.)--and on this, I am essentially copying Text Patterns' Alan Jacobs and his use of Tumblr, or somewhat mimicking the short-burst blogging style of Andrew Sullivan.

So I heartily embrace social media, social reading and social writing. I'm extremely fortunate to be alive and of the age to participate at such a time as this. But it must be said that it only enables one of my pre-existing conditions: laziness. My dad, a voracious reader himself whom I can only dream of matching in terms of quantity, is befuddled by my use of the word "lazy" in this context. Reading is the fun part of the day, he says. There is no effort involved for him; it is always the path of least resistance and the greatest return.

But my personality, my attention span, my physiology, my habits have not developed that way (all of which, almost, is my own fault). Books suffer, which really means that I suffer, depriving myself of what they hold. I should be reading right now, but instead, I'm sitting here writing about how I don't read.

Perhaps my only avenue to mitigating this concern is to learn speed reading. Hm. Now, when would I find the time to do that?

Oh, and I want to learn French, too. Can we please just add an extra day onto the weekend?

Would that even help?

Who's the Boss?

A friend of mine in the progressive movement is as livid with the Democratic Party's incompetence as I am, lamenting that the president and the congressional Democrats are all behaving as though they are in the minority. He elicited great guffaws from me when he wrote:

The White House, right now, thinks that we do not have a majority in the House or Senate, and they are emailing mitch@gopmajorityleader.senate.gov and it keeps bouncing back and they don't know why.

Theodicy Dodge

Over the past few days, contributors to WashingtonPost.com's "On Faith" site have been responding to the question of why God allows Haiti to suffer, spurred by Pat Robertson's horrible assertion that Haiti had it coming because of their alleged pact with evil spirits tow hundred years ago. I read them so you don't have to.

You can probably guess what a lot of the luminaries of modern religion had to say; several variations on the theme of "there's-no-way-we-can-understand-God's-will-so-let's-all-be-nice." (Note: I am all for being nice. You will, in this post, note me criticizing several folks who, in the midst of saying intellectually or morally offensive things, also say some very nice things about helping the suffering. I will be addressing their theological justifications for the tragedy, not their calls for compassion, which I of course support wholeheartedly.)

Here's a good example of what I will call the Theodicy Dodge, when religionists skirt an honest confrontation with the idea of the omnipotent God allowing the mass death and misery of innocents. Rabbi David Wolpe submits:

Yet we know that to offer an explanation in the face of pain is itself a kind of cruelty. Nothing, no sophistry, no genuine theology, no well meant preaching, can stand in the heat of human anguish. The scale of pain in this world dwarfs, at times, any attempt at explanation. So we turn form "why" to "what." Not why does God do this, but what would God have me do. We move, at times of crisis, from explanation to action.

You see, just by the act of asking the question, we're hurting Haiti even more. Stop asking!

Or take a look at this bit from Jennifer Butler of Faith in Public Life:

I side theologically with those who have said God is good and never the author of evil, and suffering is the result of a sinful world and fallen creation.

This is just an example of an impotent God, or a malicious one who will only manifest through good works after millions are dying or in the midst of the most hellish misery. No point in wondering why we're in this mess, but God sure is showing his stuff in the good works of others. Sorry about those tectonic plates, though. Wish I coulda done something, but you know, 'never the author of evil,' so...

This all seems innocuous enough, but oftentimes the Theodicy Dodge has an insidious undertone. Take Christian Scientist Phil Davis, who writes:

I don't want to undervalue the importance of relief efforts ongoing right now in Haiti. These are vital and so much more is needed. But if we are trying to figure out where God is in all this, I would say we are asking the wrong question. I ask myself often, where am I with God? And how is my life reflecting His Love, especially in a world capable of such horror.

Now this must be very comforting to the Haitians. Forget all the starvation, disease, violence, and death. Hey, man, are you getting right with the Big Guy? Davis isn't saying explicitly that the Haitians brought this on themselves by not "reflecting His Love," but he does imply that this whole disaster is meant as a kind of tectonic jostle to get people to start paying the LORD more attention.

Some explanations border on the truly bizarre. Take Jim Wallis of Sojourners:

The God I serve, the God of the Bible, does not cause evil. God is not a vengeful and retributive being, waiting to strike us down. Evil happens, whether at the hands of corrupt people or because the earth shifts along a fault line and the world rumbles.

When evil strikes, it's easy to ask, where is God. The answer: God is suffering in the midst of the evil with those who are suffering. Throughout the Scripture, we find a picture of a God who is with the people, even in their darkest hours.

I can't imagine what God he is talking about. "The God of the Bible" he references is pretty demonstrably a maniac, an unbridled psychopath slaughtering entire civilizations, sanctioning slavery and rape, and that's just the first book. And God is suffering today? I think the Haitian people need not weep for that. I would imagine that quake or no quake, sin or no sin, God's going to come out of this just fine.

For more inexplicable wackiness, here's Cal Thomas:

The Creator of the universe has His own purposes and is not required to explain them to us.

But don't let that stop you from trying, Cal.

But if one is looking for a "reason" why natural disasters happen, it is because the world is fallen.

So it is somebody's fault.

God did not make the world the way it is with fault lines running through the earth and through our hearts. We did by seeking our own way, inviting sin into perfect lives (Adam and Eve) and a perfect environment (The Garden of Eden).

Get this straight, everybody. God has reasons for doing everything and having control over everything, except the things he didn't do and can't control.

The resident Hindu on the panel, Ramdas Lamb, isn't so crass as to directly assign blame to the residents of Haiti. At least, not in their current form. But in previous lives? Anything goes.

. . . we go through many lifetimes and must all experience the pleasures of life as well as its pains. We must all experience poverty and wealth, sickness and health, happiness and suffering, life and death. It is the only way we can experience and know reality in its completeness, and it is not something that can happen in a single lifetime. . . . I see those who experience such suffering as going through one of the most difficult of life's lessons and courses.

This, to me, is enormously insensitive and cynical. The accuser can't be blamed for casting blame on those who are suffering right now, because they clearly had nothing to do with the tragedy. But the victims are still burdened with the implied guilt that they must have done something wrong, even if it was in another life, of which they have no control and no memory. You're fine in the eyes of the cosmos, but boy, what a dick you must have been the last time around.

To be fair, Lamb explicitly says that he doesn't see it as a cause-and-effect karmic situation, though his espoused theology implies it. But he does minimize the severity of the disaster by chalking it up to a "lesson," as though it were just one more rough patch to tough out. Don't feel too bad, Haitians (this line of thinking implies), all us comfortable First-Worlders will have the house fall down on us in another go-around. Sure glad it's not now!

In the midst of all this theological wrangling and weirdness, it's almost a relief to come upon what might qualify as refreshing honesty from believers. Seventh-day Adventist James Standish, though chock full of Bronze Age superstition (the devil must exist, lest there would be no evil in the world, etc.), at least makes no excuses for his supreme being.

In this life, all too often the wicked prosper and the good suffer. In contrast to our most popular rewrites of faith, Scripture itself has much to say about understanding the injustice in a world created by a loving God. But if you preach it you will almost guarantee you will never have a megachurch, and if you write it, its unlikely you'll have a bestseller. But by ignoring these themes, modern faith has become impotent in the face of tragedy.

Even more clearly, R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, makes no bones about the potential for God's destructiveness and his willingness to assert his moral authority (emphasis mine).

God does judge the nations -- all of them -- and God will judge the nations. His judgment is perfect and his justice is sure. He rules over all the nations and his sovereign will is demonstrated in the rising and falling of nations and empires and peoples. Every molecule of matter obeys his command, and the earthquakes reveal his reign -- as do the tides of relief and assistance flowing into Haiti right now.

A faithful Christian cannot accept the claim that God is a bystander in world events. The Bible clearly claims the sovereign rule of God over all his creation, all of the time. We have no right to claim that God was surprised by the earthquake in Haiti, or to allow that God could not have prevented it from happening.

God's rule over creation involves both direct and indirect acts, but his rule is constant.

But there are highlights. Both Bishop Shelby Spong and Paula Kirby make short work of the entire question posed, tracing the development of human knowledge and our ability to make rational sense of events, leaving no need for renting out intellects over the reasoning behind God's maliciousness or neglect. Susan Jacoby brings this point home concerning the superiority complex that comes with discerning God's attitude:

I listened to an earthquake survivor this morning on the "Today" show, and he concluded that he was rescued from the rubble because "God must have a plan for me." Right. And what about God's plan for the dead and the mutilated? How can anyone cherish these childish, narcissistic notions about a loving god who elects him to survive and others to perish?

Herb Silverman writes what many frustrated readers had likely been thinking throughout this whole series:

If an all-powerful god either caused the earthquake in Haiti or stood passively by as thousands perished, he would be a god more worthy of blame than praise. Some days the best thing you can say about God is that he doesn't exist.

And Daniel Dennett pens what might as well be the thesis for this whole post:

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

I must admit, I was a bit agog that the On Faith site even asked the question, which was specifically, "Does God allow Haiti to suffer?" Well, if we assume he's even there, of course he does! Turn on your television! He's allowing it right now. The idea that any believers might try to wriggle out a "no" or "who knows?" from that question is laughable, and as Dennett and Jacoby note in their own ways, can only be the product of tortured logic and severe cognitive dissonance.

UPDATE: Richard Dawkins has just weighed in, and tells it like no one else can. He seems as angry as I was when I first came upon these responses. A taste:

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

Things I Learn Reading The Economist

Only two things in life are certain, but one is way more certain than the other.

Americans are more likely to be overweight than to pay federal income tax.

Coverage Reflecting Compassion

A forceful piece from The Nation on recognizing human suffering and desperation over the filching of consumer objects in media coverage of disasters.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

Context Destroyed

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

From the New York Times piece on Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson.

Angry Mobs, Power Grabs, and Freedom of Contract

An actor friend of mine with libertarian leanings, Jason Guy (always a fount of good conversation) had a strong reaction to a recent Obama mass e-mailing, this one purportedly from the vice president, asking recipients to lend their names to the president's initiative to exact fees on the banking industry in order to recoup bailout funds. It reads, in part:

The fee would recover every penny loaned to Wall Street during the financial crisis and stop the reckless abuses and excesses that nearly caused the collapse of our financial system in the first place.

But the banking industry -- among the most powerful lobbies in Washington -- is already launching attacks to stop Congress from enacting the proposal.

Barack and I aren't backing down. But to win, we'll need the American people to add their voice right away.

Upon reading this, Jason sent me his thoughts.

This is indicative of the litany of crap I get every day from Barack, Joe, David, and Michelle. I proudly voted for them, but I find it increasingly possible I won't next time.

"My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed" Why in the world do we need a new Fee to do that? Isn't it written into the original bailout? Aren't the banks already required by law to repay every penny owed the US Treasury? If so, this is silly panic-mongering worthy of the Bush Administration, and if not, it's no one's fault but the current Administration. I didn't bailout the Banks! And how dare someone try to retroactively punish them because they don't like what they're now doing. Asinine.

"... and stop the reckless abuses ... caused the collapse of our financial system in the first place..." Ah, now we get to it. If Wall Street's activities are so wrong, pass a law. There's certainly public sentiment against the whole industry - so make the inappropriate behavior illegal. The Responsibility Fee, however, is a power grab, akin to Bush's Executive Orders, and similarly sans Congressional oversight. It is not Republican Chicken-Little to say, What Next, Nationalizing the Industry? Chavez is laughing at us.

"If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely [able to pay] taxpayers" The operative, implied word here, is "First". But that wasn't in the deal they signed. What if Visa loaned me $5,000 for a year, and then six months in said "Pay Now"? I'd go to jail. That's not how contracts work. And if a police state starts destroying that fundamental tenet of western democracy - Freedom of Contract - then Fascism is not an unfair epithet. I said "If"; note that when the police state does [disavowing contracts], it will certainly do so "In the Name of the People", and it will display graphics (with an angry mob and banners) like this one, but wield a gun.

I asked Jason if he felt like this really was a precursor to a "police state," and he responded to that, and provided more of this thoughts:

Not because I hear the stormtroopers' boots upon my doorstep, but because "law enforcement" (or worse, "executive order enforcement") has but one tool to wield: the gun. Every time we entrust our representatives to direct our soldiers to bar us from taking an action, we inhibit our freedoms. Some are a fair shake (stop lights, trash disposal, manslaughter), but others, I think not so much. . . .

You and I are [the victims]. There's no way to whimsically, illegally, and retroactively seize those banks' assets without subjecting you and I to a far greater likelihood of future whimsical, illegal, and retroactive seizure of assets. And I think tomorrow's President will probably not be as smart as Obama, therefore I pre-trust him/her, not.

I invite you to opine/react.