Jim DeMint is a Blithering Imbecile

Jim DeMint, a former legislator turned think-tank president, may or may not be the most hated man in Washington.  (The competition is fierce.) He is, however, an embarrassment to Christ Church Episcopal School, Wade Hampton High, the University of Tennessee and Clemson University.  DeMint has studied at all those doubtlessly fine institutions, holds degrees from at least three of them, and nonetheless lacks the most fundamental grasp of American history.

Or, if we are mistaken about that, he is a big fat liar whose pants are perpetually on fire.

DeMint recently displayed his ignorance -- or mendacity -- on a radio program hosted by one Jerry Newcombe, in which this exchange took place:

Newcombe: What if somebody, let’s say you’re talking with a liberal person and they were to turn around and say, ‘that Founding Fathers thing worked out really well, look at that Civil War we had eighty years later.’

DeMint: Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. 

But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.

(Quoted at Right Wing Watch) 

Well.  Let's think about this, shall we?

Obviously, DeMint is mistaken.  The important question is why he makes this particular mistake.

Let's start with how bad DeMint's history is.   As even a schoolboy can tell you (assuming he went to a public school and not, let us say, the Jimmie Hokey Christian Academy of Jesus), the federal government was precisely what freed the slaves.  Southern secession was a reaction against what the Confederacy saw, correctly, as Washington's plan to limit and ultimately eliminate the "peculiar institution."  Lincoln was reviled as a "tyrant" in much the way Obama is reviled as a "Socialist."  But the actual liberation of slaves, when it occurred, took place first at the hands of the United States Army acting under the authorization of a presidential proclamation, then under the direct supervision of the executive branch -- "Presidential Reconstruction" -- and ultimately in the form of a Constitutional amendment ratified in part by Reconstruction-mandated state legislatures.

The Constitution, in its original form, not only permitted slavery but rewarded it, by granting slave owners (or at least their states) extra representation in national affairs, according to the number of slaves they possessed.  Only a shocking display of leadership by two successive presidents was able to change that.

So what is DeMint up to here?

Obviously, he is trying to argue that "people of faith" -- he means Christians, although he might grudgingly admit some Jews as well -- were integral to the end of slavery.  This is incontestably true; the movement for abolition was largely an expression of Christian religious conviction.  Two things need to be added:  (1) Christianity was also invoked by the supporters of slavery, because this was the mid-19th century; and (2) it was not churches that actually freed the slaves.  It was the federal government.

DeMint's reference to William Wilberforce is telling.  Wilberforce is a "safe" abolitionist to speak about with DeMint's political base, both because he was a committed Evangelical and because he worked to free slaves through the legislative organs of another country.  Prominent American abolitionists, from the fanatical John Brown to the philandering Henry Ward Beecher, are less safe.  A few, like Brown, were what we would call today call domestic terrorists.  Many more held religious views of which American Evangelicals are suspicious -- Quaker, Unitarian, what have you.  And most, by a large margin, were what are in some circles still quaintly called "damn Yankees."  They lived in Pennsylvania, New York and New England, regions that remain deeply suspect in the minds of many Southerners.

So here is political calculation expressed as rhetoric.  DeMint's power base consists, in part, of a community in which the most enlightened and liberal members are those who can acknowledge that slavery was, indeed, wrong.  Even these bright lights are nonetheless possessed of a visceral distaste for  Northerners and the Federal government, as well as people whose religion does not closely resemble their own.  For them, DeMint has created -- or really subscribed to, since it is not original to him-- a mythology in which the abolition of slavery was not in fact driven by accomplished by just those forces.

Some people actually believe this codswallop.  We have also heard French people claim, in utter sincerity, that the Resistance was on the verge of defeating Hitler by itself.

Now, part of this phoney mythos -- in fact, its sacred writ -- is a phoney vision of the US Constitution.  Occasionally, America's Constitution-worshipping righties see it as Antonin Scalia claims to, as a comparatively narrow document which can be read only according to letter and in accord with the the worldview of its authors:

"Did the Eighth Amendment bar the death penalty?" [Scalia asked a crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently]. "Not a hard question." The people who wrote the Eighth Amendment practiced the death penalty, ergo its prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments" could not possibly exclude capital punishment. 

Apply this argument to slavery and see what you get.  Whatever reservations Jefferson & Co. may have had about their slaves, they certainly bequeathed us a document which preserved slavery as a legal practice.  It is hard to argue that this document was the "conscience" of our nation before the Civil War.

No, DeMint and his audience have staked out a significantly crazier position than Scalia's.  They disregard both the bare text of the document and its history, preferring instead to see in it a Platonic ideal of American society, expressed not in the letter but in the supposed spirit of the Founders.  Note, for example, that DeMint attributes to the Constitution ideas about the general equality of human beings which are explicit rather in the Declaration of Independence.  It does not matter what the Constitution says to this crowd, but only what it means -- or what they chose to believe it means.

Slate's Jamelle Bouie has a good take on the "Constitutional conservatism" espoused by people like Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint.  He mistakenly resents it as a part of religious fundamentalism rather than a secular analogue, but he quite correctly observes that the heyday of small-government, states-rights philosophy came under the Articles of Confederation -- a rule of government so bad it was abolished by many of its own creators.

We will concede that DeMint may not be a blithering imbecile, nor even an ignoramus.  It is entirely possible that high public-school education included competent instruction in both history and civics.  If that that be the case, though, we must conclude that he is a sleazy opportunist, pandering to the ignorance and prejudice of the masses while cynically using them to gain power in the nation's capital.

Sermons, Integrity and Richard Nixon

If you google "sermon illustrations" and "love your enemies," you will pretty quickly come across this anecdote:

Hubert Humphrey was a former vice-president of the United States. When he died hundreds of people from across the world attended his funeral. All were welcome, but one – former President Richard Nixon, who had not long previously dragged himself and his country through the humiliation and shame of Watergate. As eyes turned away and conversations ran dry around him Nixon could feel the ostracism being ladled out to him.

Then Jimmy Carter, the serving US President, walked into the room. Carter was from a different political party to Nixon and well known for his honesty and integrity. As he moved to his seat President Carter noticed Richard Nixon standing all alone. Carter immediately changed course, walked over to Richard Nixon, held out his hand, and smiling genuinely and broadly embraced Nixon and said “Welcome home, Mr President! Welcome home!”

The incident was reported by Newsweek magazine, which wrote: “If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, it was that moment and that gesture of love and compassion.”*

Great story, right?  Turns out it may be almost true.

We weren't sure at first.

We found the story repeated verbatim here, here and here.  The verbatim part makes us suspicious, since preachers are notorious for passing around the same old stories, with little concertn for pesky old factuality.The last source is Maxie Dunnam's Irresistible Invitation, published in 2010; further research finds that Dunnam has been telling this story at least since his 1998 This is Christianity.  So ... did Dunnam clip this little tidbit out of a newsmagazine, or find it somewhere else?  The question is made harder to answer by the fact that  Newsweek's archives are owned by The Daily Beast, but have not been digitized or made available to anybody except Beast employees.

There is an alternate version of the story that is easy to trace.  Remember that Humphrey and Nixon were political rivals, and the 1968 election was one of the closest and hardest fought in history.  After Watergate, Nixon's reputation was at an ebb so low it may be hard for young people to imagine.  He was hated, reviled, shunned by virtually the whole of the Establishment.  And then, in 1977, his old rival developed urinary cancer.

Then-Senator Dave Durenberger tells the rest of the story, in the Congressional Record (2 May 1994):

When my predecessor in this office -- the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey -- was dying of cancer in Lake Waverly, MN, he called former President Nixon and asked him to attend his -- Humphrey's -- funeral. 

Humphrey knew that the funeral was not going to be long in coming -- and he arranged that Richard Nixon be received at that ceremony with the full honor due to a former President. Young people who watched the TV coverage of President Nixon's death and funeral -- coverage that I understand was generally positive in tone -- might find nothing remarkable in this. But back in 1977, the scars of the Watergate scandal were far from healed. Many of Senator Humphrey's liberal colleagues -- and even a substantial number of moderates and conservatives -- viewed Nixon as deserving a state of permanent disgrace.

Hubert Humphrey demonstrated true nobility of character by making his historic gesture to President Nixon. He realized that whether you share Nixon's views or no,you have to recognize his value to public life. Humphrey had known Nixon for decades -- and knew that ostracizing Nixon would hurt America's future more than it would help.

Today, let us continue in the tradition of my distinguished predecessor. Let us join Hubert Humphrey in recognizing that all public-spirited Americans, whatever their ideology, have a constructive role to play in building our country's future.

Ah.  Now that is a beautiful story, and -- when you subtract the political blather -- a better preaching illustration as well.

Larry King tells a shorter but compatible version in his 2009 memoir, My Remarkable Journey.  In King's version, which he says he heard from Humphrey, it was Nixon who called Humphrey, in the hospital, on Christmas Eve.  (With a rope?)

But in neither Durenberger's version nor King's is there any mention of Jimmy Carter.  For a while, we thought that the homiletic version was a fabrication.  But then we found a 1994 article in The New York Review of Books, which tells the story of how Nixon fought his way back from ignominy.  And lo and behold, it cites Newsweek's 19 May 1986 issue, on the cover of which a victorious Nixon appeared, under the proud headline "He's Back!"  The Newsweek story begins:

Suddenly he [Nixon] was in the room, and the conversation died. As Howard Baker tells it, Richard Nixon “looked like he was four feet tall, all shrunk up in himself and gray as a ghost.” It was January 1978, in Baker’s Senate office, where the notables were mustering for Hubert Humphrey’s memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda. “Nobody would get near him. Nobody would talk to him. The hush lasted until President Jimmy Carter walked over, shook Nixon’s hand and welcomed him.

If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, that was it.

This version was shortened for use in a 1999 sermon by Arthur Ferry.  Ferry glosses a little, saying that Carter welcomed Nixon "back to Washington."  Ferry also adds the words "humanity and compassion," attributing them -- wrongly -- to Newsweek.  The supposed quotation, "Welcome home, Mr. President," occurs in neither Newsweek nor Ferry. 

The version published by Maxie Dunnam and often copied by other preachers is less faithful to Newsweek than the one in Ferry's sermon.  Dunnam turns "humanity" to "love," and adds the "Welcome home, Mr. President." We thought at first that Dunnam had copied from Ferry, but perhaps he has simply strayed further from a common source.  Still, if Newsweek is to be trusted, the Dunnam/Ferry version is largely accurate, apart from some dialogue and editorial moralizing.  The dialogue seems likely to be Dunnam's creation.

We prefer Durenberger's version, with its emphasis upon Humphrey's kindness rather than Carter's. In any case, the earliest telling -- Newsweek's -- comes almost a decade after the fact, and should be treated with some caution.

We shouldn't care about this.  As readers now know, we at the Egg have no more integrity than Nixon himself.  But still, we do think it is better for everyone, and especially for the credibility of the Gospel, when the stories in sermons are demonstrably true.

Failed Politician Turns Sex Tourist in Africa

One former congressman has been arrested.  Shockingly, the others have not.

Mel Reynolds has been arrested in Zimbabwe.  He has been living there since November, apparently without filing the correct immigration paperwork.  In those four months, Reynolds has rung up a $25,000 unpaid hotel bill.

Reuters also mentions that he was found to possess pornography, which is a crime in Zimbabwe.  The report does not specify what kind of pornography we are talking about.  A few dog-eared Playboys, for example, would hardly shock most of Reynolds' erstwhile constituents.

But we don't think that's it.

Reynolds was, again per Reuters, "a rising star in the Democratic Party" until

... he was forced to resign in 1995 after being convicted of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography.

Ah.  Now we get it.

Yesterday, we'd never heard of Congressman Reynolds, perhaps for the good reason that he only served one two-year term, in the early 90s.  He has spent more time in prison than he ever did in Congress, first following a conviction for statutory rape and then following a separate conviction for bank fraud.

Ick.  Just ... ick.

It almost seems cruel to add that, in 2004, Reynolds attempted to regain his seat, the Illinois 2nd, and was crushed by the incumbent -- Jesse Jackson, Jr.  When you can't beat Jesse Jr., it's time to get out of the game.

Anyway, we point out Rep. Reynolds' problems only to observe that there is somebody, somewhere, who has less integrity than we ourselves.  Small victories, people.

The Big Chill

This is what it just have felt like, long ago, when on a pleasant spring day the tranquility of your village was interrupted by a single horseman, an arrow protruding from his blood-caked leather vest, arrived at the town well and slipped from his saddle, barely able to mouth out the message he had spent himself to deliver:  "The Mongols are coming."

That sense of a deadly and implacable force readying itself just over the horizon, moving inevitably toward you, is how we in the Old Dominion feel about the "polar vortex" that has already gripped much of the United States.

At the moment, we're warm by the standards of winter -- last night's rain washed away most of the snow, today is pleasant enough that you might skip the coat if you were only headed out for a few minutes.  Somewhere in the region, a young man is almost certainly wearing cargo shorts.  He looks like an idiot, but he's doing it, because there's always one guy like that.

He'll change his tune tomorrow.

The temperatures are expected to drop about 40 degrees F over the next few hours, to near-zero.  The wind chill will make it feel like twenty-five below.  It will still be warmer than places north and west of us, but it may be colder than the kids in our youth group have ever experienced in their lives.  Some people will discover that their homes were not constructed or insulated  to keep out that sort of cold.  Cities and larger towns will set up warming centers, but many of the people who should got to them won't.  A few people may die -- cold especially kills the old, the poor and the foolhardy.

We ourselves aren't all that concerned.  Father Anonymous grew up in a moderately cold climate, and is certainly no stranger to zero-F temperatures.  Wear layers, stay active, or stay inside by the fire.  Sadly, attendance at the Epiphany service looks to be very small, but ... well, that would probably be true on a balmier night than this.  (Hora novissima, tempora pessissima sunt, as Bernard of Morlaix so memorably put it.)

In any case, that's not what we came here to say this morning.  No, we just wanted to point out that Polar Vortex would be a great super-villain name.  Batman has Mister Freeze, the Flash has Captain Cold -- why shouldn't Green Lantern or, better yet, one of the faux Silver Age characters in Kurt Busiek's brilliant pastiche Astro City match wits with an ice-themed villain named Polar Vortex?

Oh, and one more thing.  If you could only send back one Canadian import, would it be the polar vortex -- or Ted Cruz?

John Boehner Enrolled in Obamacare

Yes, that's right.  Speaker of the House John Boehner, who personally and single-handedly shut down the government (by refusing to bring a clean CR up for a vote) in an effort to sabotage the Obamacare has now signed up for ... Obamacare.

Apparently, Boehner -- who actually has a government health plan, and didn't really need to take up any bandwidth on this -- went shopping for on the DC exchange in order to demonstrate that it would be a difficult and frustrating experience.  (Speaking of which, let's talk about switching plans with Portico recently, a difficult and frustrating experience in its own way.)

He thought that he had succeeded in, um, failing to enroll, and blogged about it.

And then he discovered that he had in fact enrolled.  Meaning that he failed to fail, which seems about like the way Boehner's year is going.

Per the guy at Salon, Boehner probably got a pretty good deal, too.  Probably not as good as his government plan, but still pretty good for private insurance.

This is Why Reid Pushed the Button

Let's be serious.  A Senate filibuster is no longer the heroic personal campaign of Mr Smith having come to Washington.  It has become a mere bureaucratic exercise, requiring no all-night speechmaking, no special nutrition or wariness of bathroom needs.  Since the 1990s, as the Atlantic's Garrett Epps says, "either debate or a final vote can be prevented by one senator filing a piece of paper on the way to lunch at the Monocle."

And it has been used with an historically unprecendented frequency by Senate Republicans in the Obama era, not merely to block the appointment of federal judges but simply as a form of protest against other matters, often unrelated to the appointment under review.  It has become absurd, and the smooth function of our national judiciary has been impaired by it.

Not Just Kennedy

Today marks the 50th anniversary not only of John Kennedy's assassination, but also of the more peaceful deaths of two other well-known figures:  C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley.

The Guardian has bookend articles on both.  The one on Lewis includes something very nice -- snippets from old reviews, including early ones that didn't seem very impressed by Narnia, and Philip Pullman's later diatribe against what had become a cultural phenomenon.

We at the Egg must confess that C.S. Lewis has never quite done it for us.  At various points in our life, we have read the Narnia books and the Screwtape Letters and the Silent Planet trilogy; we expect to read them all again sooner or later.  But each leaves us a little cold.  Narnia is, for lack of a better word, too syncretistic.  Those little fauns running around in a Northern European fairyland seem so out of place.  Screwtape is clever but a little trite; it lacks the vitriol that a master ironist, a Mark Twain or an Ambrose Bierce, might have injected into its veins.  The space books -- our favorite by a good margin -- are delightfully creepy reimaginings of salvation history, but they also abuse the tropes of science fiction for an altogether unscientific purpose.

Somewhere, we believe we own or once owned a copy of his textbook on English literature -- his day job, remember -- and that it is pretty good.  Not great, but good.

As for his "theology," well, we haven't read much.  We're sure it's very good, something we must say lest his defenders flame us unto eternity.  Maybe after we finally wade through the City of God and the Loci Communes.

Turning to Aldous Huxley, the Guardian does propose that he is "the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia."  They then go on to make a far stronger case for George Orwell as claimant to the title; we would add William Gibson as a rival.  Worse yet, one might get the idea that Huxley had never written another book.  The Guardian is more excited about his pedigree -- grandson of Darwin's Bulldog, grandnephew of Matthew Arnold, went to Eton with Orwell -- than his remarkable number of novels, short stories, essays and screenplays.  No mention is made of his interest in Hinduism or, outside of Brave New World, psychedelic drugs.

Fair enough.  After fifty years, most of us will be lucky to be remembered for any one work of our hands or of our minds.  Lewis gets the fairy tales, Huxley gets the dystopia.  To be brutally honest, either of these seems better, to our minds, than Kennedy's signature achievement, provoking and then bargaining his way out of the greatly-misrepresented Cuban Missile Crisis.

GOP Push to Repeal 19th Amendment

Well, not exactly.  But close.

Having worked overtime to disenfranchise poor and black voters in 2012, and lost the White House anyway, the Republican Party is trying to figure out who else it can prevent from voting in the future.

The answer is easy:  women.

And the place is urgent:  Texas, where pro-choice heroine Wendy Davis stands a reasonable chance of success in her run for governor.

The strategy is simple:  adjust voting laws so that votes must produce a photo ID with their current leal name.  This reasonable-sounding rule in fact disenfranchises a surprising number of women -- as many as 34% of them.  Young women, apparently, don't rush to update their driver's licenses after they are married.

Jean Anne Esselink, writing at The New Civil Rights Movement, sums it up:

You have to hand it to Texas. Abortion politics threaten to drive the election for governor, so they have figured out a way to discourage a large group of women who are likely have a personal interest in the issue of choice: married women of child-bearing age. Women who might favor Wendy Davis.

Yeah.  We actually think it's that simple.

Republicans Getting High, Having Bunny Sex

"Are you high," Anderson Cooper recently asked GOP strategist Alex Castellanos.

"I wish I were," Castellanos replied, with surprising frankness.  Who in the political world, and especially the Republican hemisphere, has not recently wished for the sweet Coleridgean release of some drowsy syrup?

Nonetheless, the apparently sober Castellanos went on to provide a unique theory explaining the recent, and seemingly self-destructive, behavior of Senator Ted Cruz.

He's having bunny sex.

As Castellanos said:

[T]he snowshoe hare — I thought it’s a marvelous explanation — every ten years, multiplies six fold. Bunnies like sex apparently. But the boom produces a bust. They press their food supply, they invite predators. Right now, Ted Cruz, what’s he’s doing, feels good; he’s growing his supporters. It’s leading the Republican Party, I think, into a bust.

Well.  Now we know.

Gnesio-Republicans?

Among Evangelicals of the Lutheran persuasion, there is a ratty old saying which regularly makes the rounds: Nihil est adiaphoron in casu confessionis et scandali.  That's the long form, attributed to Matthias Flacius Ilyricus.  More commonly, we are prone to look daggers at one another and mutter "In statu confessionis," letting the rest trail off ominously.

What we mean when we say this is, "No," to whatever has been proposed, with the implication that "If you try to make me do anything, then I am required by my faith to disagree with you about everything."   It is an incredibly stubborn position, one which virtually shuts down conversation.  And yes, it is written into our confessions of faith (e.g., SD 10).

Properly, this principle only applies in times of genuine persecution, when violence is used or threatened as a tool to suppress the Gospel.  In practice, it is thrown around somewhat more freely.  Episcopalians make the historic succession of bishops a condition of full communion?  Status confessionis!  The ELCA recognizes same-sex unions?  Status confessionis!  It is an easy knee-jerk reaction, just one of the many that earn us our reputation for stubbornness.

In statu confessionis.  These are fighting words among our tribe.  They go back to the 1540s, when -- in a somewhat quixotic effort to reunite the broken Church -- Melanchthon and some other Lutherans agreed to permit any number of ceremonies which had been cast aside by the Reformation.  They argued that, so long as the central teaching of salvation by grace was allowed to stand, ceremonies instituted by human beings ought not be allowed to divide the Church.

This seemingly reasonable position aroused immense resistance from other Evangelicals.  The resistance was, we suspect, largely emotional.  Every pastor has at some point attempted to introduce a widespread ecumenical practice into the congregation's worship, only to be told "That's too Catholic."  That's what it boils down to.

Melanchthon was abused mercilessly, as were his followers.  To this day, Lutheran folk history accuses him of "weakness" or "indecision."  In fact, he was among the finest Patristic scholars of his age, and also among the most passionate ecumenists.  Her struggled mightily to do something that Protestantism still struggles with:  articulate the role of the redeemed person's will in living a godly life.  Had he been given the respect and support he deserved, it is entirely possible that the main Reformation schisms -- not only German, but Swiss and English -- might have been healed.  But he was not.

Melanchthon's vitriolic opponents, called the Gnesio-Lutherans, may have been driven by emotion, but they also had a point.  The tentative agreements of the 1540s, called the Interims, were made under threat of violence.  If the Evangelicals did not capitulate, the result was likely to be war.  So although the Evangelical party had professed (from the preface of the Augsburg Confession forward) its deep desire to keep Western Christianity united, as well as its desire to retain the ancient polity and practices so far as they were consonant with the Gospel, it is easy to argue that the negotiations which resulted in the Interims were not made in good faith.  They were the result of coercion.

So one part of the Gnesio-Lutheran argument was that you can't negotiate with a sword pointed at you. Sound familiar?  Of course it does; this is just what President Obama said at the beginning of the present political crisis.  And it's the truth.

In that specific sense, Obama's position does echo Flacius.  And conservative critics are doing their best to argue that, like the Gnesio-Lutherans at their worst, it is the Democrats who are being needlessly stubborn.  After all, they aren't "negotiating."  Never mind that "negotiation" here means capitulation under coercion -- to an electoral minority, at that.

The ACA is a reasonably popular law -- nobody's first choice of solutions, either on the left or the right, but at least a viable compromise.  Shutting down the government is wildly unreasonable, an act of wanton destruction growing from a refusal to compromise.  Insisting that a good law be put into abeyance is bad government; shutting down the government if you don't get your way is somewhere between childish and insane.

So in fact, it is the Republicans who are acting like the dumbed-down modern version of Gnesio-Lutherans:  stubborn asses who want things their way, and will not be moved by any amount of reason.  Their fight, especially as they scale back their demands, is about preserving their image, both among themselves and among the voters.  They're like a congregation saying, "Well, chasubles are okay, but if you light incense, we'll burn the church down."

And the Democrats are like Philippists:  smarter, milder, more pragmatic.  Only this time, the Philippists are not caving.

Is the GOP Shutting Down?

Time has not permitted us to blog about the current clusterboff in the nation's capital (and, specifically, its capitol).  This does not mean we aren't following it all with interest.

We serve a congregation filled with government employees and contractors, many of them directly and personally affected by the shutdown.  We also serve in what is said to be one of the most deeply Republican counties in the state -- although a party leader has confessed to some concern that the Democrats are gaining ground recently.  We can only imagine that this trend is about to accelerate.

Because who, being in their right mind and not obsessed by ideology, would ever vote for a Republican again?

The GOP has long been perceived to be running out of time, as its core constituency of old, white men gradually loses its hegemony in American culture.  Periodic efforts to broaden its base have been half-hearted and unsuccessful.

Now, Republicans in the House have allowed themselves to be driven by their extreme fringe -- driven, that is, right over a cliff.  A month before an election, the party and its leaders have made themselves immensely unpopular. Their poll numbers have never been lower, while the President's are up ever so slightly.  Although it appears that the extremists themselves are largely safe from re-election challenges, it is hard to imagine that the party will not lose some of its clout next month, and more in the Novembers to come.

Losing favor with the electorate is bad.  What may be worse for Republicans is the possibility of losing favor with their sugar daddies in the world of business.  A recent BusinessWeek article described the growing distance between the fiery ideologues and the practical minds of the business world:

If Republican lawmakers were as responsive to business concerns as they once were, the chance of a prolonged shutdown would be slim. But that’s no longer the case. “Republicans are not the party of business anymore,” says Robert Shapiro, chairman of the economic advisory firm Sonecon. “They’re the party of antigovernment.”

 A Times article yesterday revealed just how angry the business lobby is about the shutdown.  They are losing money, and lots of it, with no end in sight.  This is, to put it cynically, not the government they paid for.

And they do put it cynically.  Here's the money quote:

“We ask them to carry our water all the time,” said one corporate sector lobbyist, who demanded anonymity in order to speak frankly about the relationship with Republicans. “But we don’t necessarily support them 100 percent of the time. And what has happened is the rise of an ideological wing that is now willing to stand up to business interests.”

It is hard to know whom to hate more in a situation like this one:  the corporate fat cats or their Congressional water-boys, who chose the wrong time to show a rebellious streak.

In a sense, America's corporate oligarchs are a little like the House of Saud.  They have sponsored the raving of ideological extremists (Tea Party, Wahabists, whatever) as a way to distract the masses from their own corruption -- and now they have to face the fact that these radicals may actually believe their own nutty rhetoric.  Worse, they are willing to act on their belief in ways that threaten to bring down their masters' cushy palaces -- along with the rest of a the country.

The GOP is divided against itself, and in danger of losing its connection to both mainstream voters and corporate money.  Meanwhile, its core constituency continues to dwindle.  How long can this go on?

The New Republic is fantasizing when it offers up a headline about "the death throes of the Republican Party."  Outright collapse, represented by a prolonged period of political impotence, seems as unlikely as Karl Rove's dream of a "durable Republican majority" ever did.  For better or worse, America is deeply in love with its two-party system, even if it does not love the parties themselves.  Voters will simply switch back and forth until they arrive at the balance that they want.  These two parties have dominated the landscape for 150 years, and it is hard to imagine they they will stop dominating it any time soon.

Of course, somebody might have said that about the dinosaurs.

The Generals Are Revolting, Part I

America's problem in the Middle East, as in so much of the rest of the world, is that our nominal friends don't share our values -- and the people who share our values are so rarely our friends.

At least on paper, our core values are individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law.  But -- because we have historically also valued things like stability, security, the oil industry and a bulwark against Communism (or latterly Islamism) -- we have often made friends with regimes that emphatically reject our core values.

There is a cost to this. The CIA has recently declassified documents which detail just how it organized the overthrow of a democratically-elected regime in Iran, and replaced it with a friendly dictator.  This meant that when our cores values manifested themselves -- when the people of Iran actually demanded democracy for themselves -- the party that came to power was and remains deeply suspicious of America's intentions.  Perhaps you've noticed.

The present turmoil in Egypt provides a brutal example.  For decades, we supported the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.  In exchange for billions of dollars of weapons, Mubarak suppressed the Islamists and provided a safe southern border for Israel.  We got safety and stability at the cost of liberty and democracy.

The election of Mohammad Morsi, a member of the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood, reversed the situation.  It was an expression of our core values, but came at the cost of stability and security.  Morsi's overthrow removal by the army, in a move that the US has not yet agreed to call a coup d'etat, appears to have been an attempt to regain stability at the cost of democracy.

The attempt has failed; Egypt is a mess.  Today's reports include a thousand dead, and Christian churches attacked and burned by enraged mobs.  The army can hunt down terrorists in Sinai all it wants, but there is no way that this shambolic disaster can be associated with either stability or security.

Strangely, the US is at the moment doing something wise -- largely by doing very little.  The law would not permit us to provide foreign aid if the Egyptian regime had come to power in a coup.  Therefore, we have not legally declared this coup to be a coup.  In theory, we could still cough up some money -- and in theory, we are going to.  But at the same time, both Congress and the administration have started dropping hints that we may not.  The generals, if they are paying any attention at all, are on warning.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the UAE have stepped up their financial commitments to the new and counter-democratic rulers of Egypt.  You could argue that their support for the new order will weaken America's clout; but for our part, we can live with a little less clout if it keeps us from surrendering our core values once again.

[Insert Weiner Joke Here]

In July of 2011, Anthony Weiner, an extremely fit-looking congressman from New York, resigned in disgrace.  After the revelation that he had been exchanging sexy text messages (including naughty pictures) with women other than his wife, Weiner had lied for more than a week in efforts to protect himself.  In May 2013, less than two years after his resignation, Weiner announced his intention to run for mayor of New York City.  This struck many of us as a remarkable display of chutzpah.

Now, in July 2013, he is embroiled in accusations of further sexting activity, with at least one woman to whom he is not married.  Then details are unclear.  Last we heard, Weiner's office had admitted that "some" of the messages were authentic; what remains to be seen is whether

Some people say, in essence, "This is between him and his wife."  We disagree.  The guy is a liar and a cheat.  Worse than that, he seems to lack the sort of self-discipline that is required for effective, long-term leadership, especially in a high-pressure position.

Yes, it is true that many effective politicians -- FDR, Ike, JFK and LBJ make four in a row -- were less than faithful to their wives.  And one takes for granted that politicians are liars as a class.  Still, Weiner looks like an addict to us, a man powerless over his own compulsions.  We predict that the sex scandals of a Weiner mayoralty would make those of Rudolph Giuliani's tenure pale by comparison.  (And Giuliani, lest we forget, announced his divorce to the media before telling his wife, whom he then kicked out of the house.)

Even if the serendipitous combination of his name and his most famous selfie were not a joke by itself, his campaign certainly would be.  Seriously, New York -- don't vote for this guy.

[P.S.:  Eliot Spitzer may not be quite as compulsive as Weiner, and comptroller isn't quite as tough a job as mayor.  But don't vote for him either.  Unless you're a high-rent hooker, in which case this guy is your best friend.]

"Fewer, As In Zero."

Elizabeth Warren's rise to superstardom among liberals largely took  place while we were saving souls in Byzantium, and so we have not really followed or understood it.

This video helps.

Here, a pair of CNBC hosts attempt to argue that Warren's support for financial regulations, and particularly a return to Glass-Steagall, may be misguided.  They are wrong, and one of them -- the man -- is both insistent and impolite.  She responds politely, firmly and decisively.

She eats the guy for breakfast.



"Fewer.  As in, of the big ones, zero."

NBC has gone around removing copies of this clip, so watch it while you can.

Guns Vs. Cars

Firearms and automobiles are, obviously enough, different varieties of device.  One is made to kill, the other to transport.  It is important to keep this teleological distinction clear in our minds, because the discussion that follows may tend to muddy it up a bit.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned stumbling across some writing by a gun enthusiast which misrepresented official data concerning the number of deaths caused by firearms each year.  We've found another example here, unsurprisingly, at Breitbart.com.  A guy named Awr Hawkins writes that

According to the federal government, the number of people killed in automobile-related deaths annually is approximately three times higher than the number of people killed by all gun-related deaths combined -- handgun, shotgun, and rifle.

Yet there is, to my knowledge, no concerted effort to ban automobiles. 

Wow.  Zinger, right? We first came across this claim not in Hawkins' original piece, but in an online exchange with somebody who had clearly read this, or read something like it.  Our interlocutor -- let's call him Skippy -- argued that "America pays too much attention to gun deaths, when drunk drivers kill so many more people."

It's a strange argument, when you think about it, like saying that we worry about Al Qaeda when cigarettes are so deadly.  But set that aside for a moment.  The real question is whether cars really do kill three times as many people as guns.

They don't.

Legit numbers can be had from three sources:  the FBI, the CDC, and the Century Council.   They vary from year to year, although the general outlines remain consistent.  And here is what, for example, 2010 looked like:

Firearms deaths:              31,672 (10.3/100,000)

Motor vehicle traffic deaths: 33,687 (10.9/100,000)

Basically, guns and cars kill the same number of Americans most years, although cars are indeed a little bit ahead.  So where does Hawkins get his "three times the number"?  Easy:  he's talking about homicides, which represent a quarter to a third of all gun deaths.  But, conveniently enough, DUI deaths represent about a third of all motor vehicle deaths.  Voila, 2010 again:

Firearms homicides:  8,874

DUI deaths:         10,228

So it is absolutely true that cars kill more people than guns, and DUI accidents kill more people than gun murders.  But the numbers are fairly close, meaning that these are comparable threats to public safety.

Now, when we pushed him on the numbers, Skippy claimed that "most of these gun deaths are suicide," which is another half-truth.  Guns are used for suicide more often than they are used for homicide -- in 2010, there were 19,392 firearms suicides in the US.  That's colossal and terrifying, and deserves all the attention we can give it.  But, obviously, the numbers we have compared above don't include suicide.  Year in and year out, over the last few years, guns and cars have killed almost the same number of people, as have gun murders and DUI crashes.

But there is one enormous difference.  Since 1980, the number of drunk-driving deaths has dropped by 52%.  The  number of gun murders has dropped by about 10%, depending on the year.

When Skippy said that "we don't pay enough attention to drunk driving," he may have been forgetting that, for the past thirty years, Americans have put enormous energy into the campaign against drunk driving.  Think about the hundreds of PSAs and billboards you have seen -- the wine glasses smashing into each other, the reminder that "friends don't let friends," and so forth.  Add to that the lectures in school, and the stern warnings required by most states as part of the licensing process.  Add to that the random stops instituted by some jurisdictions, at least on holidays.  Add to that the invention of the breathalyzer.

On top of all that, of course, is the fact that automobiles are regulated in a way that guns are not.  Both cars and drivers are examined and licensed.  Changes of ownership are carefully tracked.  These are things that the gun lobby is reluctant even to let legislators consider.  Safety belts and airbags are required by law, where mandatory trigger locks remain deeply controversial and the idea that every handgun owner should also be required to posses a biometric gun safe will no doubt be dismissed as "Nanny- State Thinking."

The weak link in the chain seems to be judges, who are still reluctant to take a drunk driver's license away permanently.  Nonetheless, 52% is a big drop.

As a society, we have put a lot of pressure on the drunk driving problem, and we have seen remarkable results.  Now it is time to put the same sort of pressure on the problem of gun violence.

How Are People Murdered in America?

The short answer is guns.  The long answer is handguns.

Among the loony claims floating around the Internet, you occasionally come across some variation on this one:  "More people are murdered by hands and feet [or knives, or pressure cookers] than by guns!  Check the statistics!"

We did, and that particular claim is false.

However, we can see where it comes from, and what rhetorical purpose it serves.  According to the FBI's tally of murders in the US from 2007-2011, numbers vary from year to year but the rough outline remains the same.*  In 2011, there were 12,664 murders.  Of those, 8,583 -- almost 68% -- were committed using guns.  In comparison, knives or other cutting instruments accounted for 13%, and "personal weapons" -- hands and feet, perhaps the occasional savage head-butt -- for about 6%.  (Explosives murdered 12 people in 2011, a huge increase from the previous years but still less than a tenth of a percent).

So what's going on?  The false claims start with inflammatory articles like this one, posted at the Daily Caller.  Here's the headline:

You are more likely to be killed by hands and feet than by a shotgun or rifle

It claims, more or less correctly,** that

Total murders by hands and feet in 2011 exceed the total number of murders by shotgun and rifle. Does that mean gloves and shoes need regulation because they are concealing deadly weapons? No, but it does mean that there is no need for any further regulation of long arms

You can see what happened.  The article is about long guns -- rifles, shot guns, and the much-ballyhooed "assault weapons."  And strictly on its own terms, it is accurate.  But excitable readers may fail to ask "What about handguns?"  Then they click all over the web, spreading their own misinterpretation of the story -- a misinterpretation which is all too easily come by, since the Caller article never mentions handguns.  

Here's the fact:  of those 8,583 gun murders in 2011, 6,220 -- 72% -- were committed with handguns.  In 2011, 49% of all murders in the US were committed with a single class of weapon:  handguns.  This is an extremely important fact, of which nobody should lose sight in the current debate over gun laws.  Handguns kill 8-10 times as many Americans as do rifles and shotguns.

Which means that while a ban on automatic rifles might very well make it more difficult for killers seeking mass casualties to commit their crimes, the place to begin, if we are serious about reducing the overall number of murders in our country, is with a dramatic reduction in the number of handguns.

____________________________________________________
*Note that the FBI reports murders, not deaths.  This means that cases in which a death is ruled "accidental" -- father's loaded pistol kills boy in truck; toddler shoots woman at household party, and so forth -- are not included.   
** We say "more or less" because the FBI's numbers also include several hundred "other guns" murders, and over a 1500 "firearms, type not stated."  If as few as 50 of those murders were committed with long guns, the Caller is mistaken.

Grandpapa Was (Almost) Right

Our late grandfather used to complain that the Democratic Party in New York City was unspeakably corrupt, with the center of its corruption in the Queens County Courthouse.  Of course, our late grandfather complained about many things, including, inter alia, onions, the metric system and Swedes.

So, in the arrogance of youth, we discounted Grandpapa's warning.  Then we moved to New York and, within a year or so, a prominent politician stabbed himself in the chest.  Because his years of corruption were coming to light.  And yes, he was a Democrat.  From Queens.

We have thought of our wise old grandfather many times over the years, as one local politician after another has been revealed to be criminal and/or criminally stupid.  Is it worse than Chicago?  Probably not, but it is at least as bad as Philadelphia, and on a larger scale.

We do need to qualify Grandpa's dictum just a bit.  In the City, the Democrats are the more corrupt party, because they are the party with the power.  Theodore Roosevelt and couple of recent mayors aside, this is a Democratic town.  But if you step out into the suburbs, things change.  Nassau County Republicans are a pretty uninspiring crew, as anybody who has ever greased the palm of a building inspector can tell you.

New York State politics are corrupt and incompetent on an epic and bipartisan scale.  We are the Romania of the northeastern United States.

All of this, of course brings us to the past couple of days.

Most recently, a Bronx assemblyman named Eric Stevenson has been arrested for taking bribes.  Apparently, he was pocketing envelopes full of cash in Bronx steakhouses and Albany hotel bathrooms.  Just like the movies.  Another assemblyman, Nelson Castro, cooperated with the Feds to make the arrest happen.  Castro admits now to having been a federal informant since his 2009 perjury indictment.

But the big news came a couple of days ago, when Malcolm Smith was arrested.  Smith, a Democratic state senator, wanted to run for mayor on the Republican ticket without switching parties.  This can be done, but it's a little complicated; he decided to simplify it by bribing Republican officials all over the state.   His collaborator in this scheme was Republican city councilman (and neo-pagan) Dan Halloran.

So don't waste your breath talking about how America's polarized political debate keeps the two parties from working together.  Here in New York, we know exactly what will bring them to the table:  big wads of unmarked bills in plain manila envelopes.

Prolepsis Redivivus

Recently, we proposed that, so far as same-sex marriage goes, "it's all over but the shouting."  That is, the tide has turned so rapidly and so irreversibly that the Supreme Court's pending decisions, whatever they turn out to be, are likely to be rendered moot by lawmakers.  Maybe not today, as Rick told Ilsa, maybe not tomorrow, but someday and for the rest of your life.

Today, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) became the 50th senator and the 2nd Republican to back same-sex marriage.  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has announced that her views are "evolving," which means that she will switch over unless somebody offers her a lot of money not to.

Fifty means a dead heat.  Fifty-one means a majority.  Of course, it takes 60 to be unstoppable, but the dominoes are falling.

All Sex, All the Time

That appears to to be the motto of our local (and very fine) NPR station.  For days now, we have turned it on several times each day, as usual.  And every single time, without fail, we have been greeted by coverage of the two gay-marriage cases heard this week by the Supreme Court.  If there has been any further action on, say, Syria or the sequestration, on withdrawal from Afghanistan or the quashed candidacy of Ashley Judd, we have not heard it from WNYC-FM.

It's like being at an ELCA synod assembly in the years between 1990 and 2009.  And perhaps that's why we can't work up more passion for the news coverage.

These cases before the Supremes are indeed important.  In an immediate, practical sense, a re-evaluation of DOMA would have a dramatic impact upon the lives of many Americans.  There is money at stake, in the form of federal benefits, as well as the more fundamental question of human dignity.

Beyond that, there is the striking question of states' rights.  A defeat for DOMA, if it that act were reckoned to be a federal intrusion upon the prerogatives of the states, would be cold comfort for the supporters of gay marriage if it translated into stronger support for laws like Proposition 8.

These are important questions, and the answers that the justices offer will make a lasting difference.

But.

Honestly, it won't be that lasting.  The Supremes may uphold DOMA, and it will still be repealed within a decade.  if you don't believe us, just ask Rob Portman and Claire McCaskill, only the most recent legislators to announce their support for same-sex marriage.  If the Supremes uphold Prop 8, there will be a flood of similar state legislation over the next ten years.  Most will last for a decade or so before it is overturned.

Within a few years -- possibly a very few -- the current situation will be reversed.  Today, nine states permit same-sex marriage and the rest either do not recognize it or prohibit it outright.  But public sentiment is now changing at a geometric pace, and it is all but certain that, soon enough, the states which prohibit same-sex marriage will be a small circle of holdouts.

We are as certain of this as we can be of anything in the realm of politics.  Viewed over the medium term, near-universal acceptance of same-sex marriage seems far more likely than, say, access to legal abortion.

Rhetoricians speak of prolepsis, the confident assertion of something not yet true.  ("I am a dead man," says a man who knows he will die.)  It is hard, right now, to keep from speaking proleptically of the movement toward same-sex marriage marriages.  Although they are not yet lawful in most of the country, there eventual lawfulness seems assured, no matter what the Supreme Court does.  Like laws against miscengenation or sodomy, the prohibitions on same-sex marriage are relics of another time -- even though that time is now.

And so, emotionally at least, we find ourselves moving on.  We are trying to think about the pastoral questions, of course.  Even among the most comparatively progressive church bodies, many congregations -- probably most -- are well behind the curve.  A generation of pastors will spend much of its time coaxing church members toward the future; it may fail, as after all these years racial integration has largely failed in many church bodies, preserved at best as well-intentioned tokenism.  Once in a while, pastors will summon a bit of their old fire, as we still do for racial inclusion or the weekly Eucharist.  But mostly the old guys, who will look like relics to younger colleagues already fighting the next battle.

The battle over homosexuality which began a century ago with Emma Goldman's pro-gay speeches, which was pushed forward by the Nazi extermination of gay people and which burst into the American public consciousness with Stonewall and Anita Bryant, is at last in its final stages.  It isn't over, in a decisive sense, any more than the Voting Rights Act decisively ended racism or even racial discrimination at the polls.  But the tide is turning, even as we speak.

Ah, Wills

The conclave begins today.  It may take a few days, so this is a good time to catch up on your reading.  May we recommend Garry Wills?

Ah, Wills. The protege of William F. Buckley who became a scourge of the American right, the man who inspired a generation of activists to learn Greek by reading the new testament in jail after some protests, the Catholic who despises Kennedy, the friend of King and the Berrigans, the man who warned Obama about Afghanistan and wasn't invited back to the White House.

We admire his book on the Gettysburg Address, a rhetorical analysis which begins with the development of the modern cemetery, and are eager to read his books on Jesus, Paul, Augustine and (especially) Ambrose.

If you haven't read any of his many books and essays, we encourage you to do so.  For more of an introduction, here is an admiring profile by Sam Tanenhaus, and an explanation, by Michael McDonald, of why conservatives find Wills so unbearable.