Easter thoughts from your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

When I look for examples of of godliness, or godly people, I resort to fictional characters. J.D. Salinger's Seymour is one of these. Salinger kills him in a 1948 short story ("A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"). After a rather caustic portrait of Seymour's wife (and presumably of middle class proto-suburbanites), Salinger--cruelly to my mind--has Seymour shoot himself while his wife naps nearby.

I don't know enough about Salinger, or am not enough of a literary critic, to know whether Salinger regretted offing Seymour, but Salinger couldn't let him go. Seymour would continue to appear in later stories, and in 1959, Salinger wrote a novella called "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Seymour's closest brother, Buddy, writes a preface to a collection of Seymour's haiku. These two passages stand out for me, for Salinger's vivid storytelling and humor, and for how his literary creation inspires me.

So, for this Easter, here's to all those who already have a belief, and to all the rest of us who don't, but muddle along with a faith that we might learn to see God curled up somewhere, that we might get a ride on a Joe Jackson bike, and that we might get better at loving others as well as Seymour loved Les.

. . .there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananada's terms; i.e., 'See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk')--the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

[Les] came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishing. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation--in my view, at least--was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been neatly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les--as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: LB Books, 1963): 108-109 and 148-149.

NOTE: nearly the same version of what I originally wrote for my Facebook Notes, April 24, 2011.

Oh, those beleaguered straights.

InsideHigherEd.com today reports on efforts in the Texas state legislature to "require any public college with a student center on 'alternative' sexuality to provide equal funding to create new centers to promote 'traditional values.'"

Proponents have framed the measure as an effort to get equal time for heterosexuality on public campuses where, apparently, straight folks barely get the time of day. A political interest group, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), worked with State Representative Wayne Christian in crafting the legislation, but its goal was to not to carve out equal resources for heterosexual programming and support, but to get universities to defund centers serving GBLT students.

The YCT doesn't think universities should be funding the promotion of any kind of sexuality or values. Sounds egalitarian, doesn't it? But YCT Vice Chairman, Tony McDonald lets us know what this move is really about: "It is clear that our public universities are funding centers which promote a radical political and social agenda in favor of normalizing homosexuality and expanding homosexual rights."

Basically, the YCT and fellow travelers have fallen back on the litany of privilege that we have heard before from whites and males arguing against affirmative action, or straights fighting civil rights protections for GLBT people: the minority group aggressively promotes and agenda while the dominant group simply wants to 'live and let live;' the minority group gets all these extra rights while the dominant group is victimized. It's another round of "reverse discrimination," but this time for those poor straight people, who apparently can't cross campus without "pansexual" weirdos waylaying them, or gays sneakily luring them into deviant lifestyles. It is one of the whines of privilege--your existence on the same field with me is an affront to my tender identity, so stop complaining (you've never had it so good, anyway).

I'm all for carefully reviewing university budgets, and, frankly, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to the classroom rather than student services--but US universities have long had functions besides transmitting and generating knowledge--they are mechanisms of social mobility and socialization, they are laboratories of social change, and since the tremendous expansion of higher education after WW II, they have become this place where parents send their children to practice adulthood--hence all the support services for young adults trying to navigate the world outside their homes, as well as their often tumultuous internal worlds.

A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.

2012's getting closer--time to warm up the culture war!

Economic woes have dominated the national political discourse but there are some GOP factions determined to keep their conservative social agendas in play. One such faction is the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition (IFFC), which sponsored a forum of presidential hopefuls, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and radio talk-show host Herman Cain, and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer. Ex-Moral Majority maven Ralph Reed also shared his two cents.

The forum took place at a Christian fundamentalist megachurch, Point of Grace, and the IFFC’s Vice-President, Gopal Krishna, got the crowd warmed up with a quick, rousing ‘The country’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket’ introduction. I’ve been hearing this stuff for thirty years now, and wonder why it still works, but then I remember I can still laugh at old Monty Python shows. Here’s what Krishna had to say (and, boy, he can outwhite those Iowan Christians, can’t he, though apparently there’s little love lost between him and the GOP state establishment, according to this source.

. . .Therefore, allow me to express some of our concerns and let me know whether you agree with them.

We are concerned that a world-famous capitalist country is now doing a slow dance with socialism [applause].

We are concerned that a rich country which rebuilt other countries after World War Two is now borrowing mind-boggling amounts of money from other countries [applause].

We are concerned that the world’s most powerful country that was respected by the friends and feared by the enemies is now abandoning friends and apologizing to the enemies [whoops, cheers, and applause].

We are concerned that a country that was a melting pot for all the brilliant minds in the world has now become a land of law-breaking illegal immigrants who want amnesty. . .[applause]. . .granting that amnesty will be a slap in the face of all legal immigrants [applause].

We are concerned that a country that was founded on European style Christian moral values has now become multicultural haven for every weird and kinky lifestyle [cheers and applause].

Today’s program is a small part of our efforts to take back our country and restore its principles, moral values, financial independence, physical strength, and leadership. Let’s get started. . .

It’s glennbeckish tripe, based on a fanciful understanding of history and concepts like capitalism, but unsurprising given the nature of the forum. What I just don’t get is how conservative Christian groups reconcile their supposedly high moral standards with standard-bearers like Gingrich—familial wreckage in his wake, and the only Speaker of the House to be reprimanded for ethics violations—and Ralph Reed, who buddied around with Jack Abramoff. But I suppose their bad reps are the result of liberal media bias.

And what the IFFC doesn’t seem to get is that using its gospel to criminalize and demonize those whom they oppose is not going to get anyone outside its choir to listen—and they probably even lose potential allies—the social conservatives who aren’t militant Christians. But then, I understand their quandary: to be principled one must be absolutist, and if one starts compromising, then it’s that slippery slope to liberal hell. Thing is—according to their rhetoric—they're already there. Just can’t win, can you?

You can see the C-SPAN video here, and read NPR’s story on it here.

Letter to Senator Jim DeMint

I write in opposition to your legislative proposal to cut all federal funding to NPR--an effort to punish that media outlet for firing Juan Williams. NPR is one of the few media sources that does not spout bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric, and to end federal support for NPR is not a blow for "free speech," but rather an effort to silence a news source that does not permit slurs in the public square. You are, in effect, celebrating the right of commentators to blather inane statements that incite an unjustified fear of a category of people based on the actions of the few, conceivably a version of someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. In effect, you are contributing to a growing and increasingly ugly domestic crusade against Islam.

I am not one of your constituents, but your proposed legislation directly affects me and millions of fellow Americans. I deeply regret your contribution to a US image abroad that we are hypocrites, preaching liberty abroad while trumpeting religious intolerance at home. And I strongly resent your attempt to hamper our ability to find news and political commentary that does not contribute to the anti-Muslim hysteria.

Viral Ignorance

A recent Pew Survey produced some pretty remarkable findings. Evidently, the number of people who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, or not a Christian, has been growing over the past few years. As well, and less surprising, those who buy the falsehood already have a poor opinion of the president.

What explains what must be willful ignorance, the insistence on believing the innuendo and misinformation? Given the correlation between people's opinion of President Obama and their belief regarding his religion, it must be that people feel the need dress up their dislike of him and his policies with spurious attributes. It's not enough to disagree, they must demonize. It's an embarrassing aspect of our political culture--that people would dress up a political leader they oppose in the robes of a Muslim or non-Christian because that somehow confirms his supposed vileness.

I can understand why people might oppose President Obama. It's depressing how some of them are framing that opposition in bigoted terms.

Birther Pangs

The other day at the grocery store I saw the National Enquirer headline proclaiming, once again, that Obama is not a US citizen. Politifact.com has examined three chain emails scurrying through cyberspace that deliver a similar fanciful story.

One makes the pitch that "Obama had to have been traveling on another country's passport in order to get into Pakistan" in 1981. Another hustles the rumor that "Obama's college transcripts reveal foreign citizenship." A third claims that the "Supreme Court has agreed to rule on Obama's citizenship."

One element in what makes films or novels successful is their ability to convince the audience to suspend disbelief. The Birther fiction has enjoyed that kind of success--the collective story-telling of a small but vocal minority of Americans trying to make their own peculiar sense of what may be a perfect political storm: economic hard times, warmaking without seeming end, a polarized polity, and a black President with an ambitious domestic agenda. An important difference, though, is that filmakers and writers know they are creating fictional, if plausible worlds (excepting those like Oliver Stone and Tim LaHaye). Birthers apparently really believe the narrative they're constructing, sustained by the sincere or cynical shout-outs from pundits like Lou Dobbs or politicians like Michele Bachman.

I could just dismiss Birthers as loonies, and remark that their "movement" will maybe get a line or two in a future text on US political history, another generation in the genealogy of paranoid politics. I could worry about the propensity of some to believe in "proofs" of conspiracy based on lame research. I could just be depressed by the anti-intellectualism and racism underlying Birther claims that President Obama is not really one of us. Or I can write to myself. It won't exorcise my dismay, but may help me understand it.