City on a Hill or King of the Castle?

I was reading a funny article this morning about the country's leading expert on the vice-presidency.  I know, right?  And right there was this ad about Billy Graham, which said "I have hope for America because of Jesus Christ."
Now first of all, I thought he was already dead.  Nope.  At 94 he is still visiting presidents and preaching the gospel, planning one last stadium tour of the kind he used to be famous for.  I have to admit that, as evangelicals go, I kind of like Rev. Graham.  He is a lot less partisan and more politically moderate than many of his peers.  In fact, in one recent interview, he said that one of his chief regrets was getting too involved in politics. [Here] He is still an opponent of Gay Marriage, but how much can we really expect from a nonagenarian Southern Baptist?  He is also the same man who has openly asked his peers why homosexuality should be such a big deal: “There are other sins," he said in 1997, "Why do we jump on that sin as though it’s the greatest sin?”  Interestingly the look of the ad seemed to parallel the look of a lot of Obama-related material.
So anyway, all of this is by way of saying that I am not knee-jerk hostile to Billy Graham; if today's evangelical leaders were more like him, I think we would be better off.  But the phrase "I have hope for America because of Jesus Christ" really set me off.
Why?  Well unless you are a Mormon (or a member of some other faith where the United States actually has a role of sorts in your revelation) you have no business ascribing a particular interest in the USA to God.  You can believe in that. if you want, and it is clear that a lot of people do, especially politicians.  But no priest, minister, rabbi, imam, bonze, or other cleric has any business making that kind claim from the pulpit.  To do so is a kind of idolatry; it makes a fetish out of the nation, and places God's concerns and Human concerns on the same plane, perhaps even subordinating God to man. Anyone who makes such a claim—from within any faith—makes a claim that  degrades that person's co-religionists around the world.  This is the disturbing underbelly behind John Winthrop's famous (an oft-appropriated) "City on a Hill" quotation, the city that  Ronald Reagan always described as "Shining."  If we are shining on a hill then where is everyone else?  Dirty in a valley? Tarnished in a hole?
I can't have hope (or not have hope, for that matter) "for America because of Jesus Christ."  I can have hope for mankind, for salvation, for forgiveness, for healing because of Jesus Christ.  But for the USA, not as such, no.  
Rev. Graham is a subtle guy, a pretty ecumenical guy, and what I was looking at was an advertisement designed to appeal to people who don't normally think through the theological implications of their patriotic or political feelings.  I am sure part of his point is, in fact, that there is hope for America, because God offers hope for everyone. But, you know, it doesn't take much to get me going, and I haven't posted since March.

Where our thoughts cross: Me and Rick Santorum

Today is "Super Tuesday, a term that I find puzzling, because I have always found that the only thing "super" about Super Tuesday is that it is either Super Depressing or Super Not a Big Deal.  But this has been nothing if not an interesting year to be a spectator of the Republican Race for the Nomination.

Each of the candidates, even the ones who have already dropped out (OK, especially them) is a punch-line looking for a joke.  Some of them (I’m looking at you, Newt, Ron, and Herman) even seem to know it.  But the one with the most humorous potential is also the most humorless, and that is Rick Santorum.

I have to admit that Santorum fascinates me.  I disagree with just about every single word that comes out of his mouth—in that respect, he is no different from the rest of the G.O.P. field—but he does stand out as having a certain integrity.  He has that same quality of sincerity that John McCain once had, like one sincere statement in an ocean of advertising slogans.  If Mitt Romney seems like someone who will say anything to get elected, and Newt seems like someone who will just say anything period, Santorum seems like someone who is always under oath: to speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how wacky or unpopular (or factually untrue) that is likely to be.  I have to respect that much.  It makes me wonder if I can find any other common ground with him at all.

Nope.  Well, almost. There might one really small way in which he and I kind of agree about a small aspect of one thing.  Sex.  Yep.  Not contraception.  Not abortion. Not gay marriage.  Not the frantic denunciation of Woodstock and the 60’s. Not the implicit repudiation of feminism.  Not the phantom demons of gay polygamy or whatever other hypothetical sins Santorum has conjured out on the trail.  But just on sex, well, I wonder if Santorum hasn’t tapped into something.

I agree with Santorum that sex and sexuality is important, maybe even cosmically important.  And that is—almost—the limit of our agreement.  The one other thing we might sort of maybe agree on is that our culture often cheapens and trivializes that importance.

On everything that flows to and from that one point of intersection, me and Rick differ.  Rick’s theology on sex and the created world, from my point of view, is not only “phony” (his term, by which I mean "unfounded in Scripture," which means I am sort of trying to play by his rules, even though he is Catholic so the scripture thing isn't quite as weighty as it might be if he were protestant... whatever), but perverse and based on the principle not of a loving God, but a hating one.  I’m not saying I don’t believe in a God that gets angry, even wrathful.  But I am saying that I don’t believe in a God who’s wrath is principally motivated by everyday human sexual behavior.  The crime of Sodom and Gomorrah, as framed in Genesis, is not homosexuality per se, but rape.  The crime of Onan was not simply “spilling his seed,” but refusing to allow a woman to whom he was duty-bound to offer children to conceive them.  Paul’s many rants about wanton sexuality need to be viewed in the context of his rants about circumcision; that is to say that circumcision, like sexual fidelity, was both an actual thing, and a metaphor for many many more things having to do with being in right relations to God.  If you will offer your body to anyone (runs the symbolic reasoning) then what does that say about your soul?  That’s a legitimate question. But let us not forget that Jesus’s only words to sexual transgressors are words of forgiveness; his sternest rebuke is “Go and sin no more.”   I believe that God isn't directly concerned about sex.  God is concerned about relationships—ours with each other, and also with him.  That has implications for sex and sexuality; but not on the scale or of the kind that Santorum goes on about. That kind of theology may be venerable, but it is just phony.

11 September

    My relationship with 11 September is a complicated one.  I can't bring any personal tragedy to bear, thankfully.  In some ways, I feel that, even by trying to write about it, I am buying into something about which I am strongly ambivalent, even on a blog that no one reads.  There has come to be a difference between 11 September 2001 and “September 11” or (even more so) “9/11.”  To me the former is the day itself, in all its horror and wonder.  The latter is what people have made out of it since then, every grim and divisive decision, the two nearly fruitless wars, the bumper stickers of hate and the flags of righteousness.  Nothing new was brought into being by “9/11” and (other than the lives lost, and the symbols laid low) nothing was destroyed, but everything that was before passed through it, redefining itself in relation to the event.

   I remember in those first couple of days the stunned kindnesses, the way people looked at each other with fresh eyes.  I held my four month old son very tightly, watching the TV constantly hoping that somehow some revelation might come from it that would help it all make sense.  I remember the first issue of the New Yorker, with Art Spiegelman (mainly famous for his harrowing depiction of the holocaust in MAUS) contributing a cover that at first seemed to simply be completely black, but which had, through some subtle change in texture, the outlines of the Towers inscribed on it.  I remember the contributors: Susan Sontag, Hendrik Hertzberg, Adam Gopnik.  We agreed we would keep that issue forever, but we didn’t.

   While survivors emerged from ground zero, flags emerged on cars, and we were urged by our government to... go shopping.  The tech bubble had been bursting anyway, and so the economy needed stimulus.  The president, who had won my grudging respect on the dreadful day, quickly went back to being the jingoistic know-nothing that I found so loathsome.

   It was clear to me, very early on, that the terrorists had gotten what they were after.  Terrorism can be motivated by many things, but typically it seeks to provoke its victims into heavy-handed over-reactions that will then make the victim look bad, or exhaust it resources, or suffer in some other way that will lead to its own destruction.  I think we were very obliging to Al-Quaeda in this respect.  We took the enormous good-will of the global community in the latter half of September 2001 and spurned it like Harry Potter turning on his friends in The Order of the Pheonix.  We engaged in a ham-handed (but perhaps necessary) war in Afghanistan, and a more spectacular (but completely unnecessary) war in Iraq.  We turned against the dearly held values of an open society (something which our enemies found so loathsome in us), and instead condoned torture and domestic surveillance.  “Patriot” was the word of the hour, and “If you are not with us, you are against us.”  The Onion, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert became preferred news sources for me, because parody and satire seemed to cushion the blow of so much bad tidings, of a nation so poorly and quixotically run.

This week, The Onion ran a headline:  “Nation Would Rather Think About 9/11 Than Anything From Subsequent 10 Years”.  As is often the case with their best work, the ensuing article is humorous, but is also a pretty bare statement of fact about the last decade.  And since so much that litany of disaster has its roots in our response to the day now known as “9/11,” I cannot help but grieve as much for how we responded, as for all the lives we lost.  In our hour of darkness, we have been tried, and frankly, I think we have been found wanting.

Love the One You're With

It's been a long time.  There have been a bunch of things I have wanted to write about—book reviews, music, the end of the world—but the world won't stop for me to blog about it.  Sit Still!  Stop fidgeting!
So yesterday I saw this bumper sticker.  It was one which I think I have seen before, but which I only really thought about for the first time right then.  It ran like this:

I LOVE MY COUNTRY

But I Fear my Government

Now to be fair, if I saw this bumper sticker at any point between January 2001 and January 2009, I probably would have agreed with it, and left it behind.  But now I can see a certain logical fallacy to it, one which was just as fallacious when the Great Pretender was in the White House as it is now.  Let me try and break it down.

"I love my country" is a pretty straightforward seeming statement.  So is "I fear my government."  But unless the former is referring to the terrain, or the latter is referring to a dictatorship, then there is a disconnect here.  Because unless our democracy has completely failed (and I do not believe it has), then the government is a direct creation of, a manifestation of, the American People.  The Government has no meaning, definition, or direction apart from what "my country" bestows on it.

So to feel differently about "my country" than about "my government" is a logical impossibility.  But (to quote the great Ulysses Everett McGill) "it's fool that looks for logic in the chambers of human heart."  And experience teaches us that love and fear are not mutually exclusive things.  One possible reading of this bumper sticker is that the driver in question both loves and fears his fellow Americans.  That's a generous reading.  Personally I doubt that this person and I would feel much love for each other.  

Another, more difficult, and maybe more disturbing reading is this:  if this person and I—or any two people who agreed with the statement "I love my country"— made a list of the qualities that make America lovable, admirable, or great, the chances are pretty good that we find disagreement.  We would not list all the same things, and when we did, we might well find that we mean different, even opposing, things by them.  The "my" in "I love my country" reveals that it is paramount: "I love my version, my vision, my aspirations for, my country."   The government, consisting of hundreds of elected and appointed officials and magistrates, inevitably, is forced to cobble a collective vision out of all these disparate American dreams.  This vision of our country can never embrace all the individual dreams of its citizens.  But when we try to place the my over the our, because of ideology (I really believe that single payer is best), or prejudice (I don't like motorcyclists), or selfishness (I don't really want to pay more taxes), I think we show that we do not love our country as we should.  After all, in a romantic relationship, if we always put our own fantasies about our beloveds ahead of his or her actual qualities and desires, we would not be very good lovers.  To be good lovers of our country, we need to work on our relationship with the whole as it is, and not our private fantasies about what the country (or its government) should be.  And this is just as true for a liberal like me as it is for any Tea Party wing nut.

Thanksgiving and Its Ordinary Weirdness

    Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and much as I love it, I would like to spend a moment dwelling on some of its peculiarities.  It is, perhaps, the most completely American holiday, in the true sense of the word.  In its oddly ecumenical way, it is truly a “holy day” with prescribed rituals, a sacral meal with defined parts, and myth of foundation.*  Yet all of these are grounded in an American mythos, in American history (not quite the same thing) and respond to both American beliefs and American anxieties.  The only other holiday which even comes close is July 4.

Where to begin?  Let’s start (and maybe end) with the Turkey.  Turkey almost certainly wasn’t the main attraction on the menu in 1621 (or in 1607, if you belong to the Jamestown school of Thanksgiving mythology).  Any poultry on those early menus was simply part of a hecatomb of game, in which red meat was probably the star attraction.

   And lets face it, Turkey is a weird bird.  We are not known, globally, as a nation of great cooks, and yet our national feast requires a main dish that is incredibly difficult to cook well. We insist on making that difficult job even harder through a set of traditions that mandate cooking the largest possible bird (which leads to  toughness and dryness) and stuffing it (which makes for tasty stuffing, but an even drier bird).  Turkey's flavor takes a little getting used to: I still vividly remember the shock, as a child, of how it looked like a gigantic chicken, but mysteriously failed to taste like one.  My favorite part of a chicken, the drumstick, was an almost inedible bundle of desiccated dark meat and mysterious splinters of bone.

     The whole Turkey train wreck serves to remind me of how out of touch, as Americans, we really are with good food.  Much has been made of how the French, in particular, don’t “get” Thanksgiving.  I can see how this would be true at every level (I can’t think of a nation less likely to fetishize thankfulness than the French), but I suspect it’s the gastronomic side of the equation that really kicks it for them.  “You have a holiday whose entire celebration is built around the food,” says my inner Frenchman (I don’t know if everyone has one of these, but I certainly do), “and the food is so… ordinary. Yams?  Stale bread? What is wrong with you people?”  There is so much fuss made over the preparation of Thanksgiving food, that we tend to forget how economical the whole thing is.  Pound for pound, turkey is a very good buy, as are yams, potatoes, squash stuffing, and all the other traditional components of a Thanksgiving meal.  Indeed, perhaps that is where and why the holiday begins to make some sense for us.  We are not thankful for what we have on Thanksgiving itself, but for what we have everyday.  The ordinariness of the meal may be a problem, gastronomically speaking, but ritually it makes perfect sense.  What a blessing it is to be allowed to consider our own plentiful lives "ordinary."

*Speaking of ecumenism, nothing irritates me more than being told to have a nice "holiday" when the holiday is Thanksgiving.  Who the f*** has a problem with Thanksgiving?

Happy Father's Day

Let us now praise famous men, 
the ancestors in their generations. 
2 The Lord apportioned to them great glory, 
his majesty from the beginning. 
3 There were those who ruled in their kingdoms, 
and made a name for themselves by their valor; 
those who gave counsel because they were intelligent; 
those who spoke in prophetic oracles; 
4 those who led the people by their counsels 
and by their knowledge of the people's lore; 
they were wise in their words of instruction; 
5 those who composed musical tunes, 
or put verses in writing; 
6 rich men endowed with resources, 
living peacefully in their homes- 
7 all these were honored in their generations, 
and were the pride of their times. 
8 Some of them have left behind a name, 
so that others declare their praise. 
9 But of others there is no memory; 
they have perished as though they had never existed; 
they have become as though they had never been born, 
they and their children after them. 
10 But these also were godly men, 
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; 
11 their wealth will remain with their descendants, 
and their inheritance with their children's children. 
12 Their descendants stand by the covenants; 
their children also, for their sake. 
13 Their offspring will continue forever, 
and their glory will never be blotted out. 
14 Their bodies are buried in peace, 
but their name lives on generation after generation. 
15 The assembly declares their wisdom, 
and the congregation proclaims their praise.

The Double Down:

This was a food review that I wrote on a whim for our school paper.  The readership seems to like it, so I thought I would post it here as well.  I'd like to thank Jacob Karlins for bringing this culinary wonder to my attention.

The new KFC Double Down seems like an exciting concept: what if you took a fast food sandwich’s least interesting component—the lousy processed bread—and replaced it with its most appealing—more meat?  These kinds of questions are how new menu items are born.

The anticipation for the sandwich was something like apocalyptic (in fact one source actually described it as a “harbinger of a breadless apocalypse” [eater.com])Words like “abomination,” “baffling,” “ominous,” “freak-show,” “deadly,” “angina,” and so on.

KFC tacitly acknowledges that the public might be skeptical.  The promotional paragraph on the KFC website begins by asserting “The new KFC Double Down sandwich is real!” which is surely the most existential statement ever made by a fast food restaurant on behalf of its product.

I too can vouch for its reality, up to a point.  On 12 April, overcome by childhood sentiment for the days when Kentucky Fried Chicken (note the lack of abbreviation) was the nearest fast-food chain to our house, I sought out my nearest KFC (which turns out to be in Danvers, where rte 35 meets 128) and ordered one.  When I arrived, I was a little nervous, since there was no sign of the major marketing blitz that I had been told of.  There were no Double Down signs, nor was it on the menu.  No “Today’s the DD Day,” hoopla.  I had to ask if they actually had the sandwich for sale, and was told, with a definite lack of enthusiasm, that they did. I bought it, and not long afterwards, I ate it, hot.

Here is where the Double Down’s touted reality begins to need qualification.  One of the great truths of fast food is that the camera always lies.  The pictures of menu items always seem to be brimming with freshness, neatly and lovingly assembled, moist where they should be moist, crispy where they should be crispy, and so forth.  Of course the sandwich that arrives is usually of a much lesser star, smushed, soggy and so forth.  With that in mind, we note that in pictures, the Double Down looks like a sandwich.  It lies flat, with its ingredients of bacon, cheese and sauce neatly arranged, and with a handy paper envelope to keep it all in place and keep hands from becoming overwhelmingly greasy.  (one commentator suggested, entertainingly, that the sandwich might be healthier if you ate the wrapper).The moment I opened my bag, it was clear that the whole “sandwich” notion was a cheerful fiction.  The handy envelope was nowhere to be found, and the chicken breasts (being pleasantly real and therefore not entirely flat) did not behave like remotely like bread, but rolled around loose in the bag.  A lonely looking strip of bacon and an ersatz-looking piece of cheddar jack seemed barely affiliated with the other ingredients.  If there was sauce, I didn’t notice it as such.

I managed to cajole the whole thing into an awkward and extremely greasy “sandwich,” however, and began to eat.  And here is the kicker: it may not be a sandwich, but it was really pretty good.  The chicken was hot and moist and juicy, and the batter it had been fried in was crispy and flavorful.  The bacon and cheese didn’t contribute much, but they didn’t detract either.  Other critics have claimed it was very salty, but no more so than any other two pieces of fried chicken. 

Of course, the Double Down is bad for your health.  Particularly if you eat a lot of processed foods or have trouble with your blood pressure, you shouldn’t go near it (and don’t think you will be any safer with the grilled version: it has even more salt and almost as much fat).  But although, calorie-wise, the Double Down is no better than a Big Mac, it isn’t any worse either.  And although I was thirsty afterwards (presumably from all that salt) I was satisfied, and had none of the queasiness that I usually experience after a fast food burger.

One still must ask the question “why?” Why have this goofy sandwich-thing? Why sell it?  But I think I have the answer.  Because it has been there all along. The Double Down could be rolled out with absolutely no changes in inventory or preparation procedures.  All the ingredients (the breasts, the cheese, the bacon, the sauce) are things that KFC already keeps on hand for other menu items.  Only the little envelope is new (and apparently optional).  Even nutritionally, the fuss seems overstated; how is this actually worse than a two or three piece chicken meal with greasy sides?  KFC has been selling that (and worse) since before this writer was born.  KFC gets to roll out an attention-grabbing new product and the only cost is promotion.  And since KFC is always running ads anyway, that isn’t really any change to its bottom line; you have got to advertise something.  So even if the whole  Double Down is a dumb idea, and disappears as quickly (and with less fanfare) than it arrived, it is still kind of smart.  Will I order another Double Down?  Probably not.  But I walked into a KFC for the first time in 20 years to try one.  Isn’t that probably what they were after?

The Double Down in its Platonic form, as represented on the KFC website, with handy wrapper, neat assembly, and a plate.  A plate?  Mine came in a bag.

The Double Down as it exists in the material world.  Note its difficulty hanging together as a “sandwich.”