An insurrection?

If this insurrection is driven by something other than a blend of ideological extremism and personal animosity, it is not clear what that might be.

That odd sentence jumped out from New York Times editorial this morning. What can they be talking about?

Let's see -- this could be about the current civil war complicated by multiple foreign interventions that is underway in Yemen. Or perhaps the editorial is part of the paper's concluding coverage of the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War?

But no -- "the insurrection" to which the paper is referring is the "rage of the Republican establishment" against President Obama. They climb repeatedly to new levels of abuse against him, seeking to undermine his every small step toward policy goals that the majority of us expect from our government: ensuring equal treatment of all of us; seeking an fair and sane immigration policy; orienting our foreign policy away from imperial delusions of national omnipotence and toward peaceful relations with other peoples.

The Times won't say it, but we can. They hate him because he is Black and he is a fully realized citizen of this country. African Americans aren't supposed to be real citizens; they are supposed to be miserable and compliant, examples of pain and disempowerment that remind everyone else to stay in line.

And more, they hate Obama because he represents a better U.S. future. They have hitched themselves to protecting interests and constituencies that fear the evolution of this country and our interconnected world in a more peaceful and equitable direction. He must be the Anti-Christ. They feel justified in making war on him -- after all, an insurrection is a war.

I'm as disappointed by Obama as the next progressive. But let's not allow our urgent need for more change and more justice to obscure that his presidency announces a direction for the country more in tune with our hopes than we can expect from any likely successor.

The current insurrection aims to disempower the majority of the people. Like that last rebellion, it would rather tear down the whole edifice of government rather than give an inch. We can't just watch from the sidelines. Politics is a tiresome, nasty bloodsport but from our neighborhoods, to the states, to the national level, we can't afford not to play.

Hard for the police to break these heads ...

This is creative. A new Spanish law aims to criminalize protests in some venues. Opponents staged a hologram protest.

They want to silence us, but we are here.

Didactic drains

The authorities that implant the drain systems that carry away water run-off seem to believe that if we just understood better, we wouldn't pour things down them that we shouldn't. Sometimes the signs are simply informative.

Some are more elaborate ...

... or directive ...

... or emphatic ...

or, less commonly, satirical.

Click on any to enlarge.

Bonus cat blogging

This pert little Ocicat (yes, that's a real breed) lives with friends who kindly entertained for the benefit of El Porvenir last night. I don't know what she thought of all the intruders.

Too busy for blogging substance today ...

Friday cat blogging

Morty can appear quite fierce when prematurely roused from his nap.

On the anniversary of the defeat of the Rebellion

The Rebellion was what my ancestors called the civil conflict ended by Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender to the Union army at Appomattox 150 years ago. One of my prosperous forebears had what he thought it had been about chiseled on the monument he erected to his country's freedoms.

I was surprised to learn from historian David W. Blight's essay at The Atlantic that

... Fully one-third of this immigrant nation of over 300,000 million can still today, if they choose, trace their ancestry to someone who experienced the Civil War.

It seems to me that we ought to be celebrating this event -- it's not something to rush past without ceremony.

Moral progress prevailed in that war. Slavery was overturned by force of arms and at great human cost. As in all wars, participants' motives were mixed, complicated, not often heroic. But without much wanting to, Northerners could claim that their kin had "died to make men free." If there is anything in the history of this country worth celebrating, it is that the better side triumphed in 1865.

Echoing President Lincoln's Gettysburg formula, Brian Beutler proposes a new federal holiday:

... let's name April 9 New Birth of Freedom Day.

... Today, the South is home to innumerable counties, schools, and other monuments named in honor of Confederate men, or established to celebrate the Confederacy itself. The federal government can’t change that on its own, but it can refuse to participate in the celebration.

It could rename these 10 army installations after Union fighters. It could remove monuments to the Confederacy (as opposed to museums and landmarks) from the National Register of Historic Places, and disclaim any obligation to finance their maintenance. ...

It could remove the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and place it in the custody of the Smithsonian -- or at least end the spectacle of the president of the United States bestowing it with a wreath every Memorial Day. We aren’t being polite to anyone worthy of politeness, or advancing any noble end, by continuing to honor traitors in this way.

In a followup article, he explains to his numerous detractors

The purpose is to cement a national consensus that the Confederate regime -- its political and military leaders, and its goals, not its civilians and conscripts -- was truly odious.

Insofar as the modern successors of the nuliifiers and secessionists again try to impede further progress toward human freedom, their project is still morally odious.

Ferguson votes

Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb where Michael Brown was killed by a white cop last summer, voted yesterday. Viewed from across the country, the results seem mixed.

Two-thirds of Ferguson’s 21,000 residents are Black. Yet there had only been one African American on the city council. The new city council will be replacing the city manager. The previous occupant of that position resigned after the city's racist law enforcement practices were excoriated in a Department of Justice report. The new city manager will have to supervise a new police chief as the previous chief also has left.

Turnout was way up -- 30 percent rather than 12 percent of eligible voters who participated in the last election. Given that these elections are held in April of odd numbered years, it is amazing that anyone votes.

Three council seats were open. An African American woman, Ella Jones, who seems to have had activist support, replaced a white council member who did not stand for re-election. Two Black men ran in Ward 3 where Michael Brown was shot, so Wesley Bell has added another African American face to the council. In Ward 2, two white men ran. A former Ferguson mayor, Brian P. Fletcher, who had peddled “I Love Ferguson” t-shirts in opposition to the protests, triumphed.

In the run up to the election, Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes explained why increasing Black turnout is so laborious:

“There’s nobody stopping people in Ferguson from participating in these low-level elections. The disenfranchisement comes from people feeling oppressed,” she said. “All of the systems that are in place. And when you beat people down enough, some stand up, get involved, and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ But others start giving up, and feed into the idea that ‘things are not going to change, I can’t change it, I’m not strong enough to change it’—and they give up on one of the most powerful things in this country.”

Bynes argues that we should view voter apathy in communities like Ferguson in a different framework, and that conservative measures to limit access were, in essence, redundant when paired with bad public policy and cultural erasure. “They don’t have to play voter-ID games. There’s no poll tax anymore. They don’t even have to play games with where you put the polling place,” she told me. “After you have beaten people down enough over the years and some of them have forgotten their history, this is what happens.”

Ferguson has made a start on a new history, but nothing comes easy.

The Iran deal

Our man in Tehran until 1979

Joshua Marshall reflects on reactions to the Obama administration's deal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon:

The Curious Indifference to an Iranian Bomb
... all the threat talk we hear about an Iranian nuclear weapon is that it is so grave and singular a threat that almost anything and everything must be considered to counter it - even a catastrophic war to push the Iranians' nuclear capabilities back years. If it's really that serious - and I think it is that serious - why would you do anything to get in the way of securing that goal?

Adding something preposterous like demanding Iranian recognition of Israel (something even most of what must now be considered Israel's de facto anti-Iranian allies like Saudi Arabia won't do) is clearly no more than an effort to make any agreement impossible.

... Making such demands can only mean one of two things: either you don't really believe an Iranian nuclear weapon is quite as dangerous as you claim or you really don't want any agreement short of war.

We don't hear anyone demanding what might help solidify an accord with the Iranian side: an apology from the U.S. for overthrowing Iran's democratically elected government in 1953 and sustaining our chosen dictator, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in power for more than a quarter of a century. SAVAK, the Shah's security police, was organized with CIA assistance; it specialized in ruthless torture and assassination of any and all opponents of royal rule. No wonder Iranians came to hate and fear us.

The Iranian theocracy that replaced the Shah is pretty awful, but we don't have clean hands here. Our refusal to recognize our faults in this relationship will impede agreements as long as we persist in our convenient historical amnesia.

Another, less alluring, Opening Day

Various commentators are suggesting that this will be the week when a bevy of 2016 presidential candidates stop being coy about their intentions. Kilgore explains the timing:

March 31 marked the end of a reporting period for campaign and quasi-campaign activities, and as good a time as any to turn the page. And delaying into or past spring could be hazardous for the Republicans who want to preserve the opportunity to compete in the Ames—oops, excuse me, the Boone—Straw Poll in August. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton needs to extinguish any doubt that she’s actually running for president, and potential rivals need to show potential donors and volunteers that they’re not wasting their time.

Local wheat pasters have already offered their commentary:

We were not able to control our government's forces before they got you ...

Last Saturday, a memorial service was held at St. John the Evangelist for Amilcar Perez-Lopez, who was killed by the San Francisco Police Department.

I believe that it is the love that Amilcar expressed in his life that is the power that has brought everyone together ... we've had some beautiful ceremonies here tonight from different religious and spiritual traditions ... in almost all faiths, there are these invisibles ... there are things we can only see with our hearts in faith ... I believe it is in this sense that that love operates, that family operates, that we are brothers and sisters ... Amilcar: ... we failed you because we were not able to control our government's forces before they got you ... And humbly we must accept that challenge, and not just when it is our personal friend, our brother, our sister, because we are all brothers and sisters ... I pledge myself I will never forget this, I will never forget you and the light you shown ... and we will continue to try to make this a better place.

Amilcar Perez Lopez was a 21-year-old immigrant from Chiquimula, Guatemala. He was a construction worker and worked in restaurants throughout San Francisco. Amilcar was killed by SFPD on Thursday evening, 2-26-15. While SFPD contends he had a knife and refused to drop it, witnesses contend that he had already dropped it when 5 to 6 shots were fired at him.

The official autopsy that preceded release of Amilcar's body for memorial and return to his parents in Guatemala confirmed the witness statements.

A whiff of resurrection

The preacher explained:

“The fundamental problem that we have when it comes to [racial reconciliation] in the American church, even when we understand that there is a problem, is that those of us who are white, born-again Christians tend to assume that the Body of Christ is white with room for everybody else,” he said. “White people are normal, and the others that we minister to are ethnic.”

“We are not the state church of the Confederate States of America,” [he] said. “We are not inheritors of a lost cause but of a new creation. The cross and the Confederate battle flag cannot coexist without one setting the other on fire.”

“If what we’re conserving is 1950s Dixie, then we’re conserving something other than the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we will be fighting God, and we will not win,” he said.

“For a people who have all the marks on our history that we have, it seems to me that God is working and God is giving us another chance to get this right,” [he] said. “In order to do that we must repent, not just rebrand.”

The speaker was Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, that is, the chief flack for what Ed Kilgore labels "The Church of the Day Before Yesterday." In the year of #BlackLivesMatter uprisings, it has to be a good thing to have him speaking for racial reconciliation, even if his idea of what that might means seems to be primarily about integrating church buildings on Sunday morning. Gotta start somewhere ...***I can't leave out that Mr. Moore has been one of the cheerleaders for Indiana's phony "religious freedom" law, permitting private businesses to claim a religious exemption from treating their customers equally. He refuses to admit that this provision made the Indiana law a novelty, very different from the federal law of the same name. Apparently there are contexts in which freedom to discriminate does not, yet, move him to want to "repent" or "rebrand."

But on Easter, let's be glad for whatever tidbits of Good News that seem to have penetrated the fastnesses of fearful evangelicals. And all of us remember we're no more more "normal" or loved than anyone else.

Saturday scenes: maybe some sympathetic magic will help?

Gov. Jerry announced this week various measures to reduce California's water usage in this time of drought. But maybe we need something more ...

During the last major drought episode, I remember that some people held rain dances on Mt. Tam. Perhaps we should be waving our bumbershoots ... only temporarily rendered useless for their usual function.

Or we could just make art.

All out-takes from Walking San Francisco.

They called it the "Great War"

What remained when the shelling stopped. Somewhere on the Western Front, 1917.
The amateur photographer was a German enlisted soldier, Walter Kleinfeldt.
Historian of religions Karen Armstrong in Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence describes how the sacred and the national merged in the European belligerent populations in the first days of that global catastrophe.

The First World War (I914-18) destroyed a generation of young men, yet many Europeans initially embraced it with an enthusiasm that shows how difficult it is to resist those emotions long activated by religion and now by nationalism, the new faith of the secular age. In August I9I4 the cities of Europe were swept up in a festival atmosphere that, like the rituals of the French Revolution, made the "imaginary community" of the nation an incarnate reality. Total strangers gazed enraptured into each other's eyes; estranged friends embraced, feeling a luminous cohesion that defied rational explanation.

The euphoria has been dismissed as an outbreak of communal madness, but those who experienced it said that it was the "most deeply lived" event of their lives. It has also been called an "escape from modernity" since it sprang from a profound discontent with industrialized society, in which people were defined and classified by their function and everything was subordinated to a purely material end. The declaration of war seemed a summons to the nobility of altruism and self-sacrifice that gave life meaning.

All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity," the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled. Everyone "had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning. . . . Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass and there to be purified of all selfishness." There was a yearning to cast aside an identity that felt too lonely, narrow, and confining and to escape from the privacy imposed by modernity. An individual "was no longer the isolated person of former times," said Zweig.

"No more are we what we had been so long: alone," declared Marianne Weber. A new era seemed to have begun. "People realized that they were equal," remembered Rudolf Binding. "No one wished to count for more than anyone else. . . . It was like a rebirth." It "transported the body as well as the soul into a trance-like, enormously enhanced, love of life and existence," recalled Carl Zuckmayer, "a joy of participation, of living-along-with, a feeling, even, of grace." The triviality of the "petty, aimless lounging life of peacetime is done with," Franz Schauwecker exulted. For the first time, said Konrad Haenisch, a lifelong critic of German capitalism, he could join "with a full heart, a clean conscience, and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: Deutschland, Deutschland uber allies."

We want meaning. We want to belong. We want to feel that we matter. War is seductive.

'Tis the season when Christian supersessionism runs wild

Today is what Christians call Holy Thursday, the day on which we commemorate Jesus' Last Supper at which he commanded his little band to "love one another" and washed the feet of his friends. Tomorrow is what Christians call Good Friday, the day on which we remember that the powers of Jesus' day tortured Jesus to death. Saturday he's in the tomb, until, at evening, we -- along with his women followers -- discover he is not; that Jesus somehow lives on: that's Easter, also celebrated on Sunday morning.

This year, the first night of the Jewish Passover is Friday. The dates of both Easter and Passover are set by the phases of the moon; usually they coincide, but not always.

And this charged week is the season when careless Christian supersessionism hits its apex. According to the Theopedia, supersessionism is

the traditional Christian belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism, and therefore that Jews who deny that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah fall short of their calling as God's Chosen people.

This smug attitude of superiority underlies Christian anti-Semitism; a European culture bathed in this enabled the Holocaust. And this gets its license from the way the story of Jesus is told in the Gospels, the Christian scriptures. Simply put, the Christian scripture make it far too easy for readers long removed from the events depicted to take in that Jesus lived and died a Jew.

James Carroll's Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age is an anguished, passionate, and persuasive call to Christians to rethink the circumstances in which our foundational texts were written. In the light of the Holocaust, aided by numerous archeological and textual discoveries of the last 70 years, Jewish and Christian scholars have framed what is certainly a more sophisticated understanding of the milieu in which Jesus taught and died. And they argue that we've forgotten, or never knew, that the period which called forth these writings was for the Jewish people (including the early Christian sub-sect) a First Holocaust.

What the Romans called Bellum Judaicum, "the Jewish War," unfolded in three phases: first between the years 66 and 73, then between 115 and 117, and, finally, between 132 and 136. The scale of destruction -- with perhaps millions of Jews killed, with Judea and Galilee laid to waste, with Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean attacked -- is alone enough to bear comparison to the twentieth-century barbarity. The pre-industrial Romans accomplished the killing man by man, woman by woman, child by child, not in mechanized mass-destruction factories. The mayhem, therefore, was, if anything, even more cold-blooded than what the bureaucratically minded Germans did.

Yet it is true that the Romans were not motivated, as the Nazis were, by what moderns would regard as racial anti-Semitism. Romans were not operating out of an ontological or theological enmity, as twentieth-century Europe was in abetting -- or ignoring -- the "transport" of Jews. For Rome, the matter was one of simple imperial control, and that required submission on the part of subject peoples. Total submission, not elimination, was the purpose of total violence. A broad and consistent Jewish refusal to yield prompted levels of killing that were genocidal in effect, whatever the intent. Yet viewed from below, the carnage would surely have looked the same -- from the point of view of the many thousands of men hung on crosses, the untold numbers of women raped and forced into slavery, the multitude of infants whose bodies were torn apart, the experience was no doubt comparable. On the ground, annihilation is annihilation.

... Hitler killed one in three of all living Jews, a ratio the Caesars may well have matched.

In the war's first phase, the Temple in Jerusalem which was the touchstone of Jewish identity, was destroyed, an unthinkable catastrophe. The first telling of the Jesus story, the Gospel of Mark, was written in 70 C.E., the year of the destruction of the Temple.

The point deserves emphasis: the Gospels first purpose was to respond to the present crisis of those who wrote the texts and to whom the texts were addressed. The Temple dominates the story of Jesus in 30 because the Temple -- in its destruction by Rome -- dominated the story in 70 of those who wrote the Gospel, read the Gospel, and heard the Gospel.

The survivors had seen what they had believed to be the solid foundations of existence torn up by imperial power. It's not surprising that they took several hundred years to gradually reconstitute their understandings of God's presence in their world -- and that fissures developed.

All Jews were forced to ask the great questions: how could the chosen people undergo such near eradication? And, in particular -- now! -- what is it to be a Jew without the Temple?

... Two surviving parties of Jews offered their answers -- surviving parties, by the way, that were alike in having sought and found distance from the violent rebellion of the Zealots and from those who rallied to their revolution, which had brought down the wrath of Rome. Only such distance from Zealotry, which the Jews in the thick of combat had to experience as betrayal, enabled their survival as Jews. Thus, in 68 or 69, as the Romans were closing in on Jerusalem and the Temple, a Pharisaic party led by Rabbi Johanan ben Zaikai petitioned the Romans to be allowed to leave the city. They were permitted to go -- establishing themselves in Yavne, on the Mediterranean coast. This core would flourish as the center of a post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism.

In similar way, speaking generally, followers of Jesus decamped Jerusalem for Pella, across the Jordan, and for places in Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa. In Palestine, the Jesus movement remained centered in Galilee, where Roman legions raised havoc, but not with the brute totality of their assault against Jerusalem. ... [These "Jesus people" had a] succinct answer to the question "What is it to be a Jew without the Temple?" Now, they said, Jesus is the Temple -- "the new Temple." Here, too, cult sacrifice has entered the realm of metaphor, with Jesus having accomplished the last sacrificial offering "once and for all when he offered up himself." In this the Church was born.

This was the milieu out of which the accounts of Jesus' death on the cross were written. These stories don't look the same when their context is remembered.

When Mark portrays the Pharisees as Jesus' great antagonist in Galilee, we should understand the main antagonism as existing not in the year 30 or so but in about 70, when the Pharisees and Jesus people were just beginning their war-induced argument over the new meaning of Jewish identity.

Similarly, when Jesus' lethal antagonists in Jerusalem are identified by Mark as the priests of the Temple, the main point is that the priestly caste, at the time the author of Mark is writing, was held responsible by many surviving Jews for the catastrophe that had just befallen the Temple. It was not hard to see the priests as having been collusive with the Roman petty tyrant Pontius Pilate in 30 when, as Jews away from Jerusalem could see it, the Temple establishment had just foolishly, in 70, invited the Roman legions to do their worst.

Because of the way the Christian scriptures are organized, with the four accounts of Jesus' life coming first and various letters and other material following, it is natural to assume the letters of Paul of Tarsus postdate the other material. But all scholars agree that this is wrong. Paul's genuine letters are the earliest material in the canon and the only part of it written before the Roman's destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. And so, we easily misread Paul.

Paul's traumatic vision of the risen Lord on the road to Damascus... is celebrated as his "conversion" from Judaism to Christianity. He famously brought the faith to nonJews, and his argument that they need not undergo the ritual circumcision that initiated male converts into Judaism is taken to mark the radical break between Church and Synagogue. Hence Paul's image as "Apostle to the Gentiles," leading the way in leaving the rejected Jews behind.

Nothing of that is true. Paul never "converted" to Christianity for the simple reason that, during his lifetime, there was no such thing as Christianity. When Paul appeals, as he often does, to the "Scriptures," he is referring only to the Jewish Scriptures, with which his readers would have been familiar only because their religious reflections, even as Jesus people, occurred wholly in the context of synagogue study. Indeed, the house assemblies of those [who] Paul addressed would have taken place under synagogue authority. There are tensions galore in Paul, but they reflect not the bifurcations of a Church versus Synagogue oppositionalism, but the complexities, and even paradoxes, that adhere in every human heart -- and every human community.

... As Acts makes clear, Paul (like other Jewish people of the time) never stopped worshiping at the Temple. They never stopped thinking of themselves as Jews.

In the last phase of the Jewish War, the entire city of Jerusalem was razed to the ground and Jews were under attack from the authorities throughout the empire. This had the practical effect of deepening the divide between the Jesus people, especially their Gentile converts, and other Jews.

Reading texts organized around Jesus' conflict with "the Jews," it's no wonder the Gentile Christians readily imagined him as a non-Jew like themselves. ... the Gospels began to be read as if they had been written shortly after the events reported -- eyewitness accounts, instead of a literature of reinterpretation composed a full generation later. The real impact of the Roman War on countless Jews, including Jesus people, was deleted from memory. ...Once the Church, ever seeking a safe place within the empire, had formed the habit, in remembering the fate of Jesus, of emphasizing Roman virtue over Jewish venality, such misremembering was compounded.

Carroll makes a convincing case for his reading of the history. There's much more in this dense book. It should not be hard for us to imagine that total imperial war might unmoor the survivors' hold on what had happened and what was metaphorical. We live in the shadow of the Holocaust and the Bomb, facing climate catastrophe. We ought to be able to empathize and even learn.

Indiana legislation: I wuz wrong

Okay, I was wrong. Indiana has proved that legal advocacy organizations do have to use their precious resources on the fight to preserve the elementary principle of public accommodations law: if you are open to the public, you have to serve everyone equally, whether you like them or not, even if your "religious principles" say they are unclean. This is not really about flowers or cakes, this is about whether owning a business confers a right to practice active discrimination among potential customers.

Writing about Indiana's phony "religious liberty" law, Jonathan Capehart reminds readers that gay people do still need protection from the arbitrary entitlements enforced by business owners.

If you think such discrimination against same-sex couples is theoretical, just take a listen to this outrageous radio interview with an Indiana restaurant owner who said his name was Ryan on the “Kyle & Rachel” show of Indianapolis late last week. “I understand people’s lifestyles and what they want to do, but I don’t want them bringing that into my place of business and make my other people that are there uncomfortable,” said Ryan, who also proclaimed himself to be a Christian. But what kind of Christian would do what he said he did when asked if he ever discriminated against gays?

“I have discriminated,” he said. “I have not really closed early, but I have said something is broken in the kitchen so that I couldn’t serve them.” When the incredulous radio host Rachel Bogle asked whether he was okay with doing such a thing, the owner replied: “I feel okay with it because it’s my place of business. I pay the rent. I built it. It’s all my money and my doing so it’s my place. I can do whatever I want with it. They can have their lifestyle and do their things on their own place or have people that want to be with them in their type of place not my type of place.”

But by the day, we see more and more big national businesses recoiling from the swarm of hornets the Republican legislature and Governor Pence have unleashed on Indiana. They don't want any part of legalized discrimination. They operate in a wider world where all kinds are included; they can't survive in some Hoosiers' bleached Christian hideaway.

And the pressure is working. And as of Tuesday, even Pence is asking his legislature to "clarify" that their new law does not enable discrimination. We'll see how that goes.

Note however, this developing turn away from legalized bigotry came only when the holding actions of legal advocacy groups were joined by hordes of screaming gay folks, our numerous friends, more and more major media, and then by the businesses that have to deal with us. Sometimes it takes a mobilized crowd ...

Good simple explanation of the legal issues here. Terrific history of "religious freedom" legal maneuvering here.

H/t the Weekly Sift for the graphic.

A murderous historical falsehood

I know I'm out of touch with my culture; somehow I'd missed that the National Geographic channel had gifted us with an anti-Semitic Jesus biopic just in time for the Christian Holy Week.

No, I didn't watch "Killing Jesus." But Sr. Rose Pacatte did and wrote this in the National Catholic Reporter:

I hope that someday here in Hollywood, there will be a seminar where Jewish scholars will demonstrate to film and television producers how Jesus and the Jews of his time would have dressed and what their religious and life practices would have been. Here, most of the Jews wear the kippah, or skullcap -- but Jesus never does. These men were observant Jews, and by leaving off the prayer shawl and the kippah for Jesus and the disciples, the film, like almost every other Jesus film, lacks historical authenticity. Jesus was not a Christian.

My emphasis.

The lie that Jesus was a Christian -- and that the Jews blew it and killed him -- underlies Western Christian anti-Semitism. Jesus, whoever else he was, lived and died a Jew. The end point of the Christian fantasy story is the Holocaust. 'Nuff said.

Meandering through the MOOC

So I have completed my experiment with participating in a Massive Open Online Course: "Heroism in World War One" -- what did I learn?

Well, I encountered a useful German word, displayed here. I am not sure English has an exact equivalent. I am also not certain that this German word existed or had any currency before 1945. But the concept sure seems a good one -- for modern Germans and most certainly for us here in the dangerous, fading U.S. empire.

More generally, this course presented concepts of heroism changing over time. From an initial romantic martial jingoism, the picture of the hero morphed to celebrate ordinary soldiers doing their dreadful duty in the trenches and on to including civilians, even women, simply doing the work of carrying on at home. The faculty from the British University of Leeds made an effort that I found heroic to introduce participants to the difficult truth that what we see in history says as much about the time and place from which we are looking as about the factual fidelity of what we observe.

What remains interesting through it all is our strong human drive to find "heroism" in someone. We apparently need heroes. I think the Left needs to remember that people need heroes, even as we tend to be questioning of individuals who stick their heads up from among the group.

I've commented in a previous post about the enthusiasm with which the Brits are taking up the WWI centenary commemorations. After the Scotland referendum, in a country going into elections in May, these emotions are a force, though for what I have little clue.
***As for the experience of the MOOC: as pedagogy, the form will eventually find some improvements. In this particular one, I think the course might have been improved by beginning with an attempt to introduce students to a timeline of basic Great War and subsequent events within which the theme would be explored. Given the vast differences that participants brought to the course in educational background and country of origin (I was fascinated to note fellow students from Japan among many more obvious locations), getting us all more or less on the same page about the sequence of events could have been helpful. (Of course, I say this an historian ...)

What worked very poorly for me was the attempt to encourage student dialogue through a long sequential comment section after each exercise and topic. I just don't have the tolerance to read 70 or 80 comments looking for the few that inspire threads I might care about. There was a technical capacity to "follow" certain commenters, but even that would have required reading through vast numbers of contributions to find those few to follow. I wasn't willing to commit the time.

I wonder if the software to could be programmed to assemble random, but diverse, small groups of participants based on profiles we might submit before the course began. People who didn't want to engage with fellow students could opt out, but those who wanted this online conversation could be grouped in manageable size "sections" within which to have some back and forth. I see no technical bar to such an arrangement. Of course, maybe it has been tried and works even less well.

Like any educational effort, you get out of a MOOC what you put into it. This course took time, far more for me than the four hours a week the organizers suggested it might need. I don't know whether this was the case because I brought a fair amount of background to it or was just what it took to get something out of it.

Much of the course involved visual material. Several hour-long video discussions among the faculty were some of the most interesting parts to me -- these were "extras" but, for me, critical for advancing my understanding. There may be life in the old fashioned lecture format yet.

We were asked to assemble visual collections of our own, exercises that grabbed me less. You can see my annotated war memorials here and some war paintings from a BBC collection I selected and commented on. I probably didn't put as much into these exercises as I might have because the MOOC format meant I'd get no feedback on the exercise.

Would I do this again? I've signed up for the same program's course on "Paris 1919 -- A New World" which reassesses the legacy of the peace conference. I'm sure I'll post on that topic sometime in July.

Lessons from an elder: keeping on and moving on

Hollis Watkins: Early Orientation from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation on Vimeo.
Hollis Watkins was born into a poor farming family in Mississippi in 1941. He recalls a childhood at segregated schools where he and his classmates had only the leftover books from the white children who rode school buses to modern facilities.

I knew something was wrong ... My father said to me: "you always stand up for what is right, even if you are the only one standing." ... I felt like the things [civil rights organizer Bob Moses was doing] would lead me to get answers about things I had not been able to get. ... I made a commitment that I would do everything could, when I could, as long as I could until we get these situations straightened out. They still haven't been straightened out, so I am still trying to live up to my commitment. ... I didn't think it would take this long ...

Today, Hollis Watkins is still working with Southern Echo to fulfill the promise of full freedom that was at the heart of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s.

Hollis Watkins: Founding of Southern Echo following 1964 Summer Project from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation on Vimeo.

... for the most part we are still fighting the same battles ... [for] education, worker's rights, decent and affordable housing and voting rights. ...the major goal was to develop a cadre of young community organizers that would be willing and ready to go into different communities and hopefully their own communities ... we initially decided that we were going to start recruiting college students ... [but] they knew what they was going to do ... so we decided we needed to lower the age level... Ultimately we decided we had to start working with young people when they were 5th or 6th grade ... that was it ... and everybody that came understood, in the small group sessions, they had to give the young people a chance to speak and say whatever was on their minds.

H/t Facing South.

The ways of art, mind, and heart are wonderful indeed

Given my interests, I am a little surprised that I had not encountered the writings of Jack Miles, Professor of English and Religious Studies at UC-Irvine, until I stumbled across God: A Biography. That's my loss. The guy thinks fascinatingly about ultimate things and now I've got a whole new body of writings to explore. He has just come off the seven year project of editing, with six co-editors, The Norton Anthology of World Religions, all 4400 pages of it. It may be awhile before I get to that one.

In the 1996 volume discussed here (it won a Pulitzer Prize for biography), Miles explains his project like this:

I write here about the life of the Lord God as -- and only as -- the protagonist of a classic of world literature; namely the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. I do not write about (though I certainly do not write against) the Lord God as the object of religious belief. I do not attempt, as theology does, to make an original statement about God as an extra literary reality. I do not write as a historian and therefore do not focus, as historians do, on the successive Israelite and Jewish communities that believed in God. My interest goes not to those believing communities but ... to the God they believed in. ...

His text is the Tanakh, the Jewish ordering of the books that Christians call the Old Testament. The different orders of both these canons were set several centuries into the Common Era (C.E.) -- that's what we called A.D. until the Christian solipsism of that naming came to seem unsupportable. (Here's a pretty clear article on the two differing arrangements of the books; I don't know enough to say what axes may be being ground within it.)

Perhaps in part because I read this book by ear while running and walking, I got off to a bumpy start with God. This is not how we are accustomed to read the Bible, something I have considerable exposure to by way of the extensive lectionary of my church. It took awhile, listening to Miles' exposition, to hear into his description of God's developing character.

...a medieval mystic once wrote, "God cancels the successiveness of men," meaning that while human beings experience their lives one day at a time, God sees their lives' time as a portrait on a wall, every moment visible to him at once. But human beings have returned the favor with a vengeance, canceling the successiveness of the protagonist of the Bible by a tradition of Bible reading that regards the entirety of the text as simultaneous to itself, so that any verse may be read as the commentary on any other verse and any statement true of God at one point is taken to be true of God at all points. ...

.... True, the Lord God of Israel is the creator and ruler of time, and the Psalms delight in repeating that he lives forever. To that extent he is like Aristotle's unmoved mover. And yet, contradictory as this must seem, he also enters time and is changed by experience. Were it not so, he could not be surprised; and he is endlessly and often most unpleasantly surprised. God is constant; he is not immutable. ...

As the book wore on, I found myself able to listen into Miles' story of the deity. I won't say I came away sure I'd heard a "correct" interpretation; rather, I'd absorbed an epic poem about a multifaceted character. I could swim along in it and this was a delight.

... Knowledge of God as a literary character neither precludes nor requires belief in God, and it is this kind of knowledge that the book before you attempts to mediate.

...The Bible insists on nothing about God more than on his unity. God is the Rock of Ages, integrity in person. And yet this same being combines several personalities. Either mere unity (character alone) or mere multiplicity (personality alone) would have been so much easier. But he is both, and so the image of the human that derives from him requires both.

God is no saint, strange to say. There is much to object to in him, and many attempts have been made to improve him. Much that the Bible says about him is rarely preached from the pulpit because, examined too closely, it becomes a scandal. But if only some of the Bible is actively preached, none of the Bible is quite denied. On the improbably unexpurgated biblical page, God remains as he has been: the original who was the Faith of our Fathers and whose image is living still within us as a difficult but dynamic secular ideal.

In an interview about his more recent opus, Miles gave a clue about how we might approach this strange and wonderful volume:

[These texts] have, at least, a chance to work upon the mind and heart the way a work of art does.

WWI's Forgotten Photographs

I've mentioned before that I've been taking a MOOC -- a Massive Online Open Course. This one is World War I: Changing Faces of Heroism offered by the University of Leeds. Our final assignment was to read or watch a contemporary cultural production about the war and to describe and comment on it briefly. Here's what I produced.

I watched "WWI's Forgotten Photographs" a BBC Documentary from last fall. It is available free here.

I'm an amateur photographer myself, so I was intrigued to learn that WW1 soldiers in both the British and German armies frequently carried small "vest pocket" cameras, made by Kodak in Rochester, NY, USA near where I grew up.

On both sides, the early days of the war were treated as a jolly adventure. A contemporary magazine article warned deploying soldiers to save some film for the front -- not to use it all enroute! At first the British press begged soldiers for war shots, but soon the high command decided that it should control images. Personal cameras were forbidden to the Tommies and their possession could lead to courts martial. Fortunately, some soldiers persisted in recording their experiences, most especially capturing groups of friends, and, in one notable instance, those friends' graves.

German soldiers seem to have been encouraged by their officers to take pictures. I may be over-interpreting a slight impression, but the Germans are depicted as enthralled by the technological possibilities implicit in soldiers using cameras while at war. The sixteen year old soldier Walter Kleinfeldt turned out to be a master image maker. One of his shots heads this article.

The flood of amateur photos on both sides dwindled after 1916 as the war became no longer an adventure, but a brutal, almost incomprehensible slog.

The BBC documentary, viewed as an artifact of 2014, seems to me "heritage" schmaltz, excessively sentimental and florid. A British and a German photographer, descendants of WWI photographers, meet carrying their cameras at the Somme battlefield where their forebears fought, while mood music rises in a crescendo. I guess they could be thought of as icons of contemporary pan-European good feeling. I note the French don't get to participate.

The TV show made me think about why Britain seems to be so enjoying the centenary of WW1. We Yanks won't be doing that; that war was too marginal in our history (for all its very real consequences which we are still struggling with.) I wonder whether in Britain today, WWI enjoys a happy status as the one more or less modern war that seems 1) definitely over and 2) not an occasion for immediate horror or shame. The grandfathers have all died; the empire has faded away; other European states -- Germany and Russia -- suffered the worst subsequent scourges; the nation both endured and eventually triumphed. Just a guess from across the Atlantic.

Lovable counts

View image | gettyimages.com

Two years ago when working on a California campaign to end death sentences, I had the opportunity to work with representatives of the state's Roman Catholic bishops. These men -- who had just recently successfully trashed my kind in an anti-gay marriage campaign -- were serious allies to the campaign. They organized in parishes to get initiative petitions signed; used Catholic media to push the proposed measure; and enjoined priests to educate the faithful.

Too bad all this did very little to influence the outcome. In California as in the rest of the U.S., a majority of Catholics seem to support the death penalty. In California as in the rest of the U.S., racial and ethnic identities are stronger predictors of opposition: Blacks (historically Protestant) and Latinos (mostly Catholic) show majorities against. In my campaign role, I discovered polling that suggested that, among all Catholic positions on social issues, opposing the death penalty is the one on which ordinary people in the pews are most likely to break with their hierarchs.

Now Catholics have a pope who is affirming unequivocal opposition.

“Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed,” Francis wrote in a detailed argument to the president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, based in Madrid.

The pope said capital punishment “contradicts God’s plan for man and society” and “does not render justice to the victims, but rather fosters vengeance.”

Francis added that executing a prisoner can no longer be justified by a society’s need to defend itself, and he addressed two issues prominent in the American context: He declared that the death penalty “loses all legitimacy” because of the possibility of judicial error, and he said “there is no humane way of killing another person.”

The article from Religion News Service quoted here goes on to remark that U.S. Catholic conservatives "chafed at the abolition pleas." After quoting some of the objectors who point out that historic Catholic teaching includes considerable wiggle room in which to approve the death penalty, it asks:

What will this pushback mean for the Catholic Church in the U.S., and for Francis’ popularity? Probably not much.

Like bishops who pick and choose which people should have their human rights affirmed, ordinary Catholics have a history of picking and choosing when to agree with their leaders.

But it can't hurt that a loveable pope has taken up the cause. Loveable counts when convincing people of new possibilities. My kind knows that.

Sharp policy lessons for presidents and their handlers ...

You can't get more establishment than the two academic giants who wrote Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. Richard E. Neustadt was a political scientist known for writing the essential book on the limitations of the power of US presidents; he founded the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Earnest R. May was a Harvard international relations scholar whose lifelong focus on intelligence failures equipped him to be a senior advisor to the 9/11 Commission.

I've been dipping into this 1986 book which aims to outline for policy makers a series of steps that, if they'd only use them, would help them make better informed and more feasible decisions. The authors' examples jump about through presidencies from FDR through Ronald Reagan and through policy conundrums from the initiation of Social Security to arms control efforts with the Soviet Union. Some of these events, like the swine flu that wasn't under Gerald Ford, look minuscule in retrospect; others, like the Cuban missile crisis still yield lessons.

There's a lot in this little book. I'm only going to discuss a small sample that I enjoyed and which gives the flavor of these authors. One of Neustadt and May's concepts is what they call "placement." By this they mean that you are likely to have a better understanding of the people you are working with (and sometimes against) if you know something of the personal histories that may have shaped their policy instincts. They talk about assigning interns to chase down biographies via such sources as Who's Who. In the age the NSA dragnet and Google, this seems quaint.

But of course the concept holds, perhaps especially in international relations. Their description of Jimmy Carter's inept approach to German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt -- and Schmidt's corresponding incomprehension of Carter -- still probably catches too much of what passes for U.S. international interactions.

From government to government, one is usually dealing with career officials or experienced politicians. Class differences recede. Still, someone from another country ordinarily has little American history in his head, and even that is possibly peculiar to his vantage point. ...

That Americans who deal with foreigners should "place" them in their histories ought to be obvious; one might think therefore the practice was common. As far as we can tell, it is not. ...[E]ven -- or especially -- in dealings with our close allies that sort of empathetic effort seems remote from usual practice.

... Schmidt was only a half a dozen years older than Carter (and looked younger) but his political experience was incomparably wider. [As the leader of a weak parliamentary government, the German politician needed and expected to be listened to in Washington.] ... If Carter felt that he might someday want Schmidt to do something for him -- or not do something to him -- [proper "placement"] would have suggested the President acknowledge the Chancellor's superior experience, listen to him with an air of respect, and, before doing something that might cause Schmidt grief, give him reasons, with a tone of equal speaking to equal, allowing him time to make preparations in Bonn. ...

... The actual tactics of Carter ... were exactly the opposite. ... When Schmidt started to offer advice, Carter cut him off. ... the President said afterward that he found Schmidt "obnoxious."

... But the failure in placement was mutual. ... Just a little reflection might have opened Schmidt's mind to the unpleasing truth that the new President probably knew little more about hm than that he was a Socialist head of government with a frail majority, and possibly nothing about his country except that it used to be Nazi, now wasn't, but sold Americans too many cars.

... One veteran of the Carter Administration, also long acquainted with Schmidt, feels sure in retrospect that, with only a little imaginative effort, Schmidt could have made Carter a dogged friend and ally. We are inclined to agree. With a good deal less brainpower than Schmidt but, partly for that reason, more experience in personal charm, British Prime Minister James Callaghan managed to use Carter occasionally as the equivalent of an extra Labour Party whip.

I suspect that most U.S. policy makers still tromp about the world this oblivious to others. On the other hand, I suspect that improved international communications may well inform foreign leaders who have to deal with us rather better than in Neustadt and May's time. That's what happens when you are an empire that doesn't always know its own strengths and limitations. Others have to suss you out for self-preservation and are likely to become good at it.

The recent antics of the Israeli Prime Minister bringing his election campaign to the Republican Congress would have been fit subject matter for these authors, if they had dared. They seem daring -- though it is noticeable that this Reagan era book does not much delve into that administration's foolishness. We could still use Neustadt and May's candid and acerbic commentary on U.S. policy failures.

Caravana 43: Mexican families of disappeared tour U.S.

Sign on the former police station building in San Francisco's Mission

They behead people by the hundreds. They heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as warnings to those who would resist their power. They have penetrated the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the country. They provide employment and services to an impoverished public, which distrusts their actual government with its bitter record of corruption, repression, and torture. They seduce young people from several countries, including the United States, into their murderous activities.

Is this a description of the heinous practices of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria? It could be, but as a matter of fact it’s not. These particular thugs exist a lot closer to home. They are part of the multi-billion-dollar industry known as the drug cartels of Mexico. Like the Islamic State, the cartels' power has increased as the result of disastrous policies born in the U.S.A. ...

Rebecca Gordon, Huffington Post

So begins Erudite Partner's background article published on Monday about the mayhem that the U.S.-sponsored "War on Drugs" has brought to our southern neighbors. It's a good introduction to interconnected horrors in our two countries.

Families of the 43 students disappeared (and murdered) through connivance between politicians, police and drug dealers last September in the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero state are currently touring the U.S.

From now until April 28, 2015, parents of the 43 disappeared students are traveling in three caravans throughout the US, covering over 40 cities from the US/Mexico border along the Pacific, central and Atlantic region states. The Caravana43 is calling for justice and accountability, and will shed light on the connection between US foreign policy, and the violence in Mexico.

Families will be in San Francisco over Easter, April 5. More details as they develop.

Family members of disappeared people in Mexico met with the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States in Washington DC on Friday. Mexican government officials also attended the meeting. The families are demanding action that leads to searches for their loved ones:

Essence of journalistic homogeneity

Spotted in downtown San Francisco last week.

Mr. Dickhead steps forward

Paul Waldman reports that Ted Cruz has announced his candidacy for the big prize of 2016 at that bastion of segregation and misogyny, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

... he goes on: "Your fight is my fight," he says, and near the end, "I'm ready to stand with you to lead the fight." So now you know what Ted Cruz's campaign will be about. It's about fighting, and leading fights, and standing together while you and he lead fights, or at least he leads the fight while you gaze up admiringly at his fight-leading.

I know I've written that the Republican presidential nomination contest is not worth any waste of braincells, but sometimes it will be just too funny to ignore, as well as scary.

Bloggy day off and suggested read

By the time anyone sees this, I'll have spent 3 days offline in the Sierra foothills and, I hope, decompressed a bit. Back tomorrow ...

If anyone is looking for something longer to chew on, I suggest this significant print review of Erudite Partners' book from The Christian Century.

Juxtaposition: the parish of St. John the Evangelist

The little church I attend embodies the contradictions of its impoverished, artistic neighborhood, just the sort of San Francisco now receding under the tech money tidal wave. Let me offer a translation of a couple of lines from the middle of last week's service leaflet, reproduced above.

For the security of your belongings ...
"Hang on to your purse when you take the bread and wine. Possessions sometimes walk away around here."

Anthem ...
"Enjoy a professional quality performance during the communion by Mr. Daniel Pickens-Jones. In other venues he gets paid, but here he sings for love."

We live and thrive within the mix.

I'm in the Sierra foothills this Sunday, but I thought readers might enjoy this apparent paradox.

Faces stare back at us

Are they warning us off?

Now that's big!

An admonition ...

Is sorrow an appropriate response or am I reading that in?

"I carry the world ..."

It would be easy to miss this one.

All out-takes from Walking San Francisco.