The heart is loveliest of all

This morning and throughout the day I’ve thought, in the little scraps and spaces of free time, what I might write here. Then I read my friend Lore’s latest post, and I realized that there’s nothing I can conjure that comes close, not today and maybe not ever.

So go read her words, and maybe, if she soothes your spirit in the way I know she does for many more than she perhaps realizes, you can drop her a line and tell her so.

Why Journalists Fail

Let me run a theory about men and women by you. Your job is to tell me if you think the New York Times would print it:

The reason that women economically outperform men—women in their 20s outearn their male counterparts, and hold well over half the jobs in many of the nation’s fastest growing professions—is because they are well-suited to bureaucratic, care-taking roles. The professions where they predominate are health care assistance jobs—what were once “nurses” and “secretaries.” Women tend to do well in mid-level, corporate fields, which are increasingly the loci of bureaucracy and unoriginal thought in corporate America. Care-takers by nature, women are simply best-suited for jobs in which they follow well-established routines while taking directions from people at the very top.

(A note to my friends at Cato—the foregoing is a hypothetical offered to illustrate a point about the lack of analytical rigor among some current popular writers. Please don’t quote it in Salon as proof that I’m a woman-hating troglodyte.)

So, do you think that paragraph would pass muster at the Times? How about the Atlantic Monthly?

No?

Well, consider David Brooks’s musings in the New York Times, in an essay titled “Why Men Fail,” as he trots out ideas from “The End of Men” theorist Hanna Rosin, who first began her gender speculations in The Atlantic:

“Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances. Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one…Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid…

“She’s just saying women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than men…

“Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.”

If you break down the job performance data Brooks offers to substantiate Rosin’s hypotheses, its primarily that women have more jobs in health care professions, and a study by the National Federation of Independent Business supposedly showing that “small businesses owned by women outperformed male-owned small businesses during the last recession.”

When you actually look at the NFIB study, however, you see that the number of women-owned businesses did indeed grow faster, but they had lower survival rates, lower sales, and fewer employees. If we count the establishment of an enterprise as “success,” Brooks is indeed right. But if we count things like earning money and selling stuff, not so much.

As for Hanna Rosin, if a male writer wanted to “analyze” gender differences by using a combination of misleading statistics about women, unscientific snapshots of particular men who seem like real go-getters, and musings about how men are adaptive and resilient and possess greater vision, he’d rightly get slapped down for shoddy thinking and poor journalism. What say in the interest of gender equality we hold Rosin to the same standard?

More on the little pope of Mars Hill

Those of you who read my recent post about Mark Driscoll’s revisionist history of Esther might appreciate thoughts offered by Rachel Held Evans, who also promises to devote the next few Mondays to her own exegesis of that book:

“To compare forced concubinage to an audition for “The Bachelor,” and to ascribe sexual culpability to a girl who in a patriarchal culture had no ownership over her own body and  no control over her own marriage, is as bizarre as it is disturbing. It’s just as ridiculous as turning Esther into a Disney princess, only Driscoll—being older than 10—has no excuse to project this strange reading onto the text.”

Dave Kludt, meanwhile, cautions restraint in our criticism of Driscoll. After all, there are some things Driscoll says that a thoughtful person can agree with. For example:

“[Esther] grows up in a very lukewarm religious home as an orphan raised by her uncle. Beautiful,she allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions. Her behavior is sinful and she spends around a year in the spa getting dolled up to lose her virginity with the pagan king like hundreds of other women. She performs so well that he chooses her as his favorite. Today, her story would be, a beautiful young woman living in a major city allows men to cater to her needs, undergoes lots of beauty treatment to look her best, and lands a really rich guy whom she meets on The Bachelor and wows with an amazing night in bed. She’s simply a person without anycharacter until her own neck is on the line, and then we see her rise up to save the life of her people when she is converted to a real faith in God.“

Lessons from the news to come

In case you don’t have time to follow the news for the next week, here’s a summary:

1. Someone insulted Mohammed.

2. Otherwise intelligent and civilized ambassadors for the Religion of Peace murdered some people for being American (they’ll get around to assaulting people for being Jews and Christians as soon as schedules permit) and burned buildings after looting their contents.

3. The obvious conclusion is that the West should work harder to sensitize itself to the tender feelings of thugs and theocrats.

The Little Pope

Perhaps you’ve heard of Mark Driscoll, the tough-talking young Calvinist in the Pacific Northwest, the one who preaches with his shirt untucked and likes to be called “Pastor Mark” and writes about the righteousness of blow jobs.

In a recent blog post, Driscoll announces that he will be preaching on the book of Esther next Sunday, and offers a little preview. It promises to be appalling. Esther was, one may surmise from Driscoll’s preface, a typical slut who God nonetheless used to accomplish His foreordained plan.

In part, this kind of nonsense is just baked into the Protestant cake. Pick up any Protestant derivation of the Old Testament, and you’ll find confirmation of Driscoll’s claim that Esther is “a godless book.” This is because these versions rely on Masoretic (Hebrew) texts, which greatly abbreviate Esther, unlike the text widely used by the early Church (and quoted by Christ Himself), the Septuagint. The latter has long, beautiful prayers by Mordecai and Esther, entreating God for guidance and salvation. The Hebrew texts do not.

Setting that aside, however, there is Driscoll’s unfounded assumption that Esther secured her position as the king’s wife by pleasing him sexually during a trial run in bed. These are the moments when Protestants abandon sola scriptura and just wing it for the glory of God. The King James Bible says simply:

“So Esther was taken to King Ahasuerus, into his royal palace, in the tenth month, which is the month of Tebeth, in the seventh year of his reign. The king loved Esther more than all the other women, and she obtained grace and favor in his sight more than all the virgins; so he set the royal crown upon her head and made her queen instead of Vashti” (2:16-17)

We don’t know if the king slept with each woman. We don’t know if he slept with every woman but Esther. We don’t know if they played Twister and did each other’s hair. We don’t know if they had sex that was really, really bad, but Esther was so charming that the king fell in love with her anyway.

The Bible tells us nothing about what happened that night, but Mark Driscoll is certain that it involved Esther’s panties. Perhaps that’s the only way Driscoll imagines a woman can win over a man.

It’s astounding how theologians who can decry icons and incense because they “aren’t Biblical” can crap out exegesis that imposes their 20th-century Americanized assumptions onto a 5th-century B.C. middle-eastern culture.

Wait! I come not to bury Pastor Mark, but to praise him. Because in the midst of his convoluted, self-congratulatory, deeply misguided missive, he admits to planting himself at the root of heresy, which is this:

“What’s the truth? We will see, as I’m still studying and praying.”

Want the truth? Want the Truth? Well it doesn’t come from the Church any more. It comes only from select churches nowadays, little centers of tax-exemption and self-appointed expertise.

You want the truth? Well you’ll have to wait until next Sunday, when the little pope of Mars Hill emerges from his study with it.

Exclusive World Premiere Sneak Preview for a Very Select and Discriminating Audience

So, some of you know I wrote a novel. Keep your panties on, I don’t have a publisher yet.

Let me rephrase that: no publisher seeking to make a fortune in paperback and hardcover sales, not to mention audiobook downloads—all of which will pale in comparison to the movie and television series proceeds—has yet had the good fortune to have its offer considered by my phalanx of cut-throat agents, publicists, and attorneys.

That’s not what I have to tell you, however. Unless you represent a major publishing house, in which case, please re-read the foregoing paragraph.

For the rest of you, I want to share an opportunity to read some of my novel. An abbreviated version of the first chapter is forthcoming in Ruminate, a literary journal to which the most refined people already subscribe, of course, but which may have eluded your notice. Until now.

Just to whet your appetite, here, for the very first time, is the very first paragraph of the very first chapter of my very first novel:

“The day we killed the boy we rode to town in my father’s Jeep. An old Army duffel was slouched between my legs, its musk mingled with the smell of gas and oil. In my imagination it still held killing tools: cool, greasy bullets, knurled grenades, a long, sleek knife. In reality there was just a Delco battery and some dulled rotary rock bits inside. Only years later did I realize that when he was a soldier, Daddy’s duffel held mostly food, clean socks, and letters from my mother. The killing had never been in this stiff canvas bag, but beneath my father’s skin. Maybe it was necessarily written into my flesh as well.”

In just the first chapter there’s death and blood and fistfights and knife scars and ghosts and the very first day of school and other terrifying things. If you want the rest, you should order your copy of Ruminate here. If you don’t want to read the rest, I can only assume you came here by accident, on your quest for free Viagra or the latest scandalous news about Brad and Angelina or whatever else it is people use the interwebs for these days. So be on with you. Shoo.

The Collapse of Western Civilization Begins in Your Dentist’s Chair

Some of you may like my latest offering for Image — an homage, if you will, to those noble members of the political, legal, financial, and insurance professions to whom I sometimes refer in the collective as “that bunch of bastards.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“Loggers are dispatched to the Pacific Northwest to fell a tree. The tree is chopped and ground and pressed into paper, so the aforementioned offices can hurl mail at every address I may have visited over the past decade. I begin to get bills that must be paid immediately or babies will be thrown from windows.

Meanwhile, part of that tree goes to minions of my insurance company, so they can send me indecipherable forms purporting to explain why they cannot possibly be expected to approve the outrageously high bill my bamboozling flimflam dentist had the temerity to submit.

They include rows of numerical codes in their explanation of non-benefits. This was a code 22798, you see, with just a splash of 87453. Obviously, we cannot be expected to cover it. You owe your dentist one million dollars and eighty-seven cents. This is not a bill.“

You can read the rest here.

Letter to an Aspiring Kingmaker

Hey you. Yes, you, the one poring over push-poll numbers and wondering how you can get more smug college kids to accost people with clipboards in swing districts. We are ten weeks from The Most Critical Election in the History of America, and you are lollygagging to first base. There are mid-level HR hacks in potato chip companies thinking more creatively about how to sell their product.

You think it’s impressive, running those grainy pictures of your opponent, telling old people their Medicare’s fixing to get cut? Is that all you’ve got?

Listen, Sparky. We all know Medicare’s going under. Medicare, Social Security, pension funds — it’s musical chairs. Everyone knows the final chorus is playing, but so long as each generation thinks it has a chance of foisting the costs off onto the next, you’re not really scaring anybody.

You want to frighten the bejesus out of people? Zombies. Like that guy who took an allergy pill or whatever, and ate some other guy’s face off? That shit was scary. If you really want traction in this race, tell us how your opponent is weak on zombie defense.

You know what else is scary? That flesh-dissolving bacteria. What’s the other guy doing about that? Nothing, I’ll bet. In fact, don’t we have some footage of him digging at his nose and not washing his hands? Come to think of it, he kind of walks like a zombie. Where I come from, if he walks like a zombie, talks like a zombie, and has shockingly prominent teeth like a zombie, he’s a zombie.

Tell your guy he can use that in the debate. No charge.

Basically, any scenario where voters get eaten will grab our attention. Medicare going broke? Whatever. Every summer, able-bodied Frenchmen go to the beach and leave old people to roast in their homes. Tell us the other guy’s going to do that. Or tell us your guy’s in favor of it. Not sure which way the public will break on that one.

Look, all I’m saying is quit being such a pansy. When Adams and Jefferson squared off in 1800, a newspaper on Adams’ side warned that Jefferson would promote widespread incest. Incest, Sparky. Keep in mind that incest was creepier back in the day, before West Virginia became a state, and Angelina Jolie made out with her brother on national television.

Calling the other guy a sister-kissing flesh-eating jackwagon is an American tradition. So get on the field and hit somebody. Mix it up a bit. Nobody believes anything you’re saying any more than we believe James Cameron knows what ocean the Titanic went down in. The edge Cameron has, however, is that he keeps us entertained. So stop taking yourself so seriously, and tell us how about your opponent’s clandestine puppy-skinning operation. But be sure to shout, so we can hear you over that last chorus.

An Apple in time

Another working road trip. My colleague needs a piece of equipment from the Apple store, which is in a mall. The Apple store is swarming with people, but in less than 30 seconds, a salesman comes alongside to take us to what we need. In the Apple store, if you have their app on your phone, you can scan the bar code of the item you want, and it gets billed to your iTunes account. You can literally pick something up, point your phone at it, click a button, and leave.

If you don’t care for that option, the salespeople have devices that allow them to swipe your credit card anywhere in the store. As opposed to 99.9% of other retail establishments, which direct customer traffic according to their needs. Oh, you want to buy that item? Lovely. Schlep it over to this line, stand there until we’re ready to take your money, and wait for the privilege of paying us.

As we leave the mall we pass a Time Warner Cable store just thirty yards away. The store’s cage-like gate is closed. Customers are clustered outside, staring in at Time Warner employees who don’t seem to be doing much of anything. I ask one of the onlookers what the trouble is. “Power went down,” he says.

I look around. Macy’s is open. The jewelry store across the thoroughfare is open. Every store, in fact, but Time Warner is open. “The power went out in just this store?”

“No, it went out a while ago in this whole section of the mall. They just can’t get their systems running again.”

The company, in other words, that claims to sell connectivity and information access is the only one in the mall unable to restore its cash registers, its linkage with headquarters, etc.

The thing I want to know is how to help my children become Apples rather than Time Warners. How to instill in them the creativity, and drive, and other-orientation that characterizes so much of what Apple does, rather than the dullness, the satisfaction with the status quo, the just plain slovenly approach to customer satisfaction that characterizes — it seems to me, at least — an increasing swath of American businesses?

Because I think a child who emerges as an Apple can move the world, if only because so many others are content to sit and watch it slow to a halt.

A pox on this house

The last fortnight was chicken pox time for the Woodlief boys. I have acquaintances who are apostles of all things scientific and modern, and who are therefore appalled that my boys never received the chicken pox vaccine. It seemed like a good decision at the time, given that the vaccine wears off by the time a boy reaches his twenties, when chicken pox could leave him sterile. If you inject your kid with this stuff, you put him on the hook to get boosters every so many years, and we all know in fifty years or so they’ll tell us the boosters cause cancer or penis shrinkage or an affinity for the Hallmark Channel, and then I’ll feel bad for inflicting it on them.

So instead I got to bathe my babies in oatmeal baths, and anoint them with anti-itch lotion, and generally feel like a turd for not vaccinating them like the rest of suburbia. Had I known you can get chicken pox on your schnitzel, I probably would have opted for the vaccine, even though I trust the modern drug industry about as much as I trust used car salesmen and psychologists.

At one point, as I’m drying off a shivery, miserable Isaiah, he puts his hand on his backside. “There’s something in my bottom.” (Quizzical expression, little hand fishing around back there.) “Oo, it’s a big chicken pock.”

Exhibit 127 in my quest for the 2012 Father of the Year award.

They’re all better now, albeit a little scabby. I imagine their hearts are a little scabby too, what with the whole world being turned upside down over their heads this past year. I like to think that those scabs, too, will heal, but that’s what every divorced parent tells himself. That doesn’t necessarily make it untrue, but I’m always suspicious of anything people believe when they really need it to be true.

We’re in it, though, this sick and heart-scabbed place. All I know to do now is give them whatever balm I have in me to give, and pray that this, too, will pass. Even if it’s not what it should have been, or not what someone peering into my life imagines he could make of it, I hope it’s enough to see them through.

Which is, I suppose, what every parent prays, the great ones as well as the rest of us. Let it be enough to see them through.

Chicken hawks, meatheads, and real soldiers

I suppose in the grand scheme of crapola that is major network television, a show where has-beens and desperately-wish-they-could-bes get to play at being army men isn’t the worst possible fare. “Stars Earn Stripes” is an NBC show in which quasi-celebrities compete in various military-themed competitions to earn cash for charity (the show’s promoters mention this every 15 seconds).

There’s worse out there, but notables including Stephen Colbert and Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu oppose this particular show. They believe it glorifies war, and dishonors those who suffer in wars. Predictable voices retaliate with predictable name-calling.

I saw one of the show’s play actors, Andrew McLaren, on a stuffed-couch gab fest that passes for news programming. He wore a black muscle shirt, and camo pants, and a garish cross. His thick arms and shoulders were covered with tattoos, and if you were to mute the station, he could pass for any of the smirking know-nothings on “Jersey Shore.” The difference is that McLaren is a former soldier.

He is also, however, shallow-minded and preening and thuggish. On his Facebook page he announces that he is “above all a loyal and humble servant to Jesus Christ.” McLaren’s proclamation of humility sits approximately one inch from a picture of him posing shirtless, muscles flexed, cap on backwards, automatic weapon held not like a soldier but like a movie actor. His declaration of Christian character sits about seven inches from this announcement: “To Stephen Colbert fake news reporter, Desmond Tutu and the other 8 noble (sic) peace prize tree hugging hypocrites I say kiss my ass.”

Classy. [Note: The "kiss my ass" quote has since been removed.]

On McLaren’s website, his hagiographers explain that he left a promising career as an actor and model for military service, something to which he was drawn for “the challenge/physical fitness, to gain life experience, travel, and to pay for college.”

I know these are reasons many young people join the military, but others join to serve and protect their country. These are the soldiers this dimwit claims to represent and work on behalf of, as he grasps his fifteen minutes of sweaty notice.

It may be unpatriotic, any more, to have these opinions about a former soldier. Or even non-soldiers, for that matter; even a part-time firefighter in Iowa may now feel entitled to the honor his New York City cousins earned on 9/11.

In all likelihood this claim to transitive nobility doesn’t originate with the Iowa firefighter, with the soldier whose service never carried him into harm’s way. It originates with the self-promoters who need to bathe him in glory so they can stand next to him and have this artificial light reflected onto themselves. It’s a shame when those self-promoters themselves once wore a military uniform.

So by all means, if the masses want more realistic circuses, and this is the only way to funnel money to charities serving actual heroes with actual wounds, then let’s watch Todd Palin trudge through the mud dressed like a soldier. It would be nice, however, if NBC could find more exemplary soldiers to represent the show. That may, in fact, be what is most insulting about it — not that it pretends to tell viewers what real combat is like, but that it trots out dishonorable clowns who are nothing like the soldiers many of us have the good fortune to know.

Words

Some of you might like my recent essay at Image’s Good Letters channel. Here’s an excerpt:

“The vicissitudes of life may chink or scorch or even crack that die, but if your child doesn’t come with the self-restraint app, for example, the twin-studies data suggest you’re not going to build it into him.

So don’t delude yourself, mother, father, with the faith that your pitiful efforts can alter your child’s path any more than a butterfly might deliberately spin a hurricane off course.

Parenting certainly feels that way, to this parent, at least—like flapping my weakling wings against the coming storm, the storm that comes over a child passing into adulthood in this age of quiet terror, of hopeless optimism, of sterile, brightly packaged, insistent faith in the goodness of goodness.”

You can read the rest here. And if you’re reading this sentence, the here in the previous sentence is still a there, and hopefully about to become a here, but the point is that once you’re there you might go a bit further along to see the lovely writing of some of my Good Letters compatriots. I was especially struck by Dyana Herron’s “Gethsemane Companions,” an essay about hiding our weaknesses, and Vic Sizemore’s “The Boy Who Lived Large,” about learning how to live from someone most people imagine doesn’t know the first thing about “real life.”

I’m really proud to be part of that group, and if you read some of the other folks there you can easily see why. We were all of us brought together by Image founder and editor Greg Wolfe, whose recent excerpted commencement address is worth the time of anyone who loves words.

Confederacy of Dunces

“They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don’t you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won’t be a robot!”

“But, Ignatius, they help out a lot of people got problems.”

“Do you think that I have a problem?” Ignatius bellowed. “The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don’t like new cars and hair sprays. That’s why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

From A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

Silence

Some of you may appreciate my essay at Patheos about the long silent witnesses to Jerry Sandusky’s crimes against children, and the propensity for most of us to avoid the courageous and costly choice. Here’s an excerpt:

“We all imagine we’d choose bravely: We’d lead a revolt against the slaver. We’d turn our backs on Hitler. We’d bash Jerry Sandusky’s head against the shower wall and call the police.

Except most of us wouldn’t, the proof for which can be found in the fact that most of us don’t. How many stories remain hidden because of the silence of witnesses?

How terrible would be the crying out of stones and walls, were their voices loosed?”

You can read the rest here.

Stream of conscience

Whenever I have a lot to do, and I finally muster the resolve to do it, I’ll say “time to get down to it.” This always reminds me of that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song, which makes me think of Kent State, which reminds me of the time I interviewed for a political science job with some of their professors at a convention in Chicago. The position was funded by an endowment they’d received from some donor or another who wanted the money to fund research and teaching about peace, whatever such an endeavor looks like.

I told them my research and teaching wasn’t focused on the topic of peace, but on the politics of cities and organizations. That was no matter, they assured me, they could finesse my resume to make it look like I was doing what the donor wanted.

I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want the job, so I suppose that worked out well for everyone. I did decide, however, never to endow a university with a large amount of money. And so far I’ve stuck with that resolution.

On the passing of Sheriff Andy

My first miserable year in graduate school I got a used television and paid for cable so I could watch four episodes of The Andy Griffith Show a day. My apartment mate, a math whiz with perfect board scores from Harvard, would come through the door and ask how Aunt Bee and Opie and everyone back home were getting along.

Within a month he was addicted. I would drink my skunky Molsen beer and he would eat Wheaties from an old plastic ice cream tub and we would watch Sheriff Andy set things to rights, and though I never was all that fond of Ted Turner, I think it’s fair to say that he as much as anyone helped me get a Ph.D., because I hated Michigan and I didn’t want to be there and those four doses of Andy Griffith a day saw me through.

I loved that show when I was a boy, and I’ve seen every episode — at least the ones until Don Knotts went on his way — at least a dozen times, likely more. It wasn’t that he was from my home state, or that these were the only genuine southern accents on television. It was simply the fact that Sheriff Andy protected everyone and never hurt anyone. I probably wasn’t the only boy who wished he was my father, just like thousands of us wished we could live with Pa in that little house on the prairie.

The man left behind a mixed body of work, as we all do. His early comedic routines were, much like those of Bill Cosby, pathbreaking even as they were rooted in the traditions from which they sprang. He had a lovely voice and was a keen musician — something that ought to amaze anyone familiar with the inscrutable hymns of the Moravian Church in which he almost became a preacher.

His performance in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd ought to be studied by those who question why the American Founders erected several layers of defense against demagogues. His work on The Andy Griffith Show — ably assisted by Don Knotts, his No Time for Sergeants comic foil who was rightly the clown in his television show — was far more deeply humorous than almost anything on the air.

I never enjoyed Matlock, though it lasted, perhaps surprisingly, longer than The Andy Griffith Show. Anyone who thinks he lost a step or two, however, should pay attention to his cameo performance in the lovely movie Waitress. Though he didn’t always get the chance to flex those muscles, the man had presence and timing, which is a far sight more than half the pretty boys and girls stumbling across the stage these days.

He had the predictable small-town politics of a country boy who made good. He shilled on occasion for visionless local hacks. He joined with Ron Howard to help sell Obamacare, ticking off the promises of its purveyors to his audience as if the rest of us opposed it because we don’t want people to see doctors when they’re sick. But his heart was in the right place, and he didn’t know any better, and God willing people can say the same about at least a few of my mistakes one day.

Maybe in the end all any of us can hope is that when we are gone, the world is both richer for our having been here, and poorer for our passing. That’s certainly true of Andrew Samuel Griffith, at least so far as this North Carolina boy is concerned. Rest in peace, Sheriff Andy.

Homecoming

Some of you may like my latest essay at Image Journal’s section of Patheos, “Coming Home to Fatherhood.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Or perhaps it’s closer to truth to say that nearly everything we do, so long as we love our children, keeps us moving closer to the full heart-knittedness that we yearn for with anyone we love. Maybe what set all those fathers of men in prison the wrong direction, more than anything else, was their inaction.”

You can read the rest here.

Semantics

I’m sure it made sense to someone, this posting of an apartment complex management’s response to a resident’s complaints. But some conversations, I think, are best conducted in privacy. A sampling of the resident’s itemized complaints — nearly all of them concerning animal waste — and management’s point-by-point rebuttal:

“C. “All grass all around building is full of dog pee (grass on the edge of sidewalks are burnt).”

Response: Instances of lawn areas damaged by dog urine are obvious at the two Second Floor Entrances to the Building, as well as along the two walkway approaches to the Third Floor Entrance. However, we have not found evidence that grass around the entire Building is full of dog urine.”

The entire lawn isn’t soaked in pee, after all. Why, there’s still some perfectly green places left. It’s a little like reality TV, but you can read the rest here.

A prayer for the lying

My children woke me to pray this morning at 5:45 a.m.

Actually, they woke me playing Legos and making the range of dramatic voices and sound effects that are, apparently, part of early morning Lego play. But then I pleaded with them to go back to sleep, and they tried to comply, in a form of meditative semi-quiet, for at least five minutes, after which I prayed a great deal.

I am happy to report they are all still living. And people think prayers aren’t efficacious.

I understand that this revelation — that sometimes children can inflict a kind of torture that would make the ACLU register protest — runs somewhat counter to my latest essay for Image (which now has space at Patheos, a sort of all-things-about-faith site that no doubt gives Reformed types oodles of material for sermonizing and reprobate-spotting), but then life and faith are full of polar opposites that must be managed gracefully, no?

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.