Things We Heard Today: Vince Gilligan talking to Marc Maron

My wife and I are just now catching up with Breaking Bad.  It's a pattern with us, to binge-watch a show a few years after its run is over and it's no longer buzzy. 

With no plan in mind, just looking for something to listen to at my desk this morning, I came across a recent Marc Maron podcast where he interviewed Vince Gilligan, the creator and show-runner of Breaking Bad. 

Gilligan is a good ol' down-to-earth guy, so it was a pleasure just to spend an hour eavesdropping on him.  He was disarming in talking about his career, the debt he owes to Chris Carter and The X-Files, the offhand way he and a friend had the original spark of an idea for a show about a guy who cooks crystal meth.  His career path started in Farmville, Virginia, not the likeliest launching point for a show biz career, so that made him extra relatable.  He seemed like someone I could have known in school. 

Gilligan recounted how he didn't know in advance exactly how things would unfold in BB, plotwise-- that he initially planned to kill Jesse off at the end of Season One; that he lost his sympathy for Walter White but was surprised to see that much of his audience retained their interest in Walter.  His account speaks to the potential for collaboration in a television series, for investing in actors and other members of the creative team; perhaps even for incorporating the audience response in how the show would evolve. 

None of these are brilliant insights, I realize, but Gilligan's story might be pertinent to me and mine someday, so I want to at least bookmark the link. 

It was great that Marc Maron landed an interview with President Obama a few weeks ago.  WTF is a great success story of recent years.  It's remarkable to sustain something so quirky and personal and oftentimes coming from a place of conflict if not pain.  And even with success easing some of Maron's pain, the show remains good.  I don't think I'm Maron's target audience exactly, but I've enjoyed a lot of his shows -- I pick and choose a bit from his episode guide.  For all kinds of reasons, I like how Maron's guerrilla podcast got onto the agenda of our very shrewd, sensitive, culturally aware Chief Executive.  One reason is that some bigfoot media people got slightly sniffy that Obama would give Maron an exclusive interview and not give one to them. 

The Overnighters

POV, the public television documentary series, aired a film Monday called The Overnighters.  It focuses on a shelter for transient workers in the booming oil fields around Williston, North Dakota.

The principal figure is Jay Reinke, the Lutheran pastor who runs the mission.  This is the best, richest depiction of a pastor I've ever seen on video.  Pastor Reinke is busy damn near around the clock, housing dozens of men on the church floor each night--and trying to pacify church members, the neighborhood, and town officials each day.  He tries to be knowing, loving, and authentic in all his many relationships.  And he's relentless in pursuing his ministry.  If anyone is truly called by God, it would seem to be Pastor Reinke.

But he's in a horribly sticky situation.  Men stream into Williston from around the U.S. and around the world seeking a new start.  Some are immigrants from Africa.  Many are native born U.S. citizens carrying criminal records.  They live rough, and that's the point.  Each wants a job, a dirty oil field job, and each has a family somewhere else to whom he wants to send most of his wages.  So they sleep in their cars, or in dirty RVs, or on the floor of a church, and they eat meals straight out of a tin can.  It's the discipline.

The oil companies welcome these men, if needing their labor can be called welcoming them.  The town flatly does not welcome them, dreading the crime and the blight associated with these roughnecks.  After a point, under the strain of their unremitting need, the church doesn't welcome them either. 

Only Jay Reinke and his family truly love and welcome these men.

Most of the film, while rich in detail, traces a sad story of how that love is not enough.  The board of elders of Concordia Lutheran Church threatens Pastor Reinke's job if he doesn't close the shelter, and stanch the bleeding of church members quitting and neighbors complaining.  Town government, with its fire codes and parking rules, is a machine for maintaining small-town tidiness, and thus a scourge for roughnecks seeking a new start.  The town newspaper, claiming civic duty, publishes the names of men in town who are convicted sex offenders.  The list includes one man whom Pastor Reinke has been sheltering in his home, unbeknownst to the church. 

After months of Reinke's pleading, in formal meetings and one-on-one appeals, the shelter has to close.  The viewer has seen this coming.  There are some angry scenes in the final reel, where someone or other turns on Jay Reinke.  It seems he has made conflicting promises to various people, not all of which he could keep in the end.  As he himself admits, Reinke has trouble saying No--a common trait in ministers.  Despite good faith and the best intentions, he has disappointed people, and a few, mainly men from the Overnighters, cut him off abruptly.

The final development, however, is one I didn't see coming, and it gutted me.  (Spoilers follow.)  A man has been blackmailing Jay Reinke over a sexual encounter between them, and the scandal becomes public.  I'm not sure who the blackmailer is, but a good bet is that it's one of the oil field workers he has been ministering to.  Jay has spoken of his "brokenness" throughout the story; now it appears that the brokenness is his struggle with same-sex attraction.  We thought that Jay had lost his pet project, but at least kept his job and his family.  He loses both of those in the end.  Just ahead of the closing credits, a caption tells us that Jay is looking for work in the North Dakota oil fields.

I suppose at first I was bothered by this twist.  I'd been pleased to see a modern-day working pastor in Flyover America, portrayed in a nuanced, unsentimental, but generally positive way.  His being in a gay sex scandal didn't fit in my frame.  Leaving aside theoretical questions about documentary film, fiction vs. nonfiction--I wanted Jay Reinke to be exemplary. 

Having sat with it for a day and a half, I feel better about it.  Ministry is dangerous work, so I've heard.  I see that more deeply now.  Reinke was out on a limb: working too many hours, neglecting his relationship with his family, lacking a friend outside the church or The Overnighters who could lovingly keep him in check.  His apparent strength was wedded to a hidden weakness.  His Sisyphean determination left no space for lightness, for joy, for release, at least in licit or "constructive" terms.  So an illicit compulsion found release.

Or hell, maybe I have it quite wrong, that last bit.  Jay Reinke isn't dead, and God isn't finished with him or anyone else in the film.  Reinke may resurface as a Brokeback Prairie preacher, or leader among LGBT Lutherans.  I'm sure he repents part of his story, but I hope and believe he embraces part of it.

Charleston

The morning after the shooting, I was at my desk at work, monitoring the online news as it steadily unfolded.  The count of the dead; the photos of the shooter and his car; the account of what he said given by the woman he left alive.  The fact that he sat there for an hour before rising and producing his gun.  His uncle ID'ing him to the police.  The press quickly tracking him via Facebook, seeking comments from his relatives and peers.  I say "peers" since he didn't seem to have friends. 

(Key quote: “I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs.”)

The unsurprising news of his capture. 

Then the second day: Enterprising net-sleuths digging out his racist manifesto.  His confessing to the crime; his hapless attempt to kill himself at Emanuel AME.  He remarked that the people at the church had been so nice to him, he almost didn't go through with the murders.

It was useless for me to be glued to the news those days; it might have been better to be traveling or something, to be unplugged.  The only cheap satisfaction was seeing conservatives casting about in a panic, looking for a way to spin it.  I was messaging friends online, and everything I wrote was delivered in the tone of deadpan snark.  Hold up everybody, Rudy Giuliani says we don't know what his motivation was...

There was a meeting at my church last night, a bunch of Southern honkies not directly affected by the attack, but with shocked consciences.  We went around the room and were each asked to say a word or two to describe our emotions about the shootings.  Everyone expressed sorrow, but most were groping for some more transcendent feeling: hope, solidarity, tolerance.  I went last.  My words were action, which white folks need to take because sorrow and guilt are not enough; and determined, which the people of Emanuel certainly are, opening their doors for worship as scheduled, determined to overcome.

I realized at that moment that what I am, simply, is angry.  My words are not transcendent; my jaw is clenched.  I feel I'm supposed to forgive.  Some loved ones of the Charleston victims told the shooter they forgive him.  That's astonishing.  I don't forgive him because my heart is hardened toward him, but also because I don't feel it's my place to forgive him.  I am one on whose behalf he believed he was acting. 



From the first day after the news broke, there were people lifting up the names of the dead, and saying that the perp is nothing; let's not even honor him with our attention.  There is wisdom in that attitude: to focus on these embodiments of love and faith, not to focus on the one in the grip of hatred.  I hope I'll attain that attitude eventually.  At the moment I'm fixed on this young white man.  He was pure in his stupidity.  It's facile to say he was a perfect failure, that he will unite the races rather than divide them.  He meant to shed blood, and make widows and orphans, and he did.  But despite his declared mission, he may have taught a lesson quite contrary to what he intended.  He revealed the original sin, scar, and stain on our people, his and mine.

On the abrupt departure of Bill Simmons from ESPN

So, if his writing was always shitty, and fame and access actually improved his skill-set, then why don’t you like Simmons as much as you used to? What changed?

You did. You are not 19 anymore. You matured, read other, better writers, and eventually discovered the difference between an analogy and a reference, between affectation and personality, between pointless maundering and having something to say. You grew to prefer coherence over in-group signaling. You figured out that writing that claps you on the back and congratulates you for being careless and white and male and steeped in mainstream pop culture is the precise opposite of subversive. You lost your taste for Bill Simmons, whose writing is bad. You grew up. Good for you! Growing up is cool.

Yeah, pretty much.  For my case the sentence should read, "You are not 36 anymore."  When I discovered Bill Simmons, it must've been 2000 or so, I was charmed.  It didn't take too much reading in his ESPN archive to catch on to (and, I suppose, be flattered that I caught on to) his inside jokes, the private language and set of pop-culture references. 

What took a little longer to figure out: Simmons and his group of college buds, who featured in his columns, reminded me of my group of college buds.  That had a powerful nostalgic pull on me.  At the time, I was in a doldrums related to being the parent of small kids, a life stage that can make one feel boring and prematurely old.  I was missing my male circle from college days.  We too had our private vocabulary, our favorite movies and pop songs and other clever references.  I thought this dense groupthink made us distinctive and rare. 

It does NOT make us distinctive or rare, I've come to understand, after yet a little more time.  Five million frat bros can't be wrong, from a mass marketing perspective, but they can't all be special.  That has been a little painful to accept, along with other intimations that my college experience was not as magical as I once felt it was. 

Parallel to that sad acceptance, I've found it harder to slog through Simmons's prose.  To his credit, Grantland publishes some writers I really admire (Charlie Pierce, Bryan Curtis, and Brian Phillips are the principal names) who make Simmons's own writing look pedestrian by comparison. 

(It also publishes some folks who read like obsequious Simmons acolytes.  That's understandable; he certainly hit on a winning formula, for anyone able to follow it.  Deadspin itself could be said to take the Simmons M.O. and improve it.)

As this piece hints, Simmons has turned out to be pretty good as a publisher, producer, and all-round businessperson.  At ESPN he leveraged his pageviews into the 30 for 30 videos and Grantland, and both those things have had some good moments.  I hope Bill surfaces somewhere that understands him and gives him latitude to sponsor more good young writers and filmmakers. He has an aptitude for that.  But his writing... I'm over it.

On whether being an adult might be better than being a child

Mike isn't nice to waiters or waitresses.  He may not be outright rude, but he's brusque.  There's not a lot of Please and Thank You.  At breakfast at the hotel, he sends back the bacon, asks if it can be crispier.

That's a difference between us, and I don't mean to flatter myself.  I am polite to a fault, compulsively polite.  And I don't think I've ever sent back a plate of food in my life.  Some of them should have gone back!

It must have felt good to Mike to grow into that.  Kids are expected to defer.  It must have been sweet for Mike to grow up, get a little thicker and balder, and become the brusque, slightly imperious person he was meant to be.

I have marveled at how my oldest child has adapted to college.  She struggled in high school, I just assumed there would be struggles in college, but she has come into her own.  She can deal with adults on a more equal basis, and there are certain kinds of crap that she used to hate, and now doesn't have to put up with anymore.  Hall passes, bell schedules, parents and teachers telling her where to be every minute of the day.  No more.  She organizes life for herself now.

She is nice to waiters and waitresses, though.

Foley

John was calling to say that he couldn't come to my wedding.  He had won a sales contest at his job, the prize was a Caribbean vacation, and the departure date was the same as our wedding date.  He apologized sincerely, he hated to miss the wedding, but he had put a lot of planning and energy into winning the Caribbean trip.  I understood, I wasn't mad, and I tried to turn the conversation to other topics, news of our lives.  But John kept reiterating how sorry he was, how much he regretted the date conflict, and not being there on my big day.  Finally I said, "No hard feelings," and I realized those were the exact words he needed to hear out of my mouth.  His relief was palpable as soon as I spoke the words, the sentence of absolution.  The whole conversation was designed to get me to say it, and would have continued all day if necessary until I said it. 

Squinting and Savoring

There was a Letter to the Editor in my local paper on Friday, bemoaning the paper's decision not to print Major League Baseball box scores in the Sports page any longer. 

At first glance, this seemed just a generic rant of the kind the newspaper Letters page specializes in, of the Old Person Yelling at Passing Traffic variety.  What makes it interesting is that the author is the poet Michael McFee.

Can I access such data online? Sure. But it’s not the same as holding the folded newspaper in my hands, following the numbers with my fingers, smelling the ink and hearing the shaken-out pages, appreciating how neatly a box score (which takes up very little room) summarizes this beautiful game and doing so the way generations of fans and families have always done. It’s not even close.

Part of what McFee is praising is the sensory experience of reading a newspaper.  I can relate: My wife and I let our subscription to the physical paper lapse a couple of years ago.  But we missed it, so we re-upped.  We missed it most of all at the breakfast table.  Does it clutter up our lives?  I suppose so, but it also gives texture to our lives, concrete and local.

It was nice, also, to be reminded that the daily box score can appeal to a poet as well as a baseball stat nerd.  If you know its syntax, a box score tells a story in an economical but resonant way.  Sports reporting on the Web has almost no space limitations, so some of the beauty of the box score is lost due to the abundance of real estate. 


Michael McFee has published at least a couple of poems about baseball.  I liked this one; I have been struck by the image of a baseball diamond seen from an airplane window, especially at night.  But this one dazzled me.  I reprint it here.

Old Baseball Found Under A Bush


On this ultimate spitball
 steeped for who knows how many unseasonable seasons
  under a parkside bush,

two tiny snails are tracing
  fingerings: fast ball, slider, split finger, curve,
   a patient rehearsal

over horsehide so putrefied
 the regulation pressure-wound muscular core beneath
  is dissolving like newsprint.

This is something you want
 to drop, not throw: the old flirtation with gravity
  has gone sour, there’s too much

dirt and scuff and sweat and smell,
 the delicate infinite swell of the hand-stitched seams
  protrudes from its flayed skin

like a skeleton, a bone of hope.
 This thing is meant for the heavy hands of the dead.
  So I tuck it back in the dark

as the snails polish their trail,
 a couple of umpires searching for whatever it was
  that made this ball jump once.

"We’ve just been obnoxious and stuck around anyway"

Emma Green at The Atlantic, writing about the Allegheny Mennonite Conference debating the status of LGBT persons.  This is a terrific article: it adds to my understanding of the Mennonites, and it is a great case study of how these issues are playing out in American denominations.  No easy answers are offered.  On principle I side with the progressives, but I respect the traditions and heritage that the conservatives are defending.  I also like the audio clips.

My title here is taken from a quote by the pastor of the Mennonite congregation in Hyattsville, MD.  It was the first church in its conference to accept openly gay members, and the conference yielded to the congregation's wishes in the beginning.  As Hyattsville's identity as LGBT-affirming became stronger, it began sending gay members as delegates to the regional meetings, and it was then that the conflict emerged: Hyattsville was placed on probation, its voting rights suspended, its pastor's ordination reviewed. 

You'd think the Hyattsville group would take a hint at this point.  But they didn't; they kept attending meetings, "obnoxiously" making themselves visible if officially powerless.  This year things came to a head: the limbo of probation could not be sustained. Hyattsville won the vote to be restored, but by the narrowest margin.  As a consequence, three other congregations withdrew.

Part of the legacy of the Reformation is that some issues are important enough to split over....

Another choice quote -- One conference delegate, a gay man and Hyattsville member, is confronted with people who quote the Leviticus verse calling same-sex relations an abomination.

But Miller said he tries to ignore them. “I don’t react very much any more—maybe an eye roll. Anything that biblical writers were addressing had nothing to do with modern same-sex couples,” he said. “Some people’s whole focus about gay and lesbian relationships is all about sex—thinking below the belt, and that’s not the totality of what our life together means.”

 That's a great, succinct response -- painfully arrived at.

Heroism and Bureaucracy

I feel vaguely unworthy, sometimes, reading the blog Crooked Timber.  It's mostly by and for academics, and the topics discussed are often ones where I have only a Cliffs Notes level understanding.  This one, by Corey Robin, is about Hannah Arendt and the history of bureaucracy.   I want to bookmark it.  Does a hero have to burst the bonds of bureaucracy, or institutions generally?  Or can a hero operate, even luxuriate, within a bureaucracy?  The post concludes:

Ever since Weber, probably Tocqueville, we’ve tended to think of the soulless bureaucrat as the very opposite of the impassioned political actor. In her sharpest and darkest moments, Arendt saw otherwise: not only would the political aspirant have to work with and in a bureaucracy, but in his desire to be remembered for all time, to do something that no future could ever forget, he would happily find himself basking in paper, festooned in red tape.

Things We YouTubed Today, October 16, 2014

Bloggingheads featuring Robert Farley and Tom Nichols talking about the changing culture of D.C. and the policy-making establishment.  That might not sound thrilling, but it was a good podcast. 






 That page links to this Ezra Klein piece about the rise of political science in media and policy circles in Washington.


I've been feeling vaguely pissed off at Leon Panetta, who just published a memoir where he dumps on President Obama for being soft and indecisive on Syria and other things.  Farley and Nichols conjecture that Panetta probably soured on the Obama White House the first time he was ignored in a meeting in favor of some 25-year-old with a PowerPoint.  Sounds believable. 

We're going to look back and realize that Obama's was the Moneyball Administration in some ways.  Barack was the Billy Beane figure, and people like Leon Panetta are the Art Howe figures.  (In other recent news, Billy Beane's Oakland Athletics have gone home without a pennant again this year.)

Taking a hike

Courtesy of my cousin Caskie on Facebook: A list of Virginia's best hiking trails, crowdsourced.  Lord knows when I will get around to these, I still have a lot in North Carolina I want to do, but here is the 411.

Things We Read Today, September 25, 2014

Michael Lewis stares into the abyss.   This is a glimpse into the psychology of those who willingly sell their souls in 2014.

The last few years, Silicon Valley has grown in its appeal to top Ivy League graduates.  But working for a tech start-up can't quite match the allure of the financial markets: "[E]ntrepreneurship doesn’t offer the sort of people who wind up at elite universities what a lot of them obviously crave: status certainty."

It's a mistake to believe your values can survive any ordeal you put them to.

People like to think they have a “character,” and that this character of theirs will endure, no matter the situation. It’s not really so. People are vulnerable to the incentives of their environment, and often the best a person can do, if he wants to behave in a certain manner, is to choose carefully the environment that will go to work on his character.

Remember, kids, it's a statistical reality that no one can really pick stocks.  No one beats the house.

To succeed in this environment you must believe, or at least pretend to believe, that you are an expert in matters where no expertise is possible. I’m not sure it’s any easier to be a total fraud on Wall Street than in any other occupation, but on Wall Street you will be paid a lot more to forget your uneasy feelings.

...
... the people who work inside the big Wall Street firms have no serious stake in the long-term fates of their firms. If the place blows up they can always do what they are doing at some other firm -- so long as they have maintained their stature in their market. The quickest way to lose that stature is to alienate the other people in it. When you see others in your market doing stuff at the expense of the broader society, your first reaction, at least early in your career, might be to call them out, but your considered reaction will be to keep mum about it. And when you see people making money in your market off some broken piece of internal machinery -- say, gameable ratings companies, or riggable stock exchanges, or manipulable benchmarks -- you will feel pressure not to fix the problem, but to exploit it.

Addendum, or a reminder to myself: Dave McKenna did a piece at Deadspin about prep-school lacrosse players willingly being held back in school for a year to gain a competitive advantage in their sport. All because of Malcolm Gladwell. One factoid from the Duke lacrosse controversy from a few years back is that the majority of Duke lacrosse players, literally 70% or so, will go on to jobs on Wall Street. I think the trade-off here is, the family pays an extra $30,000 or so in prep-school tuition, to gain a place in top-flight NCAA lacrosse, which is a golden ticket to becoming one of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe.

Cool Data Viz of the Day: U.S. Immigration, Foreign and Internal, State by State, Snice 1900

This is the kind of thing that tempts me to break down and get a New York Times subscription.  The Disunion blog is another one.

A Football Fan's Dilemma: Things We Read Today, 8/15/2014

Once again I say, I love Brian Phillips.  Grantland publishes a good deal of crap, but Brian Phillips, Charlie Pierce, and Bryan Curtis make up for a lot. 

With the World Cup having occupied a lot of my attention this summer, I have been trying for weeks to finish a post about soccer.  One thing I wanted to say is that soccer players have become my heroes, my avatars of manhood, the badasses whose bravery and grace under duress I thrill to.  Clint Dempsey playing with a broken nose, guys having a bloody gash glued up by the physio and then re-entering the game -- they are to me what Emmitt Smith is to Brian Phillips and his father in the piece. 

I guess having a zone where I can admire "men being men" is important to me.  Football used to serve that function: (See: Kellen Winslow, 1981 playoffs.)  But the brutality of football has gotten to be more than I can take.  The "spectacle of acrobatic violence, an endless war between shiny cartoon armies" -- I don't believe in it anymore.

Phillips starts in on the Ray Rice spousal-abuse debacle, and the peculiar kind of PR morass that the NFL keeps finding itself in:

...It has to do, I think, with the NFL’s curious, quasi-self-appointed role as the safe zone of troubled American masculinity — or, more broadly, as a kind of wildlife refuge for endangered privilege. You could glimpse the character of this role throughout the Michael Sam story, in which a background of frank homophobia was barely kept hidden by the curtain of celebration. You could see still more of it in the controversy over the Redskins name, in which the real question, for the term’s indignant defenders, has never been “Is this word acceptable?” The real question has been “Why wouldn’t this word be acceptable in football, where we’re supposed to be able to do things like this?”

....

Internet comments defending Rice and the NFL are — well, many of them are genuinely and chillingly misogynistic, but I think more of them are primarily concerned with protecting football from mainstream cultural norms: Don’t take this away too.

I love the common thread he finds among Ray Rice, Michael Sam, and the Washington football team nickname.

The title of Phillips's article, "Tough Talk," reminds me of my overarching theory about Republican foreign policy: tough talk is all Republicans are good at, and at some some strange juncture the tough talk takes on a life of its own, regardless of its objectives or any reasonable cost/benefit calculus.  This problem can bleed over into domestic public policy too.  (See: the police in Ferguson, Missouri.)

The piece concludes:

What I really want is to save football, a game that I love, from the men who think it should work like this. I want to dispel the illusion; I want that hypertrophied caricature of male prerogative to have no place in American life.

Me too; but I believe it's an illusion to think that football can be saved on these terms.  Phillips doesn't even mention the issue of concussions, which is easily the toughest challenge Roger Goodell faces.  To me, the answer is to eliminate the use of the helmet as a weapon.  But football won't be football anymore if that happens.  The players know that's true; in fact, one of the thorniest aspects of the concussion debate is that the players love the danger of the sport, are not ready to trade away the immediate thrill for their own long-term health.

Things We Read Today, August 7, 2014

I'd never heard of Jacob Bacharach until today, when I came across his Bloggingheads video made with Will Wilkinson.  It spurred me to spend my Amazon gift card on his novel (along with the new Rick Perlstein) and to check out his website.  The guy is a hell of a good writer.

In my recent absence from the blog there have been two big news events in world politics.  One was the shoot-down of a commercial airliner over Ukraine, and I worked up a high dudgeon over that one.  (What would you have if you took this country's scummiest Tea Party elements, egged them on officially, and gave them state-of-the-art military hardware?  You'd have the pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine.) 

The other has been the escalation of fighting in the Gaza Strip, and I have lacked the courage of my convictions on that one.  It's a sign of their bankrupt position that so many supporters of Israel view their mission as a PR battle; that being said, they're doing well in the PR battle.  Even an Israeli liberal like Amos Oz is speaking in favor of the campaign to eliminate Hamas.  And it's discouraging to see just how many U.S. fora where criticism of Israel is still beyond the pale.

In this blog post, Jacob Bacharach writes in part from his perspective as an American Jew who has felt his childhood faith become tangled up with the political program of Zionism.  He knows whereof he speaks, and he has harsh words of criticism:

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

Rogue's Gallery, 7/8/2014

I'm not sure of the process whereby a Legacy.com obituary becomes a meme.  But I am always on the lookout for a good portrait of a preacher-scoundrel.  Hat tip to my friend Joel for linking this on Facebook. 

Here is a choice selection:

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. 

[...]

While George did not live well by some people's lights, it should be universally accepted that he did die well. In hospital, two days beforehand, he said he'd finished with the medical procedures he had been avidly seeking for the past few years; he said he was 'checking out'. He was completely calm and committed to the decision. The next day, we brought in some beer, toasted his life with him, drank with him, and helped him to make several thoughtful good-bye phone calls. He reminisced a bit and gave us a few unhelpful instructions. He died without pain the next evening, from a slow gastric bleed, with his wits about him and a light heart.

Turns out, his timing was impeccable: the next day we found out that he had been racking up ominous bank and credit card debts. Clearly, those supplemental incomes were about to dry up. In earlier years, George would sometimes slip out of a town after he had accumulated local debts and after the relevant woman's purse had been snapped shut. But of late, he was in no condition to skip town. And women just don't see old men on scooters as the stuff of their dreams - they see them as impending burdens. Perhaps George felt cornered. Perhaps he thought that, under his present circumstances, dying was the only way out. Whatever the story, no one can deny that George made his final exit with style and grace.

 

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

Things We Read Today, 6/30/2014

Historian Carolyn Dupont, writing about Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964, and the response of the Methodist and Southern Baptist responses to events at that place and time.

Via Slacktivist, which I may need to add to the blogroll here.

Three Chords and... a Hack Syndicated Columnist

Dave Barry opines that "Gloria" by Van Morrison is the best song ever written. 

I kind of agree with this basic thesis.  The movement of my whole 40-odd years as a pop music fan has been toward the side of punchy simplicity instead of virtuosity.  I had settled on Creedence Clearwater Revival's five or six biggest hits as the highwater mark.  But I can see the case for "Gloria."  I do love that song.

But I am uncomfortable anytime I am in the same camp with Dave Barry. 

Also: It is unbecoming of Dave Barry to advocate for the "Simple Is Better" aesthetic.  It seems a rationalization on behalf of all simple-minded humor writers, who rely on moves such as the CAPITAL LETTERS method of selling a joke. (see link for an example)

So in conclusion, "Gloria" may have been the greatest song ever written until Dave Barry said so. 

Map of the Day

You never know when you might need to consult a map of all the tribal nations in North America.

Immensely Thoughtful Yet Appropriate Love

Sam Wells in Christian Century.  The defining job of a minister is to say the right thing at the right time.  That certainly includes remembering people's names; a lot of pastors are intentional and methodical about remembering names.  Of course, no human being can live up to this expectation every time, and this piece is about failing to live up to it.

Traveling back to a church he previously served, to preach a funeral sermon, Sam is greeted by a former member who clearly remembers him warmly.  And he blanks on her name.  I am going to block-quote a big chunk because it may retreat behind CC's paywall:

. . . But the damage is done. The lie is exposed. I’m all surface and no depth, the pastor who can put on a show but deep down doesn’t care enough to remember, who made her feel special but when she was no longer useful moved on elsewhere, who could talk but didn’t walk. Maybe God, in the end, was like that too.

This is the banality of clergy failure—that we put ourselves between people and God. That we tacitly assume God is distant, remote, occupied, distracted, and so we, to compensate, must be present, intense, hearty, and inspiring. We must be more human than God. God can’t possibly remember this woman’s name, her complex story of not having and then having children and their complex story. So we invest deeply in her, utterly professionally, of course, and her melting heart, her trust, her signs of faith and hope—these are the medals of our ministry. Our people need us, need us badly, because only through our sacrificial and immensely thoughtful yet appropriate love can they possibly glimpse a God who seems reluctant to be made known in any explicit and tangible way.

[...]

Of course we’re not up to it. We forget her husband was going in for a scan and we should have inquired how it went. We neglect to ask her to read at the carol service. We get talking to someone else after the worship service, and she drifts away disconsolate to her car. But all these things are forgiven. And we know that they’re healthy ways of indicating she shouldn’t overinvest in us, because it’s not really about us, it’s about Christ and Christ’s body, the church. In fact, we shouldn’t be standing between her and God in the first place. God can look after that part without our unique contribution. The pastor’s job is not so much in front of the people as behind them, ushering them like sheep into a place where they may encounter God together. It’s not about being more interesting than God. Cyprian never said, “Outside the pastor there is no salvation.”