Thin thread

Some of you may like my latest essay at the Image Good Letters blog. Here’s an excerpt:

“Telling a story along that thin thread, however, means abandoning the notion that the world pierces us more deeply, that our hearts sing more loudly. What if the opposite were true?

What if the reason there are television screens in every godforsaken corner of the U.S., and rampant alcoholism in Russia, and endless electronic distraction in Japan, is because the average man and woman need something, anything, to tamp the intensity of bearing a soul in this soul-crushing age?

What if we writers are able to tell stories of hurt and joy only because something in us is dulled enough to look them full in the face?”

You can read the rest here.

The cowardice of the Chronicle

So The Chronicle of Higher Education has seen fit to fire Naomi Schaefer Riley for criticizing the state of what passes for “Black Studies” in American universities. There’s no need to break that down here, Jonathan Last has a telling analysis of what motivated the firing, namely, the Chronicle’s decidedly left-wing readers and staff writers believe criticizing Black Studies is a racist hate crime.

I admit there have been times when I thought the editors at the Chronicle were a few chapters short of a dissertation, if you know what I mean. Not wicked or ideologically blinkered, just a little, well, dull. How else to explain why they keep on a writer who doesn’t have a basic command of English, regularly print another writer whose pseudo-Freudian analysis of the inherent misogyny and bloodlust of conservatives is embarrassingly stupid, and still another writer whose every essay reads like a caricature of academic writing at its worst.

(On that last, consider just this smidgen from her post about Naomi’s offending essay: “Anti-racialism is in direct opposition to anti-racism. Anti-racism confronts the historical and contemporary inequities between black and white Americans, inequities that remain so entrenched that a former New York Times corresponded (sic) recently described race in the U.S. as a caste system.” Forget the manufactured term, a hallmark of those professorial mavens of perpetual grievance and hyper-intellectualized discourse, forget, even, the sloppy writing — where else but in the slow-churning bowels of the Academy can one find an aspiring intellectual who thinks a Times correspondent is the definitive source for anything?)

Whenever I marveled at the capacity of the Chronicle’s editors to tolerate shoddy writing and poor thinking in service to a moribund worldview, I reminded myself that they had Naomi on staff. She’s a strong writer and an independent thinker. Sure, they publish a few nitwits to keep the aging campus lefties happy, but they also value originality.

Apparently not.

It’s a shame and it’s shameful, but it least it makes clear for any discerning reader that for all their pretense to journalistic integrity and brave thinking, the Chronicle’s editors are fools and cowards, and Naomi shouldn’t cast her pearls before swine.

Monetizing infanticide

I suppose it should come as no surprise when a country that has long encouraged widespread killing of unborn and newborn children, and which nourishes a commercial avarice untempered by virtue, hits upon a way to make money from the corpses of its smallest and most innocent victims. One can only hope authorities have underestimated the dangers to the customers.

Short fiction

If you’re really discerning, or even just slow-witted, or perhaps even if you’re one of those people who is slow but imagines he is quick-witted — a personal fear of mine — you have probably noticed that I haven’t been writing here so much. I have been writing a fair amount of fiction, however. A fair amount. Maybe not an amount that contains anything that is actually fair. (Because really, who wants to read anything that’s fair? Textbooks have to be fair, and legal treatises, and documentaries, and the self-obsessed diaries of the perpetually aggrieved — and who wants to read any of that stuff? God save us from fair writing.)

So it’s not fair at all, in fact, but maybe it’s good. A good, healthy dose of strivings for truth, wrapped up in concocted names and places, which to the fair-minded and the Puritanical are like garlic to vampires.

Clearly I’ve been working through some personal issues as well.

Ahem. But the point is, if you’re inclined to read my newest short story, you could do worse than purchase a copy of the latest St. Katherine Review — and not just because I’m in there. It has a great set of editors, a wealth of lovely poems, and a short story by Tracy Alig Dowling that I’m proud to have my story sidled up alongside.

As for my story, the title is Driven, Ridden, or Led, and here’s a snippet:

“Past him sweeps the carousel attendant in his tilted white booth, a tent where broad-shouldered teenagers throw canvas balls at bowling pins, a wide blue slide arcing upward above the drifting dust, the tilt-a-whirl, all of them tightly circling the axis running through an earth’s center that has lost its gravity, and this keening carousel atop it. The boy sees all this only in glances, because he thinks that, if he looks at anything dead on, he will get pulled into it and past it into the dirt. Each time the horse plummets, the boy peers over its dark mane at his mother who is there and gone, there and gone. The surging horse feels like it has come alive, like it not driven by the brass rod piercing its back, but by something cold and rhythmic within its chest.

The boy remembers another time, his mother at the ends of his outstretched arms, trees and houses and people turning around them not this fast, but quick enough for the colors to bleed into one another as now. In this memory she is whirling him in the air as she turns, herself the carousel, and he a flying horse. She is laughing and her grey eyes are on his own, and they are nothing like glass but instead they are sun-fired pools of water. As he remembers this he wishes he were on a horse in front of her, so he could chance a look backward at her face. Instead there is only her back to him and her fence-post shoulders and her head turned away, the whole of her there and gone, there and gone.”

The whole thing culminates in what may well be a fatal kiddie-car ride. There’s also a deranged camel. Not even kidding. You can order your copy here.

Imagination destruction

From my review of Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child:

“And the Mordor of our time, one gathers from Esolen, is a utilitarian educational culture administered by small-minded bureaucrats in thrall to materialism, scientism, and social conformity. Whereas traditional conservative critiques of education tend to be of public schools—and these for being populated by government employees who fail to impart a sufficient level of “core knowledge” to their charges—Esolen reviles all the attributes of mass-production schooling that is equal parts Henry Ford and John Dewey: age-segmentation, undifferentiated treatment, chockablock schedules that afford no time for individual exploration, and obsession with facts (“How long is the Mississippi?”) over knowing (“What was it like to navigate the Mississippi?”).”

You can read the rest here.

Movie dads

Some of you may enjoy my latest essay at Image, about fathers in movies. Here’s an excerpt:

“I want to explain that when you’ve got four boys to cook for and look after at the tail end of a work week, finding a $5 copy of Boondock Saints feels like a win. “I really need this,” I want to tell them.”

You can read the rest here.

Ambergris

Some of you may like my latest essay at Image, which I fear once again scandalizes some good Christian folk with a naughty word. But some words are apt and true, even if George Carlin used them. Here’s an excerpt:

“‘And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ Solzhenitsyn asks on the heels of his black-and-white observation, knowing full well what we all know, which is that none of us will do it willingly, not a one, not we who cherish and sing praises to this most sickened and deceitful part of all.

We won’t do it and so God does it, and because we are whole-heartedly half-hearted in our goodness, it feels every day as if half our hearts are being burned away, and half the time we can’t make sense of it, because we can scarcely tell good from evil, we can only tell hurt from pleasure, and so who can blame us if we feel like all God ever does is hurt us?”

You can read the rest here.

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Hunting dogs

“When the law is against you,” goes the adage, “argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both the facts and law are against you….”

Here we may turn for instruction to Jerry Taylor, ringleader of Cato Institute officials in the unenviable position of needing to convince people who embrace contracts and the rule of law that Cato is governed by a Higher Law.

Thus we are instructed by Cato Vice President Gene Healy that the Shareholder’s Agreement relevant to this dispute between Cato and the Kochs is “long-moribund.” Proverb One of the Higher Law: Contracts signed before 1978 are irrelevant.

David Weigel notes, meanwhile, that neither Koch brother gave Cato money in 2011. “They have no special claim on us,” Jerry Taylor insists, “as donors.”

That might be contorted into a devastating admission about what guides Cato’s research, if one were the sort of low-minded person who sees an advantage in taking sentences out of context. All the same, these comments reveal the second proverb of the Higher Law: We can ignore your rights if you haven’t given us money lately.

Taylor insists further that two of the three living Cato founders don’t like what they’ve heard about this kerfuffle, yielding Proverb Three: Takebacks.

(I don’t let my kids get away with this when they trade Legos. That puts me in mind of a new game show idea: “Are you more libertarian than a fifth grader?”)

As for the facts available to most of us, one may find the governing documents here, and the court filing here. A transparent admission here indicates that Cato’s position is that the original agreement is outdated and should be replaced with something reflecting more contemporary views about non-profit governance.

Let’s sum up, then, what we have from the spokesmen of an organization dedicated to the rational elucidation of libertarian principles:

1. This contract is old.

2. The signers of this contract didn’t give us money last year.

3. Some of the people who signed the contract regret it.

4. Changing circumstances dictate renegotiation of previous agreements.

How these differ from the Obama Administration’s justifications for bullying Chrysler creditors into foregoing their contractual rights (a thuggish move decried by Ed Crane only months ago) escapes me. Is the difference that they were on the side of the devil, and Cato on the side of the angels? Is it that Ed Crane’s bacon is now what’s in the fire, rather than that of some UAW worker?

Perhaps the reasons can be divined in the sacred texts of libertarianism, which brings us back to poor Jerry Taylor, thrust into the courtroom with neither facts nor law to bolster his case. Having neither, Taylor must play the magician, whose chief art is misdirection.

Now, I didn’t have a dog in this hunt. I only learned that a shareholder nominated me to the Cato Institute board after Healy, Taylor, and others publicly branded me a heretic. I am, Taylor writes, “a Republican blogger,” who complains about libertarians toking up at political meetings. Healy and others dutifully repeat Taylor’s charges. Following their lead, Weigel gets marginally original by asserting that I sneer at libertarians. Accepting their claims, Andrew Sullivan calls me a “strident anti-libertarian” and a “culture warrior.”

Now, I understand that Taylor is in a tough spot. He needs a conspiracy. Heaven forbid it be a simple contract dispute. Angels prevent that anyone who believes in liberty question why a $23 million organization doesn’t have more impact on public opinion. This has to be about bad people doing secretive things in the dead of night to rob earnest and freedom-loving people of their standard-bearer.

But the thing is, when you start lifting sentences from what someone writes, intellectual honesty — not to mention plain decency — dictates that you provide context. Maybe that’s old-school thinking, way back in the day when we believed in contracts and the rule of law. Maybe libertarianism is all post-modern and stuff now.

Either way, now I do have a dog in this hunt, because I’m one of the people Taylor decided to attack in his fit of self-preservation.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about things I wrote ten years ago. My views have changed a bit, and any fair reading of my work will indicate as much, just as it will quickly reveal that I am neither a Republican nor a libertarian-hater. But let’s stick to the essays Taylor samples.

He observes that I “blogged about ‘the rotten heart of libertarianism,’” a quote intended to suggest that I despise the whole lot of it. In the 2002 essay in question, however, I write (quite obviously with a light heart), that I “originally intended to title this series” as such, but thought better of it. Maybe joking about thinking about something counts as a thought crime, in Taylor’s variant of libertarianism.

I also call libertarianism, as Taylor notes, “a flawed and failed religion posing as a philosophy of governance.” (Religion? What could I have been thinking? That would imply sects and unquestionable beliefs and bitter squabbles over abstruse distinctions…)

But immediately after, I write: “The reason I will address this topic — and the reason you should care — is because libertarianism represents perhaps the best set of potential political solutions to America’s problems…”

The exceedingly clear point, grasped by a wide array of libertarians and conservatives who joined the debate in the comments section of my blog, is that we have to overcome significant hurdles in order to make libertarianism a competitive alternative in the minds of voters. Now, you may disagree with that, but the fact that I believe it does not make me — unless libertarianism has been transmogrified into a church — an “anti-libertarian.”

Next is the accusation that I complain about libertarians smoking pot at political gatherings, a charge repeated by Healy and others. Here’s what I actually wrote, at the tail-end of arguing that too many libertarians focus on the policies that matter to them personally, rather than policies with greater potential leverage to effect widespread social change:

“If libertarians were serious about taking and maintaining power — truly serious — then they would drop the caterwauling over drug criminalization and focus every drop of energy on building schools. The latter is hard work, however, and forces consideration of messy things like moral instruction, and self-discipline, and what makes for good parenting. It’s far easier to toke up in the discounted hotel room at the Libertarian Party Convention and rail against the DEA. Thus libertarianism remains less a force for change than a tool for self-expression.”

The impression Taylor wanted to convey is that I believe libertarians are a bunch of potheads. Any reasonable reader can see, however, that this is not a meditation on the recreational habits of the Libertarian Nation, but a rhetorical contrast set forth to make the point carried in the last sentence of that paragraph.

Wiegel unsurprisingly adopts Taylor’s tactic, implying that I applied the label “sanctimonious” in blanket fashion to libertarians (I was referring to a specific post, now removed, at the libertarian site Samizdata). He also lifts another quote (in a nutshell, that libertarians are too often homogeneous and content to criticize the rest of America for not agreeing with them) and seeks to disqualify it by divining for his readers that I “sneered” it.

If the truth must be told, I most likely sneezed it, because I had a wicked cold that day. And I don’t appreciate Wiegel guffawing such a thing. Or maybe he chortled it. Whatever.

I respect many thinkers associated with Cato. Hearing talks by Tom Palmer and David Boaz brought me into libertarianism as a college student. Bob Levy’s work on the gradual erosion of liberty by the courts is essential, and helped me recognize how completely property rights have been stripped from the Constitution. Radley Balko has waged an almost single-handed battle to highlight police abuse, causing me to rethink my decade-old critique that libertarians are overly focused on drug legalization.

I don’t know if I could mutter whatever catechism one must repeat to be accepted into the libertarian fold, but I’m certainly no enemy. The pity of it is that Jerry Taylor and other Cato leaders have no qualms about deliberately misleading people to believe otherwise. What’s more, I know some of the other people they accuse of being operatives and conspirators, and these accusations ring just as false.

I assume intellectual integrity is essential to the libertarian philosophy, and if so, I wonder who is doing it more harm — someone like me, who has questioned in good faith some of its tenets, or Messrs. Taylor, Healy, and Crane, who appear for all the world like Washington, D.C. bureaucrats trying desperately to keep hold of their tenure.

For taunt-seekers

God, now I have to go back and read a bunch of crap I wrote ten years ago to see if I still agree with it.

I don’t know much about this Cato business. I do of course know Koch. I know people there well enough to find laughable the notion that they are somehow opposed to liberty, or that they could ever imagine Cato is essential to some secret partisan or corporate agenda and must therefore be taken over.

And like everyone, I know about Cato. I know many people smarter than me who work there, and I appreciate very much their efforts for decades to make mainstream many valuable ideas that once would have been relegated to the fringe. I don’t agree with all of them, and I think libertarianism, to be an intellectually cohesive philosophy, needs critique and work. Fortunately, I’ve always found the people I know who work for Cato to welcome the kind of spirited debate that tends to make idea-generating organizations healthier.

But I suppose right now the point is to circle the wagons, craft a narrative of conspiracy, and paint whatever side one is not on as intransigent and small-minded. None of which will have any bearing on the final legal decisions, but all of which is to the great delight of those who despise liberty and would love to see Cato torn down.

Listing

If you were to write down the names of everyone you trust — truly trust — what size paper would you need?

I needed the back of a receipt. There are ten names on this scrap of paper. Ten people I know would never share any of my confidences, never twist the personal things of my life into malicious gossip — or worse, that pseudo-prayerful gossip which is a cancer in so many churches, even as they police themselves against worldly novels and worldlier pornography.

Aside from the demographic peculiarities (nine are men, all are white, three — fantastically, for anyone who has survived American Protestantism — are clergy), there is the brevity of the list, and the question this raises, namely, whether its truncation is a consequence more of my failings, or the failings of others.

On the other hand, maybe I have a bounty, and I just don’t appreciate it. Read the papers for a week, and the privilege of knowing ten trustworthy, good-hearted people is revealed to be a blessing.

And it’s not like the rest of them are a bunch of bastards. Most of them, anyway. If I list the people who I know would use my confidences to actively work harm, I get about the same number, in fact. Ten true-blue people, ten low-down weasels, and the rest struggling, like most of us, not to give away what gets entrusted to them.

I could spend days on my list, weighing the merits of people, perhaps striking someone from my trusted column, adding someone to my frenemy column or my open enemy column or my means-well-but-can’t-keep-her-goddamn-trap-shut column. I could be mean-spirited and spiteful, and oh, how I would enjoy wielding the petty power of the accounts-keeping god.

But then I wonder: how many lists is my name on?

How many lists is your name on?

What can we do, between now and our day of judgement, to become the people who other people write on their trusted lists? I hesitate to ask, because if you’re anything like me, other people come immediately to mind, and what they might do to make themselves more trustworthy.

For a couple of you at least, I am your other people, and I’m sure you have any number of things for me to work on. Just as I do for you.

But when we each of us looks in the mirror, you and me, and we ask only whether we are anyone’s trusted person, what is the answer?

It’s probably worth spending a lifetime on, or what’s left of a lifetime, or what life leaves us when we aren’t busying ourselves with children and their endless needs, or work and its endless demands, or the world and its endless distractions, so many of them exquisitely crafted to keep us from this most basic question of communion, which I suppose can be cooked down to this: Who may count on me not to betray him?

The Art of Disappointment

Some of you may like my latest essay at Image. Others of you may hate it, depending on your view of property rights, downsizing, and confrontations. Also, there’s a cuss word.

An excerpt:

“Owning others’ unhappiness is why I’m accommodating, and a desperate desire to be liked is why I’m the smiling, gabby, flirty guy who people are amazed to learn is an introvert. It’s a potent combination for relationship-wrecking, for being alone in the midst of people, for consuming the stress of everyone around me and dying alone and unwanted, which is bound to happen because I didn’t tip the valet enough and now he’s mad at me.”

You can read the rest here.

The Christianity of Chris

This is not one of those reflections on the death of Christopher Hitchens, in which the writer labors to bolt his meager little meteor to that man’s literary supernova. I’ve read enough of those to make me retch, if not from their insipid attempts to rival his prose, then from their shameless me-and-Hitch reveries (“Once he stepped on my toe in the restroom at Le Bernardin, and I took the opportunity to tell him how much I appreciated his essay on Mother Teresa, which though strident was quintessential Hitch…”).

I never met Hitchens. We never traded emails. I will not now reflect on his oeuvre, or narcissistically hold forth on what his death means to me. I prayed for him and I was sad when he died and whatever comes after that is between him and God.

Something of his that stuck with me came in the midst of my repudiating Calvinism. It was in one of his Atlantic book reviews. Who knows of what book; it didn’t really matter because it was Hitchens. He wrote that a popular Christian notion that heaven will entail standing in heaven for eternity and singing worship hymns sounds, well, like hell.

(Here we might pause, and ask to what extent his atheism could be attributed to the piss-poor theology of Christians.)

Oh my God, I thought, he’s right. At first I felt bad, because you’re supposed to love God and want to stand for eternity singing to him, just like you’re supposed to pretend to your church friends that you love prayer and being in the Word and having quiet time with God, when in reality sometimes you just want to scream at God and then curl up with a bottle of wine and a book that has nothing to do with religion whatsoever.

Which isn’t God’s fault, mind you, and chances are he knows that and forgives you and loves you all the same, loves you so much that in heaven there will be wine and books and more to do than stand around singing praise choruses, which, let’s be honest, have about as much likelihood of being in heaven as an Usher ditty.

Like I said, this is not an essay about Hitchens.

The point is, I wish someone would write an essay titled “The Hidden Christianity of Chris.” The first half would be sorting out just exactly what he believed Christianity is, and delineating how far removed that mish-mash of popular platitudes and misinterpreted scriptures is from actual dogma. The second half would be filled with things like this, from Mick Brown’s fine piece about Hitchens in The Telegraph sometime back:

“I felt the urge to tell him that such was his fighting spirit I was sure that he would win this most critical of battles.

‘It’s funny you say so,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re a person of hidden intuition. I actually don’t feel that. I can’t tell you why. It’s almost as hard for me to imagine being around in the next 10 years as not being, strangely enough. But it’s not in my hands, fortunately.’”

This sense that there is sense beyond the senses, the wistful human tendency to project forward to a time when we will not be in this world, the belief that sometimes it is good not to be in charge of one’s destiny — if only Hitch had seen more of these truths in the teachings of those he combated.

And if only he had seen how utterly outside Christian tradition were the Falwells and Robertsons and other quacks and blow-hards whom he so dearly loved to lampoon. How firmly does he stand with the Church fathers, contra modern evangelical Americans, for example, with this defense of the King James Bible:

“To seek relentlessly to update it or make it ‘relevant’ is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.”

Then again, the internet is a big place, and maybe someone’s already written this much-needed essay. If so, can someone please direct me to it?

Professorial logic

There are many plausible explanations for why men commit nearly all murders and start most wars. It could be that we’re just hard-wired to smash skulls. Or perhaps it’s that we’ve learned how much chicks dig a man in uniform.

Or maybe, according to Jesse Prinz, philosophy professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, it’s because our superior strength makes us better farmers. Being better farmers makes us able to feed women, thereby making them dependent on us. This in turn makes us violent in defense of our hegemony, unless we have no hegemony, in which case it makes us violent in pursuit of said hegemony.

What can’t be the case, however (for most social science work any more is predetermined by the quasi-religious a prioris of the writer), is that men have an inherently greater predisposition toward violence.

Except that they are willing to use violence when they don’t have power, while women — relatively powerless in the modern era, by Prinz’s telling — are not.

Let’s sum up Prinz’s thesis, then: Men are not inherently more likely to use violence than women, except insofar as they are more likely than women to use violence.

It used to be the case that professors of philosophy were charged with teaching logic; now they seem to be in charge of dismantling it.

A boy grows

Yesterday was Stephen Caleb’s birthday. He’s twelve, and there are now only 364 days between him and the onset of teenagerism, which I associate — at least among American kids — with sloth and self-indulgence, ignorance and idiocy and all-around brain malfunction, the latter now being scientifically proven at last.

We are all of us pack animals, and perhaps it’s that he’s lived among a curious herd that Caleb so far has shown little tendency toward dullness. His new passion, for example, isn’t some pop star, or video games (even though there is now a Wii in his house, which feels to me vaguely like barbarians are amassing outside the city gates).

It’s geocaching. The boy wants to hide stuff in the woods for people to find, and hunt down stuff that other people have hidden. It’s so Indiana Jones I can’t stand it. Caleb likes to read and he’s irritatingly logical and now he wants to hunt for hidden treasure, and all of this makes me happy and proud.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t want to love Caleb when he was born.

We had buried his sister only four months before, and everything in me was numb. I didn’t want to love Caleb, but he wanted to love me. As soon as his legs would carry him, he became my shadow. It was that boy who cracked open my scaled and darkened heart, and even though some days he drives me crazy with his everything-is-black-and-white-and-how-can-I-be-wrong attitude, I love him beyond measure, with more weight than words can bear, more breadth than a father’s arms can reach.

Caleb, Eli, and Isaac had a Star Wars party yesterday. One of the things about divorce is you have to figure out where you’re welcome and where you’re not, and this was definitely a not, so four year-old Isaiah and I decided to have a day on the town. He got all Buddy-the-Elf on me, what with planning our itinerary, which included some snuggling. We also went for haircuts — to Sports Clips, because we’re manly men on a budget that way.

Isaiah has a curious power to make women melt. He does this shy-baby thing, and that sets them all to cooing, and then he pops out with something precocious, and then they giggle, which puts him in eyelash-batting shy-baby mode again. The whole sickening spectacle makes me think the best thing may be for this particular Woodlief boy to become a monk.

He’s a little scared of electric clippers, though, and so the lady who cut his hair was soothing and gentle. She asked him lots of questions to distract him. One question she asked was: “Do your brothers pick on you?

“No. They don’t.”

This seemed to surprise her. She has three boys of her own. “They’re not ever mean to you?”

“Nah,” he said. “They take care of me.”

They do, I thought, and in that moment I loved them all so very fiercely, and wanted to gather them up in my arms — whether to heal them or be healed by them I don’t know, but if nothing else to show them how very thankful I am to be their father. I am thankful if only for the opportunity to learn how to love fully and richly and deeply, as these boys of mine do without even thinking on it, which now that I ponder it, may be the only way any of us can love properly in the first place.

On the vice of chimps with shotguns

“Voting is a universal right.” This wisdom from Victor Sanchez, president of the United States Student Association, explaining his efforts to get more college students to vote. Mr. Sanchez is himself a recent college graduate, and a fine illustration of why marching columns of students to the polls is not inherently virtuous. A vote cast in ignorance, conjoined with enough ignorance to carry the day, has to be cleaned up by someone who works for a living.

Voting is not, of course, a universal right. We don’t let children vote. Nor do we vote for what Golden Corral loads onto its buffet trays. Most human decision-making is characterized by exclusivity and authority, in fact, and thank God for that.

The right to vote isn’t what’s in question in this case anyway. What Mr. Sanchez wants is to make it easier for college students to exercise the voting rights they already have.

It’s all well and good to encourage eligible citizens to select who will govern them, but what chaps me is that nowhere in this get-out-the-vote fervor — which will only increase as November approaches — will we hear anyone suggest that before someone tramps to the voting booth, he ought to educate himself.

Educate himself about what? There’s plenty for that list. Economics. Public policy. The actual records of the actual candidates. Hell, the actual names of the candidates. All this would be an improvement over what the average student knows about history, politics, and most important, the principles that undergird freedom and prosperity.

It’s a curious position, vote-for-voting’s-sake, given that the same voices calling for it tend to favor insuring that students know in exquisite detail every possible birth control option available in the Western hemisphere. They recognize, in other words, that action in ignorance is inherently dangerous.

In the case of student voting, however, ignorance benefits (and motivates) people like Mr. Sanchez, whose organization’s motto is: “Education is a right.” It sounds nice, until you ask who is going to pay for this, and how much of his right to property we need to deprive him of in order to pay it, and whether we ought to slap some responsibilities on those right-besotted students, such that they forfeit said rights when they fail to demonstrate any sense — a reform which would probably make the whole enterprise worth it, since the net effect would be to empty a good many schools of most of their inhabitants, faculty included. The greatest danger to the aspiration of the U.S. Student Association, in fact, is very likely the education of the listener.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that, statistically speaking, whenever droves of students rushed to the polls, they pulled the lever for the candidate who most favors limited government. Does anyone for a hot half-second doubt that Mr. Sanchez, rather than brainstorming ways to make voting more like ordering a pizza, would instead want to treat it more like buying a handgun?

And that’s how we should at least to think about it, which is to say that we ought no more encourage someone who doesn’t know what the Constitution is to vote than we ought to give a chimpanzee a shotgun. In either case you’re not exactly sure what we’ll happen, but chances are it won’t be pretty.

On the Virtue of Hemlock

In his recent Boston Review essay, philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel manages the neat trick of advocating a sensible position — that high-school students should be taught philosophy — so ineptly that he ends up proving the opposite, namely, that while it may be the case that students should learn philosophy, this is quite independent from the attempted teaching of it.

Not that Fraenkel is actually trying to teach students anything; he wants to radicalize them in pursuit of things like “economic justice” and “equality,” terms he assiduously avoids defining even as he decries the way they’ve been too narrowly defined.

Only a professional philosopher can get away with that. A philosopher or a clever teenager, because each has two qualities essential for sophistry — an overabundance of free time, and a fascination with the curvy shape logic can take when one applies a little heat and pressure.

Fraenkel seems to think that a rudimentary understanding of semantics and logic are necessary and sufficient to enlightened discourse, but his reasoning is flawed; they are certainly necessary, but not sufficient. Witness his devilish effort to undermine the religious faith of his students with sophomoric questions about Biblical contradictions:

“I asked them, ‘Do moral norms depend on God’s will? Would it be fine to murder an innocent child if God says so?’ The students found the idea outrageous.

‘But doesn’t God order Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?’ I asked. There was a moment of confusion.”

Even an atheist moderately versed in theology and ecclesiology understands there are thoughtful responses to his questions, but Fraenkel’s goal isn’t truth, it’s eradicating beliefs inconvenient to his political vision.

Which may illuminate why someone might oppose teaching philosophy to students, namely, that this entails letting philosophers near them.

More than bread

When we don’t think we can control some things we take charge of what we can. This is why the functionary fastidiously maintains a constant distance between his stapler and his tape dispenser, and why the abused child has a ritual for pajamas and tooth-brushing and curling up tight that he enacts like the body’s incantation against a doorknob turned in the gathered dark.

I am gone from them most days now and this is how it will be, and so when I am home I make bread. Isaac has stomachaches all the time. This is probably because he isn’t able to pretend, like his older brothers, that the divorce hasn’t torn him straight down the middle.

He probably hurts because his parents are no longer married, but all I know to do is make bread. Isaac helps me. He measures out the flour, he stirs in salt and yeast, he drizzles water over my kneading hands. Many hours later, after the first and second risings, he helps me bake it.  I take a small solace in knowing that it is gluten-free and easier on his gut. Mostly I give thanks that something from my hands nourishes him, since so much else I have done has wounded him.

I was so proud, after the first edible loaf (it is a simpler recipe, but I am simpler), that I must have asked over and over, as my boys wolfed down sandwiches made with its thick, warm slices, if it’s good. “Dad,” four year-old Isaiah admonished, “stop asking if it’s good. I told you that already.”

Of course I want not just the bread but all of it to be good. Man does not live by bread alone. Christ said that and so it must be true, though it makes no sense to us now, what with most bread being a ruinous mix of sugar and gut-clinging gluten and bleached flour. This bread is good, and so I turn it into a Bible lesson, and explain that we really could live on this bread.

(I don’t know if that’s true, but I don’t know if most things I say are true. If I wait to find out, my sons will write memoirs lamenting that their father never spoke to them.)

Our bodies could live on this bread, I say, but there’s more to us than these bodies, more that we need. I have to tell them what we need is the word of God, the God-breathed word, the theopneustos, the Word. I have to tell them this because it is true, but the thing is that I have no grounds to say it, because most of my life I haven’t lived it. God hates divorce. Where were those Bible words when you consented to the judge’s decree, mister?

But somebody has to tell them, and it might as well be their father.

So I tell them and we hold hands and pray and I feel like a filthy hypocrite, which is how I’ve felt for years when I pray, though at least it’s out in the open now, which is like slicing open an infection. It hurts worse than you imagine it will, but at least its on the outside of you now, splayed open, and any pain is worth that, to have the bloody rot outside and drying.

It would give some people satisfaction — perhaps me most of all — were I to pour salt in it, but I need that salt for the bread. It can’t alone sustain them, or take away the bellyaches, but if nothing else it will keep them going one more day.

One more day is all any of us has right now, and so it will have to do, and maybe that’s the point of that verse anyway, that the daily dose of bread is not alone enough to carry you the one more day you’re stumbling through, not without a word or two or three from God whispered over it.

On the virtues of snake-killing

Some of you know about my long-running battles with snakes. You’ll understand, therefore, why I so appreciate Jonah Goldberg’s jeremiad against snake-enabling military-industrial complexes, and beyond that, his bloody-minded willingness to harness good old American entrepreneurial violence in order to kill the big ones. An excerpt:

“You see, I don’t think we need a vast new government bureaucracy to kill snakes. Heck I think if we created a vast new bureaucracy to kill snakes we would very quickly end up subsidizing people to raise snakes to kill them. But, are you telling me that during a time when unemployment is outrageously high, the government can’t put a bounty on snakes and get results? I don’t know what the right number is but for the sake of argument if we had a hunting season in which you could bring in unlimited number of Burmese pythons for $50 per pound, my hunch is Burmese pythons would be erecting memorials to the great snake genocide of 2012.”

Almost the End of the World

This weekend I read Daniel J. Flynn’s wonderful piece on Ray Bradbury in The American Conservative. I hope my friends who are: a) not American, b) not conservative, or c) none of the above won’t be turned off by the journal title, and I hope my friends who are solidly both won’t think they know what’s coming, because the essay, like Bradbury’s work, is, as Flynn writes of Farenheit 451, “…less about right-left than about smart-stupid.”

It’s a remarkable piece, laden with insights into the workings of Bradbury’s “blue-collar intellectual” mind. Flynn also evinces a nice sense for the well-turned phrase, as in this gem about Bradbury’s break-out work, Farenheit 451:

“A book about books is a novel way to get booklovers to love your novel…”

An observation of Flynn’s that has me thinking is this comparison of Bradbury to two well-known (and dreadful to read) science-fiction utopians:

“For H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy, utopia was the far future. Bradbury looks in the other direction. He sets his wayback machine to Green Town, America circa 1920.”

In one of those serendipitous occurrences that are the sources of significant epiphanies (rarely), delusions of wisdom (more often), and occasions for thinking to oneself: “Huh, that’s kinda cool” (most common), soon after reading the piece on Bradbury, I noticed a libertarian holding forth about how the various Republican candidates are short-shrifting the great benefits of space travel.

And now, a brief interlude, so you can follow the trail of the synaptic firings that led me (and you, because apparently you have nothing better to do) here. I remember seeing, years agp, Louis Farrakhan interviewed on a respectable nightly news show. Farrakhan almost seemed reasonable, and even made it into the home stretch looking like a thoughtful, slightly quirky man who believes in spiritual discipline and an orderly personal life and bowties.

But then the interviewer asked him about the spaceships.

You could see a quiver in Farrakhan’s serene smile, and he almost avoided the temptation, but of course he couldn’t, because Louis Farrakhan is batshit crazy. So he began talking about spaceships and aliens and you realized, if you didn’t know it already, that if the thuggery and apostate pseudo-Islam and Jew-hating wasn’t enough to earn the Nation of Islam permanent ridicule by every thinking person, the fact that they elect to be ruled by a certifiable lunatic ought to be.

I get the same feeling whenever some of my libertarian friends start going on about space travel and having their brains frozen until all disease can be conquered.

End of interlude.

The point is, I’m cogitating now on this juxtaposition between forward-looking and nostalgic futurists. I think the critical factor is utopianism. For example, standard political pablum like: “I believe America’s best years are ahead of us” makes me roll my eyes, because it rejects a fundamental truth about humans, which is that we form tribes and ravage one another whenever we get the chance, which means it’s an absolute miracle, every year that some semblance of rule of law and limited government in opposition to tribal majoritarianism survives, and its unlikely to persist, especially when we get all moon-eyed over demagogues who say crap like “I believe America’s best years are ahead of us.”

I’m suspicious of forward-looking utopians, because they either have a messianic view of politics or economics (Ronald Reagan will be reincarnated; technology will outrun human fallibility), or because they are secretly iron-fisted totalitarians, itching for the authority to make everyone behave the way he ought. The same is true of backward-looking utopians, people like the followers of arch-Calvinist Doug Phillips (himself a crass commercialist).

Let’s face it — I have a deep, abiding dislike for anyone who thinks we can Tower-of-Babel ourselves to heaven on earth.

So I find myself with an affinity for Bradbury, who cautions us to ask what we are forsaking when we race so quickly away from what we have known, in pursuit of what we think we know. There’s a humility in that stance, I think, which can serve us all well.

Ten Thousand Hours with You

I recently discovered a delightful poem by David Kirby in Five Points, and thought I’d share a snippet of it with all of you:

… and you’d think that’d settle it, that the opera lovers

of Tallahassee would let go of their plow handles

and wipe their sweaty brows with their bandanas

and say, “Well, looky here, Ma, this newspaper

feller says he knows how to pronounce it, and he

ought to know, him being Eye-talian and all,”

but no, my update hasn’t been on-line for more

than fifteen seconds before someone writes…

You can read the whole thing here, and you should, unless you just hate poetry where the rhymes don’t jump right out and whack you across the forehead, which means you probably hate prose, too, which means you probably don’t read a whole lot of anything worth reading, which really ought to make you ask yourself, when you get right down to it, just what the hell you’re doing here in the first place.

On Conservatives as Rapists

It used to be required, of an intellectual seeking to hold forth on an idea, that he define his terms. Words are slippery things, after all. But then so are intellectuals, and perhaps this is why they often play faster and looser with terms than a backwoods car salesman.

Corey Robin doesn’t have a car to sell, and if he can’t afford one, I suspect he blames the “arrogant and unaccountable ways,” as he writes in his latest Chronicle of Higher Education essay, of the economic elite. This is good fun, hearing a supporter of government economic manipulation go on about the unaccountability of economic elites bailed out and underwritten and anointed by the very sort of politicians he supports.

“Unaccountable” is a necessary word in one’s lexicon when considering Robin, however, who has been invited back to the Chronicle despite a pathological illogic. For how else to describe an essay so fraught with equivocation and non sequitur that its best use may well be for dissection in a college logic class, if colleges still taught logic, which apparently they don’t, insofar as the command of it is no longer a prerequisite for being allowed to teach in one?

In his earlier piece, Robin claimed to show why conservatives love violence and war. Now he explains that conservatives hate protesters, factory workers, secretaries, and wives. The hating is because conservatism is “a reaction to democratic movements from below,” and “a meditation on . . . the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

Now, power is one of those slippery words that Robin isn’t going to define for us, and so there’s no need trying to pin him down. What power does a millionaire trader working 80-100 hour weeks in New York have, exactly, over the Princeton trust baby roughing it for the people in his SlingFin tent pitched fifty paces from a Starbucks? Or over the homeless man, for that matter, whom the trust baby will forget as soon as this power-to-the-people action gets tiresome?

It’s an interesting question, especially in a system of decentralized political and economic authorities, but that decentralization is a fact people like Robin routinely elide, because they can no more make sense of its complexity than a Monopoly board can convey how an economy works.

Robin’s point about power is simple enough anyway; rich people have it, and they want to keep it. Now, a more charitable view would be that people with wealth oppose Occupy Wall Street because they don’t want their property stolen from their families, or the institutions that enable people to earn wealth destroyed. But that would suggest they are people who want what’s best for their families and communities.

And that just won’t do. Instead, Robin explains, deep down in the limbic part of their brains, conservatives need power over others. One might ask how he cracks open the collective conservative psyche like that, but it’s a silly question, because we all just know, in our movie-drenched, Freud-besotted culture, that this is what’s really going on.

The most entertaining part of Robin’s diatribe is where he does that slug-is-a-fish-is-a-rat-is-a-boy thing that characterized his last confused piece. This time we learn that a secretary is a wife is a slave, all of them kept down by conservatives. Further, contracts lead to wife-rape, and conservatives like contracts, therefore if you’re voting against Obama in November you were likely just the kind of guy who raped his wife back in the day.

If this has you puzzled, Robin can offer a passage from Edmund Burke inveighing against overturning the social order. To rational people, this is no more proof of his thesis than foregoing supper is proof of anorexia, but this Alice-in-Wonderland logic is well-suited to the shoddy psychoanalysis that is increasingly the domain of the modern political theorist.

But wait. I come not to bury Robin, but to praise him. Because at the butt-end of his long-bodied thesis, he makes an observation that conservatives (and libertarians) ought take to heart. It’s not his own, but at this point I’m willing to give the man credit just for being able to spot a right thought among his intellectual betters. To wit: “A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations.”

Surveying the long slide in America, from The Conservative Mind to The Way Things Ought to Be, from “Firing Line” to “The Sean Hannity Show,” from Goldwater and Reagan to Gingrich and Romney, one can’t help but conclude that would-be leaders who call themselves conservative have displaced principle with pandering, and thoughtfulness with a tentatively moistened finger lifted to the breeze.

Robin is mistaken about why the conservative distrusts the gathered, pitchfork-bearing masses, but he’s right that conservatives (and libertarians) distrust them. And well we ought, whether they gather in the name of modern liberalism or modern conservatism, because both movements are denuded of all but brutish envy and tribalism, and they celebrate commonness, disdain for the intellect, and populism.

But then again, I like puppies and so did Hitler.

Expert Offense

Some of you may like my latest Image post, even though (or maybe because) it ranges from E.O. Wilson to homosexuality to Michael Polanyi to engineers to literature to the Dewey Decimal System to sparking revolution with bedtime stories. Here’s an excerpt:

“. . . I confess I enjoy seeing scientists upset. Whenever you stumble upon a coven of them inveighing against a line of inquiry, you can be fairly certain there’s something worth inquiring after. Discoveries are frequently advanced by heretics, after all, and reviled, up until the very last, by the keepers of orthodoxy.”

You can read the rest here.

About what comes next

Sometimes I care about a political battle or news event or Item of Great National Debate enough to write about it, but then I stop, because I think someone has already said this better, or said its opposite more persuasively, or someone who donates money to the non-profit where I work will see it and not like it, or somebody crazy will see it and like it and then start giving money to our non-profit and then expect to have a phone call with me every day, or people in my family will see it and think I’m secretly talking about them — or ask how I have time to write so much when I haven’t called my mother since I was fifteen, or someone who believe he knows me by virtue of having traded rumors about me will write to explain that instead of writing about politics I need to work on my personal life/walk with Jesus/failed marriage, which then sets me to thinking that maybe I’m going to hell, which would be especially intolerable insofar as gossips and self-righteous Puritans are surely its chief denizens.

Or I think about how all the blog/marketing/carpet shampoo experts say you’re supposed to find a niche, a narrow crevice of a specialty for your writing, and then own that cramped corner like nobody’s business. Define a category, the marketing gurus say, and be number one in it. This mitigates against writing one day about one’s religious struggle, and the next about one’s grief, and the next about how one’s four year-old fell asleep in the clothes hamper again, and how one began to panic that he’d wandered out of the house and gotten eaten by feral cats, until one of his less-concerned brothers saw his foot poking out from under a tee-shirt and solved the Mystery of the Missing Boy.

So I’ve been thinking about what this space is for, and I figure since my name is on it, it may as well be for whatever I damn well please.

With a caveat, because of course I can’t say whatever I want here. One thing I learned the hard way last year is that however broken and fallible and selfish I can be, there are people far worse — evil, ugly, spiteful people with no qualms about using things I write to hurt me and my children.

But then that’s what fiction is for, to take the people you don’t like, change their identities, and then gleefully drive them off cliffs, or give them unmentionable diseases of their private parts, or perhaps even cause them to be eaten by feral cats, if feral cats actually eat living things, which I’m beginning to doubt, because the family of welfare cats living on my back deck seems utterly uninterested in the mice that have been finding their way into my house.

(This could be because nine year-old Eli, in charge of feeding the cats just every other day — in order to keep them lean and hungry and Cassius-like — tends to dump about a pound of food in their tray when he does feed them, as penance for the times he forgets.)

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going to use this space more for working thoughts out than for capturing a niche in which to market my Personal Brand. Which I could probably have simply said right up front, and spared you the trouble of reading all the way through, but then that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

Lessons

“Dad,” asks Isaac, “do you think it was disrespectful of you to leave the music playing while we prayed?”

“I guess so. I’m sorry. God will forgive me.” I notice the boy is wearing a big triangular colonial soldier hat. “Do you think it was disrespectful for you to wear that hat while we prayed?”

Isaac thinks for a moment. Frowns. “Yeah.” He pauses, smiles. “God will forgive me.”

I think a boy could learn worse.

The New Boy Scout

The thing with my 11 year-old Caleb joining Boy Scouts is that finally I can learn how to tie a sheepshank knot, and start a fire using only a fork and dental floss, and how to evade bears, and all the other stuff that I never learned how to do, never having been a Scout myself. My truck was filled with great excitement as we went to his first ever meeting. I think Caleb was looking forward to it also.

I’m still not sure what you call those meetings. A den meeting, maybe, or a club meet, or a coven session — I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the manual. Either way, it was heartwarming to see Caleb assemble with the other boys, and say the Pledge of Allegiance, and listen intently to his new Scoutmaster.

I had been anticipating for weeks what the first meeting might cover. Tracking animals, say, or how to set up an impromptu triage tent if your Scout Troop should suddenly find itself in a war zone. What mysterious and essential man-type skills were we — I mean they — about to learn?

Popcorn sales. That’s right, it’s that time of year when the Boy Scouts hit the pavement. Those great adventure camps and service projects aren’t free, you know, and someone, somewhere, decided that in addition to gutting a fish correctly and being able to identify poison oak, a boy ought to know a thing or two about how to move merchandise.

At first I was — I hope you’re sitting down, because I know this will shock you — cynical about the exercise. My boy’s very first Scout meeting, and they want to turn him into a salesman. But then one of the older Scouts got up to give the younger whippersnappers a little sales advice. He began to recount how he kept a notebook on each house in each neighborhood, to remind himself where he visited, who had bought, who wasn’t home, who was wavering and needed a return visit. Carry samples, he told them, because if people get a taste of the more expensive cheese popcorn, they’re twice as likely to buy it. Hand them the literature instead of just holding it and showing it to them.

This kid was good. I started taking notes. Since I’m running a new non-profit these days, I need all the fundraising advice I can get.

Caleb was chattering as we left the meeting. He has big plans for covering many square miles of territory, and setting up a booth at a retail location where people with high net worth and outsized patriotism congregate, and launching a sophisticated and widespread email campaign.

I got tired just typing that. I have half a mind to buy $200 of popcorn from him anonymously and call it good.

But I don’t want to dilute the boy’s entrepreneurial verve. And so I’m doing what I promised him I’d do, which is sucker all of you in with what you thought was a sweet essay about one of my children, only to tell you that if you like cheese-flavored popcorn, or buttery microwave popcorn, or trail mix, or chocolate-covered pretzels, and you love Boy Scouts and America and Almighty God — or even if none of these is true, but you have within your heart even a scrap of a feeling of kindness for me — then you will make a new Boy Scout very happy if you go to his little popcorn webpage and order something. Otherwise his father will go another forty years without learning how to tie a sheepshank knot, and that would be a tragedy.

And if you do order something, please let me know in the comments section. That way we can keep track of who Caleb needs to thank. As an added inducement (or perhaps merely as evidence of my narcissistic overconfidence regarding your interest in my opinions), the highest popcorn buyer will thereby purchase the right to direct me to write an essay here on any topic of his or her choosing. That’s right — Astroturf, kittens, the precautionary principle, particle physics — you name it, buy enough popcorn, and this hired pen will be yours.

Thank you all, and God bless America.

UPDATE: In case the link I provided doesn’t take you to Caleb’s page, if you click the button that says “Change” next to the irritating message that says “You are supporting no one,” you can type in Caleb’s ID number, which is: 18960567. Thanks to everyone who wants to support the boy.

Death-defying

Some of you may enjoy my latest post at Image. Here’s an excerpt:

“I told Caleb about the time when he was two, and he fell from a second-storey porch to the hard-packed earth below. I told him how I turned too late, and saw his little rain-booted foot disappear from sight, and heard the thud. How I saw him lying face down, motionless.

I didn’t tell Caleb how I begged and cursed God as I hurtled down the steps. I didn’t tell him what I told God in my heart: if you take another of my babies I will never, ever forgive you.

I didn’t tell him that when you are a father and one of your children goes through the valley of death’s shadow, you would give anything—your very soul—for the right to hurl yourself at death and murder it with your own hands. There is no greater human rage than this, no more pitiable impotence.”

You can read the rest here.

Valley’s Light

This morning I drove past the house where she died. The light today is the way it was then, a light that doesn’t warn you how peace comes at a cost this day, how once she’s sleeping she won’t wake again, no matter that she is stronger than little girls are supposed to be, no matter that she will try mightily, at the very end, until breath won’t come.

I saw the awning over the window I would look out for hours each day, holding her in my lap, feeding her a sip at a time through her tumor-clenched teeth, because we couldn’t let her starve the way they said we should. Maybe we should have. When I die, I want it to be the same way, the tumor pushing its tendrils through my brainstem, so I can know what she knew, know whether she could hear us in the end, could feel love pressed into her skin, or only pain.

I drove past that house and I imagined it was twelve years ago, and that she was in that bedroom sleeping, and her mother and I relaxed, God forgive us, grateful for a respite after weeks of her pain.

I wondered what would happen if I knocked on the door and a younger me answered. Would I listen to these words, that it will be worse than you imagine, that it will be nothing like you imagine, that you can burn down your marriage and your friendships and set your very soul aflame in fury, and none of it will heal you, because while the rest of your life is tinder, that hole shot straight through the center of you can never be burned away?

This is what I’ve learned: suffering doesn’t make you noble. Suffering is a burden and a wound and a gift, even, but what you do with it, well, that’s on you, no matter how you rage at the sky. This is what I’ve learned, and maybe I haven’t learned it too late. Maybe it’s not too late.

This is what I would tell me, if I could knock on the door and get me to listen, if I didn’t know that the me twelve years ago was even more stubborn than the man writing to you, and all lit up with the self-righteousness of the afflicted.

I can’t go back there and make that man listen, can’t yank him back from the precipice. So I’ll whisper it to this man who is whispering to you, as he climbs up from the cavern, hands bloodied and slipping, straining to see just a crack of light above, to know this is not his tomb. I’ll whisper to him — and to you, those of you who need to hear it — that it’s not too late. I’ll remind him of that girl, eyes fluttering open even as death crushed her, eyes opening out of stubbornness and love, faith-filled that there is light even in the valley of death’s shadow.

Especially in that valley. For if there is no light there, where will it be found?

Holy cow, a whole bunch of words that don’t direct us to something Tony wrote somewhere else!

I realized this morning that part of the reason I haven’t written here in so long, the reason I balk at the thought of it, is that I got the most hate-filled letter I’ve ever received, back in July, in the form of a comment someone tried to post here. The writer claimed I was headed for hell, and likely my children too, because sons tend to fall into the sins of their fathers, you know, and because “God is not as merciful and forgetful as you pray He will be.”

As best I can tell, between the IP address and the embittered comments about how my last church should have kicked me out before I could leave (recall from time to time I’ve written here about the soul-destroying heresies of Jean Calvin, and about my previous church’s decision to excommunicate all the children of congregants), the person is a member, if not of my former church, then of the sect to which that church attaches itself.

Which is a shame, because nearly everyone there, including most of the leaders — as dreadfully wrong as I believe they are about Christian dogma — are good and loving people. Now the thought of walking through its doors ever again makes me cringe, in much the way one might be reluctant to dive into a pool once he’s found a thick ugly snake slithering about in it.

But I realized only this morning, as I thought about all the things my boys are doing, and what I’m learning from them and about myself, and how surely there are other parents who find themselves caught up in maelstroms who must struggle to be present and good in spite of these — that I scribble these things down but don’t put any of them here, because I know there is this ugly person lurking out there, judging not only me but my children. And there are a dozen more like him, who don’t just content themselves with hate mail to me, but write letters and emails to other people — publishers and pastors with whom I associate — in an effort to get them to cast me off.

Then there is my family, and people I’ve alienated, and employees, and people I’ve fired, and preachers I’ve angered, and people who don’t even know me but think they do because they know someone who knows something about me and so feel entitled to have an opinion about me, and all I can think is that years ago I should have named this bloody thing ruminationsofananonymousbozo.com instead of tonywoodlief.com.

But then half the writing gigs I’ve ever gotten wouldn’t have come my way, which I suppose would have been a bad thing, though half the time I wish I hadn’t written half of what I’ve written, not because I disbelieve it but because there’s nothing people hate more than someone who will not fit himself to their ideal of him.

The thing is, I don’t like writing cautiously. I had the honor of speaking at Ruminate Magazine’s Faith and Arts Dinner a few weeks back, and I put it this way:

“I’ve not been accused of sugarcoating. I’ve been accused of exaggeration, and slandering dead theologians, and libeling living ones, of homophobia and homophilia, of socialism and libertinism and judaism, and I’ve been accused of heresy so many times that I’d start to worry if it wasn’t coming from a pack of heretics — but I’ve not been accused of sugarcoating.”

It’s hard, now, to feel like I have to sugarcoat, because someone may not like what he reads when he comes to the place with my name on it, where my words are, where nobody has to venture if he doesn’t think himself up to enduring what I have to say.

I know, I know, it’s a two-way street. If I’m going to be in the business of calling something a God-damned heresy, then I ought to gird myself for the other side of that transaction, which is that some Puritan somewhere is going to decide it’s me who’s God-damned. And so he’s going to say so, and if I think I’m man enough to write boldly, I ought to be man enough to read what someone thinks about what I’ve written. That’s only fair and right and par for the course.

But this person wrote about my children, about the hell to which they’re headed because of me, and suddenly I was right back in those old Baptist churches of my youth, listening to some fat, sweating bully rail at all of us for not being good enough, for heading to a place where we’ll burn and burn and burn unless we shape up, because if He is nothing else, God is really, really angry.

All of which just drains my soul right through the bottoms of my feet, which is sometimes why I think they call that place your sole, because that’s where it feels like it’s gone sometimes, doesn’t it? Down through your belly, screaming along the veins of your legs, into your feet and spilling out through the bottoms of them, into the dry dirt on which you stand.

But then I think — this is how these people rule each other, in too many churches. A few amateur scholars set up shop around the ramblings of minor, abstruse theologians, and a bevy of chattering hens surrounds them to cluck away at questioners, and so those who disagree, who feel their souls oppressed by the doctrines and the dynamics and the denuded aesthetics of the place, slink away in ones and twos and entire families, until the church isn’t what it once was.

We slink away because we are polite, and because we feel outgunned, and because we want peace, not a fight. Those are all good reasons to slink away, but I don’t suppose a writer is much of a writer — or a man much of a man — if he gets bullied away from his own website.

Which is my longwinded way of saying that I’m sorry I haven’t written more here, and I’ll try to do better, and if you happen to be one of those lurking vipers, I’d appreciate you attending to your own brats, and leaving mine to the grace of God, which is far greater and wider and grander, thank God, than you would have it be.

Truth through lies

Some of you may like my latest Image essay, which is about writing truth through fiction. Here’s an excerpt:

“Maybe we have to come at truth sideways, which if nothing else means saying it sideways, which is what I like about fiction, that you never have to worry about some literal-minded pharisee insisting that actually it happened at the dinner table and not the beach, or that it was a Thursday and not a Sunday, or that he doesn’t recall people really being that stricken the day Kennedy died.”

You can read the rest here.

Against principle

Some of you may appreciate my latest post at WORLD, where I argue that Alabama’s contested anti-immigrant law is neither conservative nor Christian, and hence people who imagine themselves Christian conservatives have no business supporting it. Here’s an excerpt:

“If conservatism has any animating idea, it is that great power in the hands of government inverts Genesis 50:20. “You meant evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers, “but God intended it for good.” But what we have seen to be persistently true about any government armed with great intrusive authority is that no matter how good the intentions such power tends to be corrupted and the liberties of the virtuous destroyed.”

You can read the rest here.