The Views I Left Behind Me...

This entry is more than twice as long as it ought to be.  I try to keep my blog pieces under 500 words, and this is more than double that.  I have been carrying it around in my head since Saturday, through the frenzy of Easter and an ensuing all-family gastric flu of epic intensity.  So please bear with me on its length.  Or read half now and come back to it later.  Or, you know, don't read it at all.  That's ok too.

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer’s gripping Under the Banner of Heaven. It isn’t a new book, of course.  I think for a long time I thought it was about Al Quaeda; only in the last year or so did I realize it was actually about polygamist mormon factions.  Naturally, when I found that out, I became interested in reading it at once.

Really, I don’t think the confusion is accidental.  Joseph Smith Jr is compared more than once in the book to Mohammed, and the violence and fanaticism described among the most militant persons in the book is compared to that of jihadis.  And, despite the objections of the mainline Mormon church (who are not really the subject of the book at all), I think the comparisons are apt.  The real subject of the book, according to Krakauer, is “violent faith.”

Krakauer says early on that his main concern and interest is with religion’s capacity to fuel and justify horrifying acts.  In the prologue, after detailing the gruesome double murder which acts as the centerpiece of the overall narrative, he writes: “There is a dark side to religious devotion which is too often ignored or denied.  As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means to inciting evil…—there may be no more potent force than religion.”  Later on, as one of the many many epigraphs that appear before and between the book’s various chapters and parts there is a long passage from Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian” which is a pretty vicious attack on religion, blaming organized religion for opposing “every moral progress that has been in the world.”  Krakauer’s tone is normally more moderate than this (in a strained sort of way), and I find it hard to understand his inclusion of this passage, except that on some level, he must agree with it, and wanted to let Russell say what he felt he could not.

I used to agree with this passage too—and let me note how odd it is to stumble across the sort of thing that one used to believe and no longer does.  I would have proudly brandished the name of Bertrand Russell as proof of both my own smartness and the incontrovertabality of my point. When I was fifteen, sixteen years old, it really did seem as if many of the most dreadful deeds ever done—perhaps all of them—had been done in the name of God.  There were a few things I didn’t know of course.  I didn’t know that Hitler was an atheist, along with the rest of his inner circle.  I didn’t know about Pol Pot.  I was just learning about Robespierre and Danton and Stalin.  All these guys probably would have thought Bertrand Russell was right on the money, and Bertrand Russell would have been horrified.

So that’s problem number one with Russell’s assertion (and the strongly implied assumption of Krakauer’s book): you don’t need to be religious, in Russell’s or Krakauer’s sense of the word, to be an instrument of unimaginable violence and fanaticism.  Yes, there are plenty of examples of religious fanaticism gone off the deep end; but, arguably, history’s most spectacular crimes have been committed by atheists in the name of various non-religious idols: race theory, communism, nationalism, fascism.

The flip side of this is a failure to credit religion with any positive achievements at all.  Russell was writing in 1927, so the world had not yet witnessed the American Civil Rights movement, a movement which only began to gain serious traction when led from the pulpit.  Russell explicitly credits Christian churches with aiding and abetting the institution of slavery (which is fair), but neglects to mention the equally crucial role of the church in creating and sustaining abolitionism.  Although Americans across the political spectrum have become accustomed, over the last thirty years, to seeing religion as a pretty narrowly conservative force, traditionally the role of religion in all areas of American moral and political life has been much more complex and nuanced.  By contrast, the places where science has been co-opted to create new moral philosophies have resulted in neither good morality nor good science (social Darwinism anyone?).  The more you think about it (the more I think about it, anyway), it isn’t so much that the worst thing about humanity is religion (or government, or nationalism, or ideology, or any one thing).  The problem with humanity is that we are human.   And most of those other things (government, nationalism, religion) have developed as attempts to deal with that fundamental problem of trying to make us better than we are.  Who really thinks it would be a good idea if we stopped trying?

As an author, Krakauer is drawn to both extremism and extreme situations.  Even a glancing acquaintance with his other works makes it clear that his reputation is built on that.  And the combination of religion and extremism is powerful stuff, frightening even when it does no harm.  The New England colonies owed their existence and survival to it, and bemoaned the loss of that early fervor for two generations, before slipping quietly into Unitarianism.  Krakauer rightly describes extremist zeal as a kind of high.  And one of the things Krakauer astutely notes about extremism and the exaltation it brings, is a marked diminishment of empathy on the part of extremists.

Krakauer is not a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, pouring scorn on the benighted believers in religions of all stripes.  Although he admits that he has not found a religious creed that fits him, and although it is clear that some elements of faith baffle and even horrify him, he has too much empathy himself to be a kind of anti-religious zealot.  And empathy, and the compassion that goes with empathy—I have not yet seen or heard of a religion that doesn’t hold that as a central tenet.  In Christianity it is a key component of the Golden Rule.  “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”  What is that but a call to empathy?  “Love one another as I have loved you.” What is that but a call to compassion?  It is religion that provides us with a meaningful moral compass with which to condemn the very religious excesses that Krakauer describes, even if that moral code has been more or less desacralized. So in the face of the horrors that Krakauer chronicles, committed in the name of faith, I am disappointed a little at his unwillingness to discriminate, to note that faith (or a perversion of it) leads some to do terrible things; but not to embrace a little more warmly than he does, that faith (as the Greeks used to say of Eros) is also a builder of cities.

Playing Mad Libs in the Car, On the Way to Manhattan

CATHY: So Oliver, we need a verb.  That is a "doing word."

OLIVER: I know what a verb is mom.  I have mastered that already.

ME: What did you say?

OLIVER: I have mastered verbs already.  You don't need to tell me what they are any more.

CATHY: Oh OK.  So. give me a verb.

OLIVER: [Pause]  Volcano.

Updates From the Anglican Wars

An editorial in today's NY Times draws attention to the movement afoot in Uganda to impose the death penalty for homosexual behavior. The Times suggests that this move is less than enlightened, and I would expect even my more conservative readers (do I have any conservative readers?) to agree that this is, shall we say, an extreme position.

Uganda rang some other bells for me though. Oh yes—the Anglican Church of Uganda has been aiding dissident American Episcopalians. Almost a third of Ugandans are Anglican, and it is a big thriving growing church, like a lot of the African churches. They are biblical and energetic and exciting, three words not normally applied to the American Episcopal Church.  And it must be empowering for Ugandans to offer assistance to a bunch of really affluent Americans, rather than the other way around.

So I have these friends and acquaintances who belong to various breakaway Episcopal/Anglican congregations. And they often have told me that the rift isn't really about Gene Robinson or about Homosexuality (sometimes they look uncomfortable and say "it's complicated"). They claim their disaffection is about God, and scripture, and really believing in something, and really standing for something. Not being wishy-washy and "do whatever you feel." I can respect a certain amount of that. But when you choose to affiliate yourself with people who believe that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death, then I think it is time to ask who the real heretics are here. No doubt people will cite the book of Leviticus or the story of Sodom and Gomorrah or an epistle where Paul is "down on homosexuality." But Anglicans are supposed to be against the death penalty, period. And Jesus is supposed to have brought us a New Covenant. The New Covenant allows us to eat pork, and be uncircumcised, and get haircuts, and all sorts of other nice things. Wouldn't it allow people to, you know, be gay without being executed for it? It seems to me that it would.

So I am thinking these schismatics, to whom I have been (or tried to be) sympathetic in my disagreement, maybe don't deserve as much sympathy as I thought. Maybe they really are just so many rabid homophobe heretics. And maybe the rest of the Episcopal church is better off without them.

Natural Born Eastmen Don't Have to Work...

Well, I don't think anyone read part 1 of this piece, regarding Furry Lewis and his version of the story of Casey Jones, but here is part 2 anyway. There may or may not be a part 3.

In the next verse, we finally meet Casey, but only indirectly. The train is preparing to leave the station:

When the conductor he holler “hello!”

Fire man he holler “all aboard!”

The people tell by the whistle’s moan

The man at the throttle was old Casey Jones

But this construction is in the historical present. Is this the final trip for Casey? Or any trip? The drama of meeting Casey is left to hang in the air, as “Old Casey Jones” is not repeated. Instead the narrator moans

Oh, on the Road Again

And stays silent through what would normally be the sixth and final line of the verse.

Then we turn abruptly to the narrator’s own life and perspective. It turns out that he is a bootlegger:

When I've sold my gin, I sold it straight

The Police run me to my woman's gate

His woman offers him her “folding bed.” This sounds generous enough, but the next verse seems to complicate the picture.

I’m gonna leave Memphis, to spread the news

That Memphis women don’t wear no shoes

The shoelessness of these women has a significance that is lost on me, but I like the image a lot. He goes on.

I got it written on the back of my shirt

I’m a natural born eastman and I don’t have to work.

I don’t have to work.

I’m a natural born eastman and don’t have to work.

You can search for quite awhile before coming up with an interpretation of this lyric that actually makes sense. The difficulty is the word “eastman” which is hard enough to make out (“easement” is one common mishearing, “easy” is another), but even more difficult to interpret. Although you can turn up evidence for what “eastman” meant to African Americans in the delta of that time, it is probably just as easy to gather it from context: an eastman is a man who lives off his woman’s income, maybe even a pimp. We should have guessed. But what does this shiftless narrator have to do with the mighty Casey? The next verse offers a clue:

When I woke up this morning at half past nine

I saw little Casey’s chillun on the doorstep crying

“Mama mama we can’t keep from crying

My daddy got killed on the Southern Line.”

That southern line

My daddy got killed on the southern line.

The narrator is able to bear witness to the human tragedy of Casey’s accident, and establish Casey as a family man (The real Casey’s children were between ages twelve and four at the time of the accident). In the midst of all his shiftlessness, the narrator is IN the story. In real life, Mrs. Jones wore black every day for the rest of her life, more than fifty years after the accident, and never remarried. In the ballads, however, she is sometimes portrayed as a pretty cool customer, in contrast to her grieving offspring:

She cried “Children Children, won’t you hold your breath

We’re gonna draw another check from your father’s death.

From your father’s death

We’re gonna draw another pension at your father’s death.

Other versions of the story even have her telling the kids that they have “another papa” on a different railroad line.

The perspective shifts again, this time back to Casey, and before the accident itself.

Now Mister Caseysaid, just before he died

There was two more roads that he would like to ride

Fireman asked Casey, "What road is he?"

"That’s the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe.”

That Santa Fe…

The Southern Pacific and the Sante Fe

Casey’s fireman, Sim Webb, was the last man to see Casey alive, so that statement feels authentic. Casey had spent his whole career working on North-South railroad lines, and the Southern Pacific and Sante Fe presumably run East-West. But the thing from this verse that haunts me is the repetition of “Santa Fe.” “Santa Fe” means “holy spirit” in Spanish, and so the simple unfulfilled ambitions of a dedicated railroad man become freighted with spiritual portent. Underscoring this is that "Santa Fe" is rhymed with the odd pronoun "he" (which appears where we would, grammatically, have expected to hear "that.")

Now, “On the Road Again” is a late performance of Furry Lewis. A lot of verses from the earlier “Kassie Jones” are missing. The last two verses, however, are a startling departure—even in a song that has already pointed out the unusual customs of Memphis women regarding footwear. Here is the first.

Now you come all you men if you want to flirt

Here come a lady with a mini skirt

She got a half-yard ribbon wrapped around her leg

She step like she stepping on a scrambled egg

I’m on the Road again.

Step like she step on a scrambled egg.

I am not sure what a woman stepping on a scrambled egg looks like, but apparently it is highly alluring. But I am more intrigued by the re-emergence, for the first time since we met Casey Jones, of the narrators old cry of “on the road again.” Perhaps we are reminded too of the “rambling mind” of the second verse.

Then the narrator takes another sharp turn, before bidding us farewell:

If you wanna go to heaven when you D-I-E

Just put on a collar and a T-I-E

Is this meant to be a warning? Why the spelling? Do we really just need to dress nicely? Or is dressing up just shorthand for going to church and being “respectable”? The next two lines do not offer any clarification.

If you wanna scare a rabbit out of L-O-G

Just make a little stunt like a D-O-G.

Does that help? I don’t think it does. What are you going to do about it.

I’m on the Road Again.

And we’re done.

On The Road Again part one: Furry & Casey

My good friend, the webby-winning Melanie MacFarlane, told me when I first started blogging to avoid entries longer than about 500 words. This has always struck me as good advice. So I will be breaking up my magnum opus on Furry Lewis's "On the Road Again" (which is currently about 1500 words) into at least three parts. Here is the first.

Like a lot of kids, I went through a big song lyric phase in my late childhood and early teens. I remember slowly, agonizingly, trying to piece together the lyrics to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” and treasuring albums that came with lyric sheets. Then, pretty suddenly in my mid-teens, I got to be a big classical music fan. When I got back into more popular forms of music, it was by way of the blues. Obsessing over blues lyrics seemed like a real waste of time—when it wasn’t downright uncomfortable. What was Sonny Boy going to do with his “shooting iron”? It didn’t sound like the sort of thing an enlightened guy with a lot of female friends should be endorsing.

Fast forward twenty years and more, and lyrics are interesting to me again, and the more primitive they are, the better I like them. A case in point is Furry Lewis’s “On the Road Again.” This particular song is mostly a rewrite of Lewis’s own longer song “Kassie Jones pts 1&2” in which “Kassie” is really “Casey” (the spelling is thought to have been changed by the record company for copyright reasons). Anyway, for “On the Road Again” swapped out a few number of “Kassie”’s more narrative verses, and replaced them with a curious series of lyric observations. The result is a lyrical oddity, like Bob Dylan’s masterful “Tangled Up in Blue,” where third person narration alternates with first. Who is the song then about? Casey and his fatal accident? Or the narrator and his own life and loves? What is the relationship between these two threads, between the “he” and the “I”?

The song opens with a throbbing guitar chord that doesn’t really move, almost like a kind of blues raga, or delta version of minimalist music.

I woke up this morning was a shower and rain

Around the curve was a passenger train

Under the bottom was a hobo John

He was a good ol’ hobo but he’s dead and gone

At the end of the fourth line, the chord shifts dramatically into a high and eerie territory, and Lewis repeats the end of the fourth lyric line.

He’s dead and gone

Then the chord shifts back to center and the fourth line is repeated, usually slightly altered.

He’s a good old hobo but he’s dead and gone.

What are we supposed to make of this verse? In most related versions of the Casey Jones story, the rainy morning, the passenger train are images associated with Jones and his crash. Instead the narrator tells us of a “good old hobo” who is dead. Whether he is a victim of Casey’s train accident or some other fate is never told.

In the next verse, we meet the infamous Alice Fry. Alice Fry was (in some versions) the Other Woman in the “Frankie and Johnnie” tale. Why is Alice here? Is she Casey’s mistress too? We don’t know. But she tells us something important about herself.

She said “I’m gonna ride with old Casey and die

I ain’t good looking, but I takes my time

I am a rambling woman; I got a rambling mind

I got a rambling mind.”

And is if to sum it up, the singer adds:

A rambling woman with a rambling mind.

[to be continued]

When Direct Democracy means Bad Government

Over the last few days I have slowly been working my way through George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead. It is an absolutely horrifying film, part art house and part grindhouse. Parallel to this uncharacteristic project, I have been reading about Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood’s book is largely about the defeat of the basically elitist legal project of the Founding Fathers and its displacement by the more radical democracy typically symbolized by Andrew Jackson. Wood’s thesis celebrates the replacement of disinterested elite with a broad-based system where the competing interests of many relatively ordinary citizens balance each other out. Getting back to the Zombie picture, the main problem of Night of the Living Dead is precisely that the self-interests of the various living characters utterly fail to achieve any kind of balance. They cannot agree on leadership, or see even a simple plan through to its conclusion. As a result, despite their relative intelligence, agility, secure position, and weaponry, they are easy prey for the mindless Zombies. So, although I find it hard to disagree with Wood’s description of the facts, I am not sure that I am as convinced of their unalloyed usefulness.

So this brings us to my real concern right now, and that is ballot initiatives. Ballot initiatives have a long and checkered history in this country, dating back to the Progressive era. The idea then (and the idea now, at least nominally) is that legislatures, especially at the state level, are easily held hostage by special interests or by ridiculously powerful leadership structures (this last is certainly true here in my home state of Massachusetts). But there is some evidence that ballot initiatives, under the guise of “direct democracy,” create many more problems than they solve, and disrupt other aspects of a functioning democracy.

The first problem is that ballot initiatives are usually calculated by their proposers to appeal to passion over reason. They tend deal with questions about which people have strong emotional reactions based on social values or self-interest. Tax policy, animal rights, gay marriage, minimum sentencing—these are the stuff high profile ballot questions are usually made of. If they aren’t appealing enough, you can always put a little girl’s face on it, and call it “Betty’s Law,” or something like that. Often a sensible ballot initiative (such as the one to allow alcohol to be sold in grocery stores here in MA) can be derailed by similar emotional tactics, stirred up by the infusion of incredible amounts of cash into the public discourse.

A second problem is the practical tendency of ballot initiatives to pile up and create conflicting mandates. The textbook case of this tendency is California, the state where the ballot process is possibly most open and frequently employed. Although it is probably the wealthiest state in the union, its government is hobbled by a complex web of voter-mandated restrictions on the state’s ability to raise revenue combined with a large number of voter-mandated expenses. To a lesser extent, even Massachusetts suffers from similar ballot driven madness, thanks to the thirty-year-old ballot initiative that led to proposition 2 ½.

The third, and most vexing problem with ballot initiatives is that, although they embody democracy in a direct and powerful way, they run directly counter to other, less glamorous, but vitally important principles of American government. One of these is the separation of powers. In most jurisdictions where ballot initiatives apply, the results of the ballot trump all three branches of government. And this leads to a profound imbalance, wherein the hands of the other branches of government become tied to whatever the outcome of the ballot question. It is hard to be effective at getting things done with tied hands, so we complain of ineffective government, and (to fix the problem) propose more ballot initiatives to tie those same hands tighter.

Related to this question of separation of powers, are the ends that such separation serves. One of these is the principle of civil rights. These rights, these freedoms which we prize so highly, are guaranteed in federal and state constitutions precisely because this is supposed to make it extremely difficult to modify or do away with them. At the federal level, this remains true. At the state level, in many cases, this has become a joke. If rights are acknowledged that a majority dislikes, then those rights can be done away with on the simple principle that a majority dislikes them. That is not true democracy; that is mere force majeure, a technical term for rule through the possession of strength, rather than moral or legal right.

Pope Benedict Goes Fishing...

I have been following this debate as an interested Episcopalian. Just to lay out all my credentials on the table: I consider myself a liberal in both politics and religion, and (though some may see this as a paradox) a traditionalist on matters of faith and scripture. I am perfectly happy with the Episcopal church’s actions (including the ordination of Gene Robinson), but somewhat distressed by the words of some of its other leaders.

So, the current pope would like to facilitate the entrance of disgruntled Anglicans into some sort of branch office of the Catholic church. What does that actually mean? Well, for one thing, said Anglicans can keep their liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer (for the benefit of all you non-Anglicans out there, this is a really big deal. Sentimentally speaking, the BCP is for Anglicans what Ikons are for the Eastern Church). Besides being a little more archaic in places than the Catholic English Liturgies typically are (think 1560’s vs 1960’s), in substance this difference is beyond trivial and symbolic. Oh, and by the way, this change also means that that dissident Anglican priests can switch over to this new Anglo-Catholic church even if they are married.

This has been controversial, because (as everyone on the news points out) [1] regular Catholic priests cannot marry, and [2] there is a global shortage of Catholic priests which (many claim) could be obviated if celibacy were chucked as a requirement. This has led to a charge of opportunism on the part of the Roman See, seeking to gather wealthy first world discontents into its fold, even if it comes at the expense of doctrinal principle.

I am not so sure that this is really true; it certainly isn’t a novelty. I would point the interested reader to the so-called “Eastern Catholic Churches.” These churches (there are 22 of them) were gradually incorporated, with their “rites” (that is both liturgy and canon law) intact, over a period starting in the sixteenth century and continuing to the 20^th. Of course, the various Orthodox Churches of the East cried foul (and sometimes worse), but—in the case of the Ukraine, for example—such compromises have probably avoided the kind of bloodshed that can often accompany religious divisions. Here is what Pope Leo XIII had to say on the subject in 1894:

“that the ancient Eastern rites are a witness to the Apostolicity of the Catholic Church, that their diversity, consistent with unity of the faith, is itself a witness to the unity of the Church, that they add to her dignity and honour. He says that the Catholic Church does not possess one rite only, but that she embraces all the ancient rites of Christendom; her unity consists not in a mechanical uniformity of all her parts, but on the contrary, in their variety, according in one principle and vivified by it.”

It is a beautiful thought, one that I have had before…

It may seem strange, but I am pretty happy about the Pope’s move. I would much rather see dissident Anglicans be accommodated within another church, than see the Anglican Communion (or the Episcopal Church USA) riven by a schism. Pope Benedict isn’t high on my list of people I want to hang around and discuss gender issues with; but I would rather talk with him—about anything at all—than Peter Akinola, the hate-mongering archbishop of Nigeria, who is one of the Anglican prelates that disgruntled American Episcopalians have been turning to.

In the meantime, American Episcopalians like me have some discerning to do. It is easy to castigate the dissidents as prudish and intolerant. In fact they are, themselves, uncomfortably aware of this and have been trying to shift the terms of the debate onto the Episcopal Church’s apparent wishy-washiness on much more fundamental doctrinal issues than who gets to be a bishop. It is easy to read statements of the most theologically liberal Episcopalians as a kind of Crypto-Unitarianism. Unitarians are fine, of course, if that’s what you want for a religious life. But there already is a Unitarian church, and it is hard to see why we need another one. If you can’t recite the creed, and really mean it, then what is the point? I am not saying that one needs to be certain on every point of it, or clear about the meaning of each and every assertion. But the good Christian, I think, has to have hope and faith that it is true, that the Gospel really is the truth, not just a truth. Because frankly, if it is just a truth, who wouldn’t rather just sleep in on Sundays?