The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.”

Such is the reality for millions and millions and millions of people living here in the Land of the Free^®, the Home of the Brave^® and the Birthplace of the Religious Freedom^®.

As badly as it griped me to see such a fine, artistic photo hidden behind a cut like some tawdry porno you’d pay a Times Square carney a dollar to see (price adjusted for inflation), I also had no interest in seeing any of our intelligent, hard-working readers escorted out of their places of employment at gunpoint.

However, my colleague Dr. Slammy suggested that the all-too-standard NSFW tag – the Modern American Internet’s version of the Scarlet Letter – was a lingering stain on the credibility of the artist, and in due course I (apparently being ill of will and sharp of tongue) was enlisted to pen what you may take as an official Scholars & Rogues policy position.

Briefly stated, when you put an artist behind the Scarlet NSFW, you convey a general social verdict that shame should be attached to the work. It is not fit for general viewing; it is likely to be deemed offensive to some people; and those who choose to click the link, well, that’s between them and Jesus.

It does not matter whether such a judgment is reasonable. For instance, in the case of “Hello Nurse,” what really is there to be scadalized by? Let’s take a close look:

What is the supposed objection? The subject is of consenting age. No aberrant sexual acts are depicted. Hell, she’s not even partially naked. No vajayjay showing. No boobies. She’s not fondling herself (at the moment, anyway). There is an aspect of the erotic in her pose, of course, but let’s be clear here: whatever obscenity might arise from the communication of this image lies entirely within the mind of the viewer.

Goddammit, people, you can see more NSFWing imagery any goddamned night of the week on any goddamned channel on television during goddamned prime time. If this is NSFW, then the publishers of every fashion magazine available in America need to be hung in the public square right fucking now!!!

Oh, I’m sorry – is my invective NSFW?

It is true, as another of my unnamed colleagues pointed out, that good art seeks to provoke. MentalSwitch isn’t an especially in-your-face artist, but it is also true that his work routinely challenges convention in ways that are guaranteed to provoke, and it’s not hard to conclude who the targets of his critiques are. As he explains in the notes accompanying a portrait of “Lizzy”:

If all Christians were like this guy then the world would be a better place. On the other hand, if all Christians were like this guy we wouldn’t even recognize Christianity anymore….

Well played, that.

Welcome to 17th Century Salem, folks. Welcome to neo-Puritan America, a land where dismemberments and flying body parts and mushroom clouds and elected officials intentionally and strategically lying to their constituents are cool but a woman wearing four times more clothing than every teenaged girl around every swimming pool in the United States is NSFW. Because she looks suspiciously like she might enjoy sex in a non-missionary position. And sex is not to be imagined. Pictures that might make us think of sex are not to be condoned.

In neo-Puritan America, millions of people wake up every morning praying that the Lord will afford them an opportunity during the day to be offended. Hypocritical offense is next to godliness and the Constitution apparently has a clause about the right not to be exposed to anything you don’t like. Lawyers will be summoned. Human Resources policies will be invoked. Sinners will be terminated. And Hester Prynne will have a red NSFW branded on her twitchy, hellbound little ass, BY GOD!

In case the theme of my rant hasn’t yet made itself apparent, the Scarlet NSFW brands the wrong person. Those whose visions challenge are to be positioned behind the screen of shame, while those who are afraid of ideas have their narrow prejudices reinforced by official policies and unspoken self-righteous bullying.

We will know America has finally attained a measure of enlightenment when the reverse of those statements is true.

In the meantime, I mentioned something about a policy, so here it is. Since, as I noted above, we have no interest in damaging the careers of our readers, and since we’re smart enough to know the reality of many workplaces, we’ll be placing things that we believe might offend the average granny-panty neo-Puritan behind a cut. But when we do, understand that it is not the artist whom we are indicting. It’s the Scarlet Letter crowd.

In addition, don’t be surprised to see NSFW replaced by NSFP – Not Safe For Puritans. (My original idea, Not Safe For Repressive Puritan Asshat Jesus Nazis, was deemed a bit unwieldy.)

At Scholars & Rogues, we don’t shrink from challenges. We’re not kept up at night by the unconventional. And we are absolutely, positively not afraid of ideas.

And we will not quietly pander to those who are.

The problem facing conservatives is that updates to the New International Version are decided on by a committee “dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal* and feminist in outlook”. That would explain why the project proposes to replace all occurrences of the word “Pharisee” with “intellectual”. Mark 3:2 (KJV), “And they [the Pharisees] watched him, whether he would heal him [the man in the synagogue with a withered hand] on the Sabbath day; that they might accuse him.” Mark 3:2(CBP), “The intellectuals watched Jesus to see if he might catch and accuse him of healing on the Sabbath.” No, i didn’t mistype anything. That’s what it says. Maybe God’s revealing himself to be semiliterate. And the “translators” reveal themselves to be rather inconsistent, as the word “Pharisees” in Mark 7:5 is not translated into Modern Conservative but left in plain old English.

Before we leave Mark—the only gospel even partially translated—behind, let’s pause at 7:15. This is the famous verse wherein Jesus says, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile a man.” Aside from changing the meaning by replacing “the things which come out of him” with “that which comes from within” and moving from a definite state of defilement to one of possible corruption, there’s an analysis of the verse. Translator(s) wonder if maybe Plato was inspired by God because he said the same thing; they even entertain the possibility that Jesus knew “earlier doctrines”. Now that’s just blasphemy because all the earlier doctrines were false and Jesus was the truth…get it together, conservatives.

Should i dare point out the fact that there’s no proof that Jesus said anything recorded in the Gospels? (He might have, i wasn’t there.) Would it be unkind to suggest that since they were written in Greek, the writers might have heard of Plato? I’ll leave aside that wisdom is wisdom is wisdom, no matter who says it or when.

The projects only completed work is the short, “Epistle to Philemon”. “Fellow labourer” is changed to “fellow volunteer” in verse one, because the former “falsely connotes socialism”. And in verse three—“Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”—we learn that “peace” really means “peace of mind”. Peace, you see, is not as Merriam-Webster defines it but means “anti-war”, and we all know that good Christians are not anti-war.

There is more of course, but you’re probably an illogical liberal who hates Jesus and the Bible, so i won’t bore you by going through the translated text with a fine toothed comb.

The project is starting with the New Testament, both a curse and a blessing. The Old Testament would be a lot more interesting, e.g. we’d get to find out the Modern Conservative for “begat”. But at least they’re only adulterating a second rate collections of stories that define modern Christianity. All the best books were thrown out and burned very early on, and the rest have been a tool of conservative politics since the Council of Nicea. I will not digress too far into exegesis, but it should be noted that the project questions whether Luke 23:34 is a “liberal corruption of the original”. There’s actually a fair amount of debate on this verse, but to suggest that its inclusion is a liberal corruption makes for a vast, left-wing conspiracy that stretches back to c. 400AD. Surely they’re just begetting around in jest.

Not even the Bible is immune to socialism, its terminology “permeates” the damned thing without justification. Worse, this corruption encourages the social justice movement within Christianity. Jesus was clearly not interested in social justice, he was just a dork who couldn’t make the football team and had to hang around with lepers and whores and acne-ridden outcasts. Would anyone like to place a bet on the conservative bible project discarding Catholicism’s just war argument like it discards the social justice argument?

But this isn’t about people degrading the New International Version’s seventh grade reading level to somewhere in early elementary school. It isn’t about “translating” English into English. It isn’t even about the simple-minded trying to avoid the complex social, political and religious situation in Judea during Jesus’ lifetime. This is much more serious. The debate surrounding this project “would flesh out – and stop – the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian”. If all goes well, the project might prompt the Bible to become part of the curriculum in university Politics Departments, and perhaps the conservative Bible could even be a public school textbook. See where this is going?

Liberals will argue this till the second coming, but the project coordinators aren’t worried about arguing their translations, because the argument will force liberals to read the Bible. That will open up the liberal mind. I’ve read the Bible a few times and look at me. It obviously doesn’t work. I still figure that Jesus looked like Yasser Arafat, was all over Mary Magdalene and that he was probably a revolutionary who associated with terrorists. … Hmm, well now that i think about it, maybe the CBP is right: Jesus might have been a modern, American conservative.

*A “liberal” is someone who “rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons”. Liberals are also socialists, so liberals are self-centered socialists. The Inuit may have a hundred words for snow, but Modern Conservative has none for contradiction.

Since we’re asking rhetorical questions of ill-defined groups of people, i have a few for conservative-land…

Question 1: If we’re to be so afraid of creeping socialism, how come nobody in conservative-land is complaining about the redistribution of individual wealth through the state for the benefit of the military industrial complex? It sure looks like we could cut close to $1 trillion in taxes every year if we weren’t supporting big government Pentagon mismanagement.

Question 2: How come when i visit conservative-land i hear so much about the philosophy of Ayn Rand, but nobody ever talks about her near-militant atheism? She said that the non-existence of God is self evident, and i find it difficult to reconcile her philosophy of extreme individualism with any belief in a higher power. What gives with the picking and the choosing?

Question 3: Why does conservative-land insist on conflating corporatism with capitalism?

Question 4: If conservative-land is so big on free markets, why is it for locking up non-violent participants in the drug market and pouring billions into constraining that market?

Question 5: What exactly are conservatives conserving?

Preemptive Calling of Bullshit: Don’t tell me that it’s about “values” or any derivation of “God, mom and apple pie”.

This was not founded as a Christian nation. It was founded by a bunch of Masons back when Masons weren’t “everyday people” who took care of the gas money for the Shriners’ awesome little cars. They considered themselves heirs to a secret wisdom going back to at least ancient Egypt, and they were serious about it. The only mention of religion in the Constitution is to guard against it, and in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson choose “their Creator” rather than “God”. He could have just written God and everyone would have understood, but he didn’t, did he?

No, don’t give me the Pilgrims bullshit story either. They weren’t persecuted in England. The English got tired of the Puritans running the country like a 17th century, Christian Taliban and took their political power away. The English went back to dancing and celebrating Christmas, and the Puritans left to build their holy land in the New World. They weren’t alone in the wilderness either. Those banks have been fished by Europeans for a long time. The fishermen didn’t help them because the Puritans were self-righteous assholes. Our Masonic founders were trying to protect us from them, deal with it.

I’m pretty sure that darkies, Mexicans, homos, Muslims and commies have moms too.

Apples weren’t wholesome until the temperance movement. Johnny Appleseed was a capitalist paragon, staying two seasons ahead of the settling movement. Not only would he claim the choicest bit of land in a likely location, he would plant apple seeds. Apples don’t come true from seed (every Macintosh you’ve ever eaten is genetically identical to every other Macintosh on the planet). The chances of getting an eating apple from a bag of seeds are about the same as winning the lottery. All those apple trees that Johnny sold were used to make cider, which, with no processing beyond setting up, becomes booze in a short amount of time. Johnny was a drug king-pin and his apples were the scourge of good, Christian society.

So spare me all that. I’m conservative enough to believe that bullshit shouldn’t be worshiped but rather composted and spread on the field to grow more grass to feed the cows that i’ll eat as steaks.

Question 6: My visits to conservative-land have indicated that a good many people their realized that Bush was a fraud during his first term. So tell me, why the fuck did you all vote for him again?

No, you can’t turn that last one around on me. I’ll admit to voting for Obama, but i never would have done it if conservative-land hadn’t nominated a crazy old man with a history of treasonous behavior and health problems backed up by Sarah Palin. What fucking choice did i have?

But i’ll tell you this, with Isis as my witness, barring a massive and unlikely turn by the Obama administration, i won’t be voting for him again. This was the Dems last chance with me, and they blew it.

I don’t speak for liberal-land. I don’t want to speak for liberal-land. I speak for my own cranky, misanthropic damned self. As far as i’m concerned, if you managed to unite mainstream liberal and conservative-lands into one big happy family, it still wouldn’t be able to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel. I’ve been plenty critical of Obama, so you can drop the “partisan attack” cry and answer my questions.

Bonus Question: Exactly when will conservative-land start opting out of all the socialism run amok and quit cashing social security, medicaid, disability checks, etc?

Bonus Question 2: For eight long years we were all told to respect the office of the Presidency while the President’s godless, Trotskyite advisers took away our civil liberties, started wars at every opportunity and used the Constitution to wipe their collective asses. So tell me, how does conservative-land now feel it’s right and proper to argue for military coups, impeachment and assassination?

For a second, let’s set aside any arguments over whether or not Rowling’s work merits such a lofty honor and do something that we simply don’t do enough these days. Let’s dig beneath the surface silliness and examine the deeper implications of what this revelation really means.

Put simply, would you be worried about “encouraging” something you didn’t think was possible? It’s one thing to want to discourage, say, meth use or binge drinking or texting while driving or unprotected sex. Those things are real and they have real, observable consequences. If Rowling’s books were encouraging angel-dust-fueled arson sprees, we’d all be advised to support the former president and his merry band of loco parentis.

But did they see witchcraft as real? (Sure, practitioners of Wicca and other neo-paganisms indulge in the craft, but for a variety of reasons I think we have to assume that’s not what Bush was concerned with. After all, Rowling doesn’t talk about real-world Wicca, and real-world Wiccans don’t fly through the skies of London terrorizing the Mugglery. Whatever the real world’s witches may or may no be up to, it has so far proven very unHollywood-worthy.)

So, do we then conclude that President Bush and his cronies wanted to discourage children from learning how to change each other into rats? From flying around on brooms? From trying to outwit dragons? From teleporting via fireplaces? From sneaking around under invisibility capes?

Certainly these are the sorts of things that we’d want to keep our children away from, I suppose. But while Dubya may have resisted the corrosive effects of education, there are rules of logic and he is not magically immune to them. By definition, one wouldn’t actively discourage children from something that was in fact impossible. Not unless one were absolutely barking, anyway. It might theoretically be dangerous for young children to attack the Xyrxalian Star Fleet on Pegasus-back, for instance, but you don’t recall any Executive admonitions on the subject, do you?

Still, let’s remember, the Bible says that witches are real. Former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin consulted freely with a witchbusting “minister.” The shenanigans at Hogwarts are barely more outlandish than some of what went on in the White House when Nancy Reagan, wife of Bush’s intellectual hero Ronald Reagan, was in residence.

And we’re talking about a man who believes that God commanded him to run for president.

Therefore, I believe we have every reason to believe that our former president did, in fact, view the kinds of powers imagined by Rowling in her best-selling series to be plausible.

Since this is America, we have to respect his faith.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has conditionally reinstated

Last Thursday the Philadelphia Eagles answered the question as to which team would sign a convicted dog-killer (there were 32 possible answers to the question, and “none of the above” wasn’t one of them), and in doing so touched off a long-awaited PR war for the souls of their stunned fans. That the move is this controversial in Philly is instructive, because this is a city that has some of the meanest, most hardcore fans in the sporting world. Imagine if the team had instead been somebody like Seattle or the 49ers.

In any case, this is America, and as such there was never any doubt that Vick would be reinstated and that some team would pay millions to sign him. If Saddam Hussein had been able to break down a defense and get to the rim he wouldn’t be in Hell right now, he’d be in the NBA. So the controversy, such as it is, has nothing to do with anybody being surprised that Vick would find his way back onto the field.

Nonetheless, the argument is raging, and not just in Philadelphia. As I’ve read what people on “both” sides of the question have to say, as I’ve listened to the takes from local and national various sports commentators, as I’ve heard callers to sports talk stations offering their humble (and utterly meaningless) opinions, I have to admit that I’ve gotten a little tired of some of the memes being trotted out to defend Vick, the Eagles and the league. No matter how self-evidently inaccurate or utterly silly a particular idea may be, once it reaches the point of cliché the chances of somebody not repeating it are about the same as a crack addict not honking on the pipe every chance he gets. It’s true that much of what I’m complaining about comes from a noble place and it’s also true that many of those who are getting on my nerves are in fact good people espousing worthy ideals. Still, we have to understand that good intentions don’t guarantee positive results, and sometimes the pursuit of even the best ideals can effect unanticipated and undesired outcomes.

Here are some examples.

Everybody deserves a second chance…

Really? Everybody? Let’s test this. How about Charles Manson? Does he deserve a second chance? If so, can he stay at your hosue when we release him? Did Ted Bundy deserve a second chance, and if so, would you have let him escort your daughter to the prom? How about TIm McVeigh, or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold or Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer?

Okay, okay. What Vick did wasn’t as bad as those guys. I get that. But two things to remember. First, the meme says everybody, not almost everybody, and this ain’t no straw man – I’m quoting lots and lots and lots of people that I’ve heard with my own in ears in just the past month. If we agree, as I suspect we do, that it’s not really everybody, then what we’re literally saying is that not everybody deserves a second chance.

Second, let’s try a scenario involving nobody famous. Say you’re a parent and you have a brother named Fred. And one day you catch Fred molesting your five year-old daughter. Assuming you’re even vaguely human, Fred’s ass is off to jail (assuming you can keep yourself from killing him on the spot).

So one day Fred gets out of jail. Do you let him babysit your daughter? If not, why not? After all, everybody deserves a second chance.

Give me a few minutes and I think I can convince just about anybody out there, even the most charitably minded person alive, that some people don’t deserve a second chance. Once we get to that point, the only thing left is to decide where to draw the line. At a minimum, though, we’ve demonstrated the ridiculousness of ever saying those words again.

He’s paid his debt to society…

We’re a nation of laws and we must, at some level, invest a measure of faith in the collective justice of our system if we’re to live civilly. Otherwise there’s a lynch mob on every corner, a vigilante lurking in every dark alley, and that’s a prescription for chaos. Who will watch the watchers, right?

That said, it’s hard for an intelligent and moral citizen to take the system at its word, to assume that justice is done in each individual case. If a man breaks into a home, rapes and murders a woman, and winds up pleading to a misdemeanor because the prosecutors can’t cobble together enough evidence to get a felony conviction, has the perpetrator paid his debt to society? Has OJ Simpson paid his debt to society? (Remember, he was found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman in a civil case.) Or has he merely paid a fraction of the debt he should have incurred?

The “paid his debt” meme forces us to assume and to assert that the system is always right, and I’ve never yet met anyone who believes that, I don’t think. Yes, the system has run its course, but it’s not hard to find cases where offenses are punished too heavily or too lightly and every day the guilty walk free (and the innocent are sometimes convicted, as well). We do have an obligation to accept the results of the justice system, writ large, though, so while I’m mad as hell that Michael Vick only served a fraction of what I think his crimes merited, I’m not campaigning to throw him back into prison. Given a chance I’ll certainly support much stiffer penalties for dogfighting, but that’s about the future, not the past.

That said, what should I think of people who spout these kinds of clichés when they clearly have no idea of the implications of them? Further, what do we do with those who seem to think that the framers of the Constitution meant that multi-million dollar sports contracts were an inalienable right?

The system has rendered a verdict and exacted a punishment. In one context this means Vick has a right to pursue a life for himself. But in no sense does this entitle him to resume the life of royalty he lived before he was caught.

Forgiveness

Don’t get me wrong – forgiveness is a wonderful thing, taken in moderation. People make mistakes and it wouldn’t be much of a world if we couldn’t forgive the simple fact of human failing. For my part, I’ve made massive mistakes in my life and am the (hopefully worthwhile) person I am today because I’ve been afforded the chance to learn from those errors. By the same token, I have been the victim of the mistakes of others, and have tried to be as generous with my own spirit of forgiveness as possible.

That said, we Americans have some problems where forgiveness is concerned. For starters, not all mistakes are created equal. I do not believe that all things deserve forgiveness (refer to my comments above on Tim McVeigh and your Uncle Fred) and even if I did, I think it would need to be earned by a regimen of penance that was proportional to the offense. Despite what 90% of Americans are required by their religions to say they believe, I don’t think that if we all felt free to voice what we really believe that I’d be in the minority at all.

For example, if you’ve been around long enough you’ve probably had the misfortune to be involved with some form of marital or relationship infidelity. Maybe he/she cheated on you, or maybe you were the cheater. Or both. Or maybe you’ve been lucky enough not to be involved, but you know people who have. In any case, tell me if you have heard some variation of this: “I forgave him/her, but I can’t ever forget.” My guess is that most of us know of a case where person A forgave person B, but nonetheless exiled person B from his/her life forever. Well, is that really forgiveness? If so, then what is the functional difference between forgiveness and can’t-forgiveness? The practical results are the same in both cases – the only distinction is that in one case you repeat the words that you’ve been taught you have to repeat when issuing mandatory forgiveness.

An ever bigger issue has to do with the hypocrisy of forgiveness – in short, the ways we use the certainty of forgiveness to enable all manner of bad behavior. We get a lot of this from those in the ministry, it seems. Jim Bakker. Jimmy Swaggart. Ted Haggard. Henry Lyons. If it isn’t a preacher it’s somebody famous in the news all the time. Right now the happy guys in the spotlight are Louisville hoops coach Rick Pitino and former Senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards. (One wonders if “Catholics in Louisville” would be less forgiving of a coach who knocked up a stranger in public restroom and then paid for her abortion if said coach’s record was in the .500 range.)

The problem here has to do with the concept of intent. It’s one thing to forgive someone who acted improperly in a time of crisis, or who made the wrong choice when the choices were ambiguous, or someone who hurt us accidentally through some form of negligence.

But what about those people who intentionally did that which they knew or believed to be wrong with clear planning and/or forethought? Jim Bakker didn’t realize that he shouldn’t cheat on his wife? Really? All those Catholic priests didn’t know that molesting little boys was bad? Really? Ted Haggard can’t say hello without railing against the abomination of sodomy but he thought it was okay to buy a male hooker for himself? Really? In these kinds of cases there’s a good degree of arrogance associated with even asking for forgiveness, because the regret very clearly isn’t about the action, it’s about getting caught.

To this point, can you actually argue that Michael Vick didn’t realize dogfighting was wrong? If so, then why did he take such effort to conceal it?

We’re not just talking about famous people and preachers here, of course. The certainty of forgiveness plays a big part in the way some of us plan our lives. For instance:

• Monday-Friday: go to work
• Friday night: get loaded, get into a fight
• Saturday night: pick up a hooker
• Sunday: go to confession

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. How many times do you suppose that the aforementioned legion of priests confessed for buggering altar boys? What do you think is the world record for number of consecutive weeks confessing to buggering altar boys?

At some point, we’re not talking about genuine forgiveness, we’re talking about enabling.

Rehabilitation

The purpose of prison – or at least one of the purposes – is rehabilitation. We send people who do bad things to prison so they won’t do them anymore. Studies indicating national recidivism rates of better than two-thirds tell us what we need to know about the rehabilitating effects of incarceration. Still, it’s a nice idea.

But even in the absence of this data, we’re assuming that all things can be fixed. In truth, an extremely detailed study would probably conclude that some kinds of anti-social behaviors are more easily addressed than others. For instance, a small-time mugger who encounters a strong vocational training program in jail is a very different case from a pedophile. A few experts seem to think that pedophilia can be treated, but I don’t believe this is anywhere near a majority opinion.

So if we’re going to talk about rehabilitating Mike Vick, it’s fair to ask about the nature of the crime and its amenability to treatment.

And here’s my biggest problem: what Michael Vick did was simply sub-human. I don’t mean that word in a pejorative, insulting way. Instead, I’m referring to a clear deficit in human empathy. One of our greatest writers, Philip K Dick, in one of his greatest books, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, confronted a world of increasingly human-seeming androids and posed the question: what quality makes us essentially human?

The answer: empathy. In the narrative (upon which the film Blade Runner was based), humans worked hard to cultivate their empathy (which was central to the society’s dominant religious ideology) through the stewardship of animals. A citizen who didn’t have an animal to care for lived a deficient, hollow life, and few sins were more damning than the failure to properly care for one’s animal. In one of the central moments of the novel, one of the replicants kills an animal – something no human could have even contemplated. The lesson is undeniable: only something inhuman could harm an animal.

Dick’s depiction of a strange science fiction near-future was brilliant in its grasp of the fundamental character of our actual humanity, here in the real and now. Empathy makes us human, and there are few measures of empathy that are more revealing than our treatment of animals. Why animals? Because they are helpless. They rely on us.

There’s no absolution here for Michael Vick

We all have our own means of evaluating other people and the moral codes that govern our lives, but for me no bell has ever rung more clearly than the one PK Dick sounds in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? From where I stand, there is no more meaningful and reliable measure of human character than how one treats the innocent and those who cannot take care of themselves. Animals are one case, and a good one. So are children. And if you’re a man, especially a strong one, I know all I need to know about you if you abuse women. You are sub-human.

I have no forgiveness for that, and I’ve never really understand people who do.

So here’s how I see it from the context that I’ve described here. The NFL has said that sub-human behavior doesn’t disqualify you from membership in their highly paid club, and the Philadelphia Eagles have gone a step further and said they’re willing to subsidize those who exhibit sub-human behavior.

You do what your conscience tells you is right. For my part, though, I won’t be spending a penny on the NFL this year. Further, I’ll be paying attention to who advertises with them and making sure I don’t patronize their businesses, either. It’s not much, I know. I don’t have a lot of money and the NFL doesn’t care what people like me think. But my principles must matter to me and I won’t apologize for having a code that isn’t subject to compromise on something as essential as the default qualities of humanity.

Meanwhile, it’s a shame that Rae Carruth isn’t up for parole anytime soon. I’d like to see if the league would at least put its foot down when the victims are human.

by Josh Sternberg

Michael Vick could be the best thing to happen to the American reputation in quite some time. His heinous acts of violence and horrific judgment were undeniably stupid. But the lesson learned is not about dogfighting or about why individuals do stupid things. It’s about the nature of our society.

America can show the world that we are not only a nation of law, but also a society of forgiveness – that someone could commit a crime, spend their time in a rehabilitation facility and come out to be a productive member of society. We all have made mistakes, some larger than others. But in the end, we all subscribe to the belief that if we make amends, the past becomes just that: the past. We hope to learn from our errors so that we don’t repeat the harm we did to others. While there are certain individuals who never reform or show remorse for their actions, a vast majority of the people in our society are able to overcome their indiscretions and become functional members of society. From the highest elected office in the land to the neighbor next door, people have broken laws and rules, but in the end, the American society usually forgives. “Time heals all wounds” is an apt (and oft-used) cliché because it’s true.

We are participating in one of the longest running experiments in human history. When our nation was founded, self-rule was a largely untested concept. Granted, only certain people could vote (white, land-owning males) but that’s not the point (right now). We were the first country to begin with “We, the people” and our experiment in democracy was a long shot to succeed, especially since what our founding fathers knew was based in monarchy or oligarchy and was not a representative republic.

As we’ve progressed as a nation (women’s rights, civil rights, etc…and yes, we still have a long way to go), we’ve also evolved as a species. Maybe not in the Darwinian/genetic case (although there are studies that indicate we, indeed, have) but more from an emotional perspective. What once offended us or was considered taboo is now part of the mainstream. And of course, what offends us now most likely didn’t exist 200+ years ago. Over past 100 years or so, the U.S. has been regarded as a leader – technological, legal, political, and up until the latter part of the 20^th century, moral.

We started to lose our moral compass once we became the first nation in the world to use a weapon of mass destruction. While I would never want to have to be the person to make a decision to kill 200,000 to save 200,000,000, the day we dropped The Bomb was the day our moral footing started to give.

We continued down this path through Vietnam and through the ’80s, where we propped up nations because we were afraid that a political ideology would infect us like a deadly disease. In the ’90s, we ignored atrocities around the world and we all know what’s happened since 9/11. But there has always been a glimmer of hope because when all’s said and done, no matter what our elected leaders do, the resiliency of the American people is too strong to quiet.

Maybe because our nation is deeply rooted (whether we believe or not) in the Judeo/Christian philosophy of treating your neighbors like you would want them to treat you, maybe because we spend our days thinking about how to pay the bills and buy food rather than in debating policy, or maybe because humans can be inherently good, we’ve become a society that is eager to forgive.

We live in a constant state of dialectic tension, which communications theorist Leslie Baxter defines as “a result of the conflicting emotional needs felt by the participants of any relationship, who experience tugs and pulls causing relationships to be in a constant state of flux.” For example, after we graduate college, we want to be independent of our parents, but yet we still ask them for money to pay our rent. We communicate to ease this tension. While this theory is rooted in the philosophical dialectic, I believe it can be incorporated for the masses, too.

We love an underdog; whether on film or on the sports field, an audience loves to root for the little guy. Rocky. Rudy. Bill Clinton. It has become the quintessential American story, right? We love getting behind the underdog and propping them up until they are at the top of their game. And then, for some reason, we love tearing them down. We love seeing the fall as much as we love seeing the rise. But once the fall comes, as it inevitably does, the audience is right there to offer support and help the underdog work his/her way back up. Maybe not all the way to the top, but at least off the bottom.

Now, I’m not arguing that we caused Michael Vick to become a dog killer. That’s on him and it’s something he has to deal with. But we helped push him along this path with our insatiable need to see our heroes fall. We didn’t pull the trigger, but we definitely loaded the gun. But that was in the past.

We may not forget, but we do forgive. And when a person does his time for committing a crime we should embrace forgiveness. Because if we don’t, then our society is a sham. We set up prisons for the idealistic goal of reforming disturbing and disruptive behavior. But we also set up prisons for the realistic goal of keeping bad people away from the good people. If we were to reach for the ideal and achieve the goal of rehabilitation, who are we to condemn someone for past sins against humanity (or in this case, caninity?) So we forgive. Because if we don’t, we are mocking our penal system, which in turn mocks our society’s values and norms.

This is why Michael Vick should be allowed to play in the NFL. He lost two years of his life because he was stupid. But he went through the system that we created and hopefully he makes something of his second chance. Because that’s what we need. We need the fallen idol, now underdog, to rise again or our nation falls, too.

Josh Sternberg founded Sternberg Strategic Communications by using traditional and digital approaches to help clients understand who they are and how to get their messages to the right audiences. Josh has honed his professional communications skills at a couple of NYC firms, including Stanton Crenshaw Communications. Prior to entering the real world, Josh taught several communications courses at William Paterson University and Montclair State University, both in New Jersey. On Twitter, Josh is @josh_sternberg

Q: Let’s say you’re sick with a potentially deadly disease. Who do you want for a doctor?
A: The smartest, most experienced and highly qualified expert in the field.

Q: You’re looking to invest your life savings. Who do you trust to handle your money?
A: The brightest, most agile financial mind I can find.

Q: You’ve been selected to participate in a “private citizens in space” program. Who do you want in charge of building the rocket?
A: The most brilliant and reliable engineers in the nation.

So far, so good. One more.

Q: You live in a time of unimaginable complexity and danger. Who do want to be the leader of the free world?
A: Somebody I can have a beer with. You know, a regular guy, a Joe Sixpack.

It’s said that people tend to get the leaders they deserve, and I can’t imagine better proof than the United States. At present we’re watching as a new president attempts to arm-tackle an array of national political and economic crises of evil supervillain jailbreak proportions, and at this early stage it’s far from clear that he’s Rushmore-bound.

• He may or may not get health care reform passed, and if he does it may or may not be as comprehensive as the programs pursued by previous arch-progressives Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
• He may or may not bog us down in a vastly expanded quagmire in Afghanistan, although at present only an idiot would bet on him meeting his campaign promises regarding getting the heck out of Iraq.
• He may or may not decide to honor the pledges he made to the gay community.
• He may or may not spearhead a green revolution that saves the species from itself.
• And his economic policies may boost us to new, unprecedented levels of universal prosperity. Or they may plummet us nards-first into a meat grinder of a global recession so epic it will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in the Hamptons.

So the jury is still out on Mr. Obama. But… While past performance is no guarantee of future results, there’s also that thing about those who don’t understand history being doomed to repeat it. And America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza. I’d love to be wrong, but let’s be honest. An indicator that can pick a loser 100% of the time is every bit as valuable to the shrewd investor as one that always picks the winner, and the Electoral College is as reliable a Finger of Doom as the world has ever seen.

Let’s review, shall we?

George W. Bush: Worst president ever? Dumbest president ever? Hard to say for certain, although put me down for “hell, yes.” The nation apparently elected a string of semi-housebroken wombats in the 1800s, and contemporary polling feels obliged, in the name of “balance,” to humor the estimations of conservative “scholars” who rate him the sixth-best ever. For my money, that opinion alone is sufficient for the credentialing institution to revoke the PhD, but such is the price we pay for the privilege of living in an society that not only tolerates fools gladly, it gives them television shows.

Bill Clinton: In so many ways, Clinton was the archetypal president of our age. He was the distilled, undiluted essence of the modern political animal. He was like everything in Washington, only moreso. And I don’t mean that in the good way.

Bubba may not be the man who invented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, but he was damned sure the one who established it as the only wing that mattered. The irony, of course, was that he was reviled by the GOP. I’ve always wondered if the source of that rage was that Clinton was a better Republican than they were.

In addition, he cheapened the office at every turn: whether renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidder, pardoning Marc Rich or “hiking the Appalachian Trail” like mink freebasing Viagra, it seemed as though his every action left us feeling the need for a shower. From the poor house to the penthouse to the whore house, we’ve never seen anything like him. God willing, we never will again.

George HW Bush: It’s still hard to fathom how this mealy-mouthed little wimp stumbled into the White House. All the Democrats had to do in 1988 was find a candidate with a pulse. Instead, they trotted out Mike Dukakis, a man with all the charisma and passion of an accountant on a phenobarbital drip.

Bush the Elder was the latest incarnation of an established and thoroughly corrupt dynasty, and between him and his fuckwit kids there is no better argument, could be no better argument, in favor of a 100% inheritance tax. If they’d had to earn anything on their own merit their only entree into a country club would be as assistant assistant assistant greenskeepers reporting to Carl Spackler at Bushwood.

Ronald Reagan: Wow. Where to start. Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan, in writing about where television was taking the culture, predicted Reagan in terms so accurate that you’d think you were reading a history instead of a precognition. The only thing missing was the name and home address. The failing in McLuhan’s analysis, if there was one, was this: as cynical as he was, the reality turned out to be even worse than he feared.

Ronnie was as anti-intellectual a leader as we could have imagined prior to Dubya. A man who somehow managed to remain immensely popular despite the fact that most Americans disagreed with his policies. One of the most corrupt collections of advisors, staffers and appointees in history. And the man who represented the grand triumph of years and years of scheming by wealthy conservatives bent on by god rolling the rich-poor gap back to feudal levels. An intellectually void, amoral cesspool of a human being who will nonetheless go down as one of our “great” presidents.

Jimmy Carter: Carter has the distinction of being one of the very few politicians that Hunter Thompson ever said anything nice about, and his record since leaving the White House has made clear what an outstanding statesman and humanitarian Carter really is. History will not mark him down as the most adept practitioner of the presidential arts, however, and for those who bemoan the erosion of the line between church and state, let’s remember just how very publicly Baptist Jimmy was. Now, thanks in part to him, we’ll never get the smell of the fundamentalists out of the furniture. (Which reminds me – Phish is playing four dates at Red Rocks, so those of us who live in downtown Denver are hoping the wind isn’t blowing straight west-to-east for the next few days.)

Gerald Ford: Nice enough guy, seemed like. For a politician and all. But he wasn’t ever elected.

Richard Nixon: Please tell me we don’t really need to talk about this one.

Lyndon Johnson: Ever heard of Vietnam? It’s hard to recall the last time somebody took an idea so bad and managed to make it even worse. He does get credit for important civil rights legislation, at least.

Still, in the final analysis he was a president from Texas with a lust for illicit, unwinnable wars. If that reminds you of somebody else, don’t blame me. I’m just reporting the facts.

John F. Kennedy: He invaded Cuba, and once the troops started landing he changed his mind. He nearly got us into a hot nukular shooting war. Then there was that Vietnam thing – he and LBJ can share this honor. Marilyn Monroe was either a plus or a minus, depending on where you stand with respect to the marital infidelity issue.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved his legacy was death. Had he lived to serve out his term(s) he’d be judged today based on his record, which falls somewhat short of the legend.

So, when was the last time America elected a president it could be proud of? By today’s standards Ike isn’t looking bad at all, and his two predecessors, FDR and Truman, also score high marks.

If you look at that chart in the link above, it seems like maybe the country’s ability to elect somebody half decent runs in cycles.

Let’s hope that’s the case, and that the wheel is turning back in our direction. Because damn, America is due.

I’m referring, of course, to the “Lone Wolf” Flu. It’s precisely the sort of bug we’d expect to strike conservative talk show hosts across the nation – and it has – but lately it’s turned up in what were once considered to be some of the most objective and sanitary environments in the American media landscape.

I’ll stop torturing the metaphor now, lest it seem like I’m treating the subject too lightly. Instead, let’s examine a couple of news items that do considerable damage to the truth of our domestic terror problem. First, a June 13 AP story bylined by Devlin Barrett and Eileen Sullivan came across the wires with this headline: “Shootings show threat of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.” And yesterday the Wall St. Journal joined in with “FBI Seeks to Target Lone Extremists,” which explained that “[l]one-wolf offenders continue to be of great concern to law enforcement.”

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the terrorists they’re characterizing as “lone wolves” are no such thing. Or, if they are, then the working definition of “lone wolf” is so badly broken that it’s beyond fixing. That phrase asks us to accept that killers like James von Brunn and Scott Roeder (and Eric Rudolph and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and James Kopp and Jim David Adkisson) get to the point of politically motivated homicide all by themselves. It asks us to accept that these people have no context, no community, no ideological fellow-travelers whipping them on.

Which is bunk. David Neiwert has written a couple of pieces since the latest fatal case cropped up in the Holocaust Museum several days ago. As he explained on Friday, “these are not ‘isolated incidents’.”

As Potok explains, the “lone wolf” concept was popularized in the late 1980s by an Aryan Nations leader named Louis Beam as an extension of his strategy of “leaderless resistance.” One white supremacist, a fellow named Alex Curtis, even went so far as to develop a “point system” for lone wolves.

A 2003 piece by Jessica Stern in Foreign Affairs described how even Al Qaeda was finding the concept useful. And she explains its origins:

The idea was popularized by Louis Beam, the self-described ambassador-at-large, staff propagandist, and “computer terrorist to the Chosen” for Aryan Nations, an American neo-Nazi group. Beam writes that hierarchical organization is extremely dangerous for insurgents, especially in “technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure, revealing its chain of command.” In leaderless organizations, however, “individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization.” Leaders do not issue orders or pay operatives; instead, they inspire small cells or individuals to take action on their own initiative.

The strategy was also inspired by at least one “lone wolf” shooter: Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist sniper who in the late 1970s and early 1980s killed as many as 20 people — mostly mixed-race couples — on a serial-murder spree, and attempted to assassinate both Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt. (Franklin was also the inspiration for William Pierce’s Hunter, the follow-up novel to The Turner Diaries.)

As it turns out, we know a bit about these murderers, and the facts help us paint a picture of wolves who are anything but lonely.

• Buford was a member of the Aryan Nation.
• Smith was a member of the white supremacist Creativity Movement.
• Kopp was a member of the anti-abortionist Lambs of Christ.
• Rudolph isn’t tied to a specific hate group, but seems to have had ample support from a variety of sources.
• Adkisson was a fan of hate-talkers Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Bill O’Reilly.
• Roeder was either a member of or had ties to a variety of right-wing organizations, including the Montana Freemen, the Sovereign Citizen Movement, the Army of God and Operation Rescue.

Like all these other “lone wolves,” von Brunn was hardly an island, either.

The conclusion we’ve all hopefully reached about “lone wolf” terrorists is this: just because the rest of the pack isn’t physically present doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Sara Robinson summed it up nicely:

The assassins themselves are ratting you out. They’re telling us, straight up, that they were inspired to act by the hate radio talkers that you empowered — one of whom is now the de facto head of the Republican party. They got it from media outlets owned by your biggest donors. They got it from bloggers who receive daily talking points faxed in from the GOP. They got it from activists representing causes that would have never become causes in the first place if the issues hadn’t been politically expedient for you.

Beyond that: You’ve already admitted your own complicity. When the Department of Homeland Security expressed their worries about right- wing extremist violence last April, practically every conservative pundit in the country went into a righteous fit. DHS never named anyone directly, so it was astonishing how many of you on the right were so quick to step up and claim that that memo was slandering you, personally and collectively. Since you were so eager to claim that that memo was all about you, now that the violence has come to pass, we’re well justified in holding you to that.

The Press as Typhoid Mary

Back to the AP story, which unfortunately provides a warm, nutrient-rich pool in which the “lone wolf” meme can replicate with abandon. In a number of respects, it might be argued that the reporters and editors toe the journalistic line in ways that are more than defensible. The term is embedded in quotation marks in the header and in the first occurence in the body of the story. They interview and dutifully quote experts, and we have no reason to believe that FBI officials have any particular ideological axe to grind with their use of the term.

The WSJ story, authored by Gary Fields and Evan Perez, differs from the AP article primarily in the fact that it doesn’t even feel a need for quotation marks.

Despite the insight each story provides into the FBI’s attempts to head off these kinds of “isolated” attacks, I find myself wanting more in the way of perspective from the reporters. A lot more. As the FBI frames the issue, a “lone wolf” crime is apparently defined in opposition to one “planned by a trained terrorist network.” This taxonomy is probably useful in some contexts, but here it lacks a certain … granularity. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center spokesman quoted by the AP privileges the term.

In the end, the reader comes away with the idea that these killers are, as a matter of fact, solitary agents. Both agencies lend credence to this misinformation by failing to challenge the underlying factual inaccuracy, and in doing so they inadvertently serve the cause of the “leaderless resistance.“ When our most reliable news institutions say that these incidents are isolated, that they’re not part of a larger movement, that there’s no collective organization behind the attacks, it provides cover for a thriving, blood-thirsty community of wolves.

Put a little more aggressively, we might argue that such weak reportage provides aid and comfort for terrorists. No, that’s not a terribly civil accusation, and I’m certainly not arguing that Fields, Perez, Barrett, Sullivan or their editors are in some way intending to promote or enable the actions of these freak-right loons. Nonetheless, their failure to fully and clearly identify the context in which these actions occurred has an effect – intended or not.

If their hesitance to pull that particular trigger is somehow related to a concern over the appearance of bias (far more likely with the AP than the WSJ, I’d think), I’d offer two responses. First, the Homeland Security report that stressed the threat of homegrown right-wing terror was generated by the Bush Administration. Second, “balance” is never an excuse to sidestep the truth.

If we’re going to effectively address the causes of our recent domestic terror epidemic the Lone Wolf Flu must be eradicated. Step one: our mainstream media has to stop spreading the virus.

______________

Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his church this morning. According to the New York Times:

Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

He had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. In the latest such effort, in March, Dr. Tiller was acquitted of charges that he had performed late-term abortions that violated state law.

The shooting occurred at around 10 a.m. (Central time) at Reformation Lutheran Church on the city’s East Side, Dr. Tiller’s regular church.

MSNBC’s Web site is reporting that authorities have a suspect in custody, although no details are yet available.

Of course, we’re not a breaking news site and that’s not what this story is about. Instead, let’s speculate a bit.

Here’s the wager: the murderer will turn out to be a right-wing Christian terrorist. I’ll also offer a side bet: his media consumption includes the like of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly and/or Glenn Beck.

If I’m wrong, check this space. I’ll gladly post an update noting my mistake. But as of this moment, would you bet against me?

Let’s hypothesize that I’m right for a second. What does it mean? Well, in the short term it probably means nothing for the doctor, his family, colleagues and friends. Whatever the reason, he’s dead, and tragically so, and at times like this the what probably means a whole lot more than the why.

From a big-picture perspective, though, from the perspective of the culture war that has claimed another victim, the slobberingly ignorant wide-right nutjobs have given the cause of Progress another martyr, and in doing so have made the case against their reactionary jihad a little clearer than it was before. Even in a nation as unrelentingly bassackwards as the US, the tide of enlightenment is slowly but surely washing them and their violent, Stone Age ideology away. The repudiation of their 8,000 year-old code of ethics in the last election may well make them more dangerous for a time, but with each passing day more and more mainline Americans are standing and looking them dead in the eye, at last seeing them for what they are.

Your gutless thugs may assassinate a librul or two in church every now and again, especially if you’re sneaky enough to catch them unawares. You may win a school board battle or two. But the war? The war is lost. It’s not about if, merely when.

I won’t bother with the arguments over why the Jesus’s Jihadis are doing what they’re doing. We know those details,  and our friend Sara Robinson predicted this very sort of terrorism less than a week ago. Besides, I’ve already had my say on why we’re not having an honest conversation on abortion itself, and so far there’s been no evidence whatsoever suggesting that I’m wrong.

All I’ll do is say, with 100% certainty, that if I’m right about what happened this morning in Wichita, our wild-eyed war god-worshiping right wing has done little more than pound another nail into its own coffin.

UPDATE 1: Operation Rescue is apparently making the same assumptions that I am, offering a faux-condemnation of the assassination:

The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, which has led numerous demonstrations at Tiller’s clinic, condemned the shooting as a “cowardly act.”

“Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice,” the group said in a statement. It offered its prayers for Tiller’s family, “that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

Why would I question the sincerity of the statement, you ask?

On its Web site, Operation Rescue refers to Tiller as a “monster” who has “been able to get away with murder.” And Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who is no longer affiliated with the group, called Tiller “a mass murderer.”

Find the dumbest mob possible, whip them into a lather, point them at Satan’s personal emissary on Earth, and then play innocent when the predicatble happens.

Sure, why not.

UPDATE 2: Hmmm. This isn’t officially confirmed, but if it proves to be true … well, everything I said above, times 10.

KMBC-TV in Kansas City reported that the suspect had a post-it note with the phone number of anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in his car, however that group issued a statement this morning denouncing the shooting.

Part three of a series.

In the days following the murders at Columbine High School I visited the school and the grounds of Clement Park. Those walks produced this piece, which was originally published ten years ago today.

We have learned a great deal about the  events that took place at Columbine since  this essay was written (for instance, we now know that the  “Cassie Said Yes” story never actually happened,  and we also know that the whole “Trenchcoat Mafia”  thing was also a media-propagated fiction). But it seemed to me that going back  and revising to account for new information would damage the  fabric of what I wrote in late April and early May of 1999.  I have therefore elected to leave the factual inaccuracies  in place. I do, however, note the spots containing errors with an asterisk (*).

Salon.com and Westword.com provide as thorough and accurate  a picture as we are ever likely to have of the shootings and  the aftermath, and I recommend them highly.

_________________

Sunday, May 2, 1999

It won’t stop raining, and nobody seems to care.

I went to Columbine twice this week. On Wednesday I was simply overwhelmed – I have never seen anything like the rambling memorial site that has spread across the grounds of the high school and the adjacent Clement Park, never imagined anything like it. There was no sense of scale, of proportion – there exists no frame of reference with which to make sense of this deluge of grief. But I feel compelled to try describing what I saw, the pain, the small expressions of faith for the future, this physical manifestation of a community’s psychic anguish. So I returned yesterday, Saturday, hoping vainly for perspective where none appears possible.

As you turn east off Wadsworth and drive down Bowles the park and school grounds lie to your right. The park features picnic space and fields for football, lacrosse, soccer, and softball. Fields for small children to run and play in. Fields to watch the sun set behind the Front Range of the Rockies just a few unobstructed miles to the west. Whatever permanent monument they eventually erect here will never reflect how thoroughly and ironically public Clement Park has become. We sometimes lament how our nation has lost all sense of itself as a community, has forgotten what it is to have a town square, a shared space that symbolizes the communal spirit.

Well, here it is.

At the west end of the park, beside an athletic field, there’s a small latticework shrine featuring a lacrosse helmet and two crossed sticks mounted over a bucket of flowers. On one side there’s a small laminated sign with a prayer that reads, in part, “Dear God, we have been abused and it has wounded our souls. Our memories and thoughts, Dear Lord, are full of horror and we are powerless to heal them.” The other sign reads, “When God would educate a mans (sic) and compels him to learn better lessons he sends him to school to the necessities rather than the graces that by knowing all suffering he may know also the eternal consolation.”

Just west of the site where Vice President Gore laid a bouquet last Sunday is a tent dominated by a tribute to Cassie Bernall, the young woman whom the gunman asked,”Do you believe in God?” with information about how to contribute to the Cassie Bernall Fund rest on a table.* Notes, posters, and banners offer condolences and solidarity from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Marin County, California, and an elementary school in Wallace, North Carolina.

A major memorial has grown up around the flowers Gore placed, and a tent has been erected to protect the site from the elements. Inside lies a carpet of flowers – bouquets, formal arrangements, loose cuts, potted; a profusion of handmade cards, posters, placards, most handwritten and decorated, but few displaying anything like professional art or design skills and none that I saw were store-bought; a large poster from the people of Southern Oregon, who last year at Thurston High School came to know firsthand the pain we in Colorado are now grappling with; in front of this stands a silver and blue football goalpost – the crossbar is hung with a mobile featuring strings of paper angels; several stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears; balloons – some with sympathy messages, others in bouquets of blue and white; candles – some plain and some bearing Christian imagery; a blue baseball cap with a red and white cross; crosses, and more crosses. These artifacts – flowers, cards, posters, crosses, and hundreds, if not thousands, of stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears – make up the bulk of what people have brought and left at Columbine.

As you walk the hundred yards or so to the central memorial area the trees by the sidewalk are wrapped with blue and silver ribbons and some are draped with paper prayer chains. These were put here by a school district somewhere in the Midwest, and each link was made by a different student. Originally at least one chain hung from each tree, but to preserve them against the weather most have now been moved inside a tent down the street. Most of the trees in the park are wrapped with blue ribbons at the least; many have flowers laid beneath them and other remembrances hung from their branches. On one hangs a blue rabbit’s foot.

Just before you reach the main memorial area there’s a light blue wooden A-frame shrine about four feet tall and six feet wide dedicated to Cassie Bernall. It bears pictures of her and handwritten messages, as well as balloons and flowers. On the ground at one end is a one foot by one foot black board lettered in gold calligraphy: “I promise that from this day forth I will do everything in my power to insure that such a thing as this will never happen again. I will change my lifestyle and be more vocal and assertive in my beliefs.”

Some shrines are dedicated to all the dead, and others to individuals, these probably placed by the victim’s friends. As you turn into the central memorial area the first thing you come to is an elaborate tribute to Dave Sanders, the lone faculty member killed and a man who died trying to save student lives. This display features pictures of Sanders coaching, with his family, his players and students; two Columbine softball jerseys and a trophy; a pair of running shoes hangs from a tree; a soccer ball and a basketball lie loose among the flowers. The pile of flowers and stuffed animals threatens to swallow the whole display.

Some local residents went to Clement Park even as the tragedy was still unfolding and erected a series of lattices where people could place flowers. This spot has become the centerpiece of the memorial site, and eleven days later these lattices have been overtaken and literally buried beneath the artifacts of grief. I’m hard put to describe it, really. The central area around the lattices is probably thirty yards by fifteen, roughly oval. It’s bordered by row after row of displays, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at you might think yourself at some sort of carnival. Park officials have covered the ground here and in other heavy traffic areas with straw, adding to midway effect. More flowers, more teddy bears, more posters than you can possibly count, and more unconventional tributes stand in defiance of whatever hate drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to want to destroy an entire school and all those in it. A volleyball lies before a sign placed by Columbine alumni. Nearby a baseball rests amid the flowers. There are also American flags, although fewer than you might expect.

Seemingly every school in the Denver Metro area has placed a memorial of some sort – whether a simple posterboard project from a kindergarten class or something more elaborate from a neighboring/rival high school, it’s clear that this attack is being taken very personally by students no matter where they are.

There are condolences from beyond the metro area, too. In addition to the tributes from Oregon, North Carolina, Marin County, and Pennsylvania, people in many other places have sent their thoughts and prayers: besides condolences from cities across Colorado, there are tributes from Maui; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Lynchburg, Virginia; Allan, Texas; Gage, Oklahoma; Pace, Florida, and Palm Springs, California. A blue banner hangs between two trees: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you, from the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana.” A poster and letter have been sent from Belvidere High School in Illinois, where on April 21, 1967, a tornado struck the school, claiming the lives of 17 students. On the news yesterday morning they interviewed a woman who had flown here as an emissary from her church in Franklin, Tennessee. There are probably commemorations from other communities, as well – it’s easy to miss things here. I think my fellow Coloradans wouldn’t mind me speaking for them in saying thank you to the citizens of these communities.

Southeast of this area several sets of wind chimes hang from a tree, ringing in the rain and the light wind. The chimes are in the shapes of butterflies, doves, and a couple of birdhouses. A young man who looks to be in his late teens is wandering around handing out free flowers – I get a bouquet with carnations and columbines.

A sign that especially caught my attention was originally nestled in one corner, and it has now been moved under a tent near the street. On a white sheet folded in half, written in black magic marker, is a crudely drawn message that may be among the most important for a community trying to heal. In big letters: “Ours pains and sorrows for the victims of CHS.” In smaller letters across the bottom: “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers.” Hanging just to the top and right of this sign is a print of Warner Sallman’s famous portrait of Jesus, beatifically looking toward Heaven.

You may have read in the papers or heard reporters on CNN talk about Rachel Scott’s car. But even knowing it was there, it still took me a few second to realize what I was seeing. When it became apparent that Scott might be a victim, her friends found her car in the parking lot and began placing flowers on it. Since then the red Acura has been buried beneath flowers, cards, teddy bears…. I only know it’s an Acura from news reports – you can’t really tell by looking at it. The driver’s side especially is almost completely covered by plastic. The passenger side isn’t quite so concealed, though, and I’m startled by the things we sometimes notice in times of overwhelming sorrow. Rachel needed new tires. The right front is almost bald. Another thing – lying on the bed of flowers by the driver’s-side door between three teddy bears is a loose dollar bill.

A few feet away John Tomlin’s truck, a brown-gold Chevy beater, has also become an altar. John liked to off-road in the truck – a popular diversion here in the high country – but now it’s hard to imagine it ever moving again. Vehicles are about as secular as objects get in our culture, but in the wake of this tragedy these two have been invested with a profound aura of consecration. Relocating them will seem like graverobbing.

Adjacent to this lot is the portable satellite dish farm where all the news outlets have their trucks and trailers and uplinks. The memorial area is braced on one end (the end nearest the school) by a few media tents, and one crew was preparing to tape as we walked past on Wednesday. A reporter for the Today Show was recording a segment a few feet away. Despite the presence of the implements of media, the area remains quite hushed. When people talk, they tend to whisper. They don’t look each other in the eye as they pass so much – if they’re like me, they don’t want to see their own numbness reflected back at them.

Still more remembrances have been placed closer to the school itself. The fences of the tennis complex, two sets of three or four adjacent courts each, have become walls of posters and banners. This is where the members of the San Jose Sharks, in town for their playoff series with the Avalanche, placed their banner on Friday – it’s about fifty feet long and is signed by literally thousands of fans: “To the community of Littleton, Colorado – Our hearts and our prayers are with you.” The Sharks are wearing CHS emblems on their helmets for this series.

Other signs are placed by individuals, by towns and schools, by a sorority from the University of Colorado. And here, a new symbol – there are hundreds of angels and thousands of bears, but hanging on the fence are two bears with angel wings. Another sign notes the connection between Columbine, Oklahoma City, Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield: “As the world watched our lives were forever changed.” On Saturday the baseball team from nearby Arvada West High School is out in full uniform touring the grounds.

Two Hills

If you watched the memorial service on CNN last Sunday you saw the hill in the distance where students were gathering. It’s actually two hills, and as you walk across the field toward them you pass several other shrines – one, at the corner of a recreation football/lacrosse field, is fairly large, maybe ten feet by fifteen, a growing mound of flowers and posters and bears. By Saturday it had been covered by a tent. Cards and tributes hang from trees. There’s a four-field softball complex between the main memorial area and the hills, and on the outside of one of the center field fences another teddy bear sits with two or three cards. A smaller bear, wearing a sweater, hangs on the fence, and there’s a piece of paper tucked under the sweater. I pull it out and unfold it. In blue and pink marker it simply says, “We care.” If you walk around a bit you find these small, private remembrances all over the place – here a loose bouquet of flowers lying in the grass with no explanation at all, there a card or a balloon or a bear, maybe indicating a mourner whose grief found no solace in the company of others.

As I approached the hills on Wednesday it was growing dark and beginning to rain. The skies have been heavy here almost continually since the shootings, but as oppressive as the weather has been there is a sense of rightness about it. On Saturday it rained all day, with temperatures in the 40s. There is only one safe path up the hill now, as the weather and the foot traffic have rendered most of the area treacherous with mud. The grounds crew has paved the main route up the lower hill with straw, and hundreds of people wait in line to view the hilltop memorial. Some make their way up by other paths, slipping and sliding, but enduring nonetheless. Some people take shelter beneath colorful umbrellas. Others, like me, expose themselves to the skies. I can’t speak for anybody else, but there is nothing here I want to shield myself from.

Several days ago fifteen crosses were erected along the ridge of the lower hill by a craftsman from Chicago. Each cross bore the name and picture of one of the dead – thirteen for the victims, and one for each of the killers. People wrote messages on each of the crosses, and many stress love and forgiveness. The message at the top of Klebold’s cross said, “God loved you.”

As you can imagine, the crosses dedicated to Harris and Klebold stood amid some controversy. The cover of Thursday’s Denver Rocky Mountain News featured a photo of two students tearfully facing off with a woman writing “a derogatory message on Dylan Klebold’s cross.” Whatever the woman wrote was conspicuously marked out, as well as whatever was written at the top of Eric Harris’ cross.

I walked from cross to cross, reading what I could in the fading light. As I paused before the monument to Isaiah Shoels, I thought about the irony of a kid who had fought to overcome so much adversity. He worked to overcome a heart condition and his small size (he was just 4′11″) because he wanted to play football, and his family reportedly transferred into the Columbine district because it represented a better and perhaps safer school environment. There he died because he was black and an athlete.* When I returned yesterday, I took a marker with me so I could write Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on Isaiah’s cross: “I have a dream….” But the wood was so wet that the marker wouldn’t write on it. A man behind me, without even asking what I wanted to write, handed me his marker, which he said was waterproof and should work. But the soaked wood resisted this, too. I told myself I’d come back when the weather broke and try again.

I won’t get the chance. On Friday the father of Daniel Rohrbough and some relatives went to the hill and took down the crosses dedicated to Klebold and Harris. Mr. Rohrbough told reporters that it was a simple matter of right and wrong, that people coming to the hill wouldn’t realize they were honoring killers. “I don’t think any thinking person in this country is going to disagree with me,” he said.

Two small makeshift crosses were quickly erected in the place of the ones the Rohrbough family removed, and at the top of each was written “Start to forgive.”

Then, early this morning, the Chicago man who built and placed the 15 crosses originally came and took them all down. CNN captured them being loaded in the back of a pickup truck and driven away, with all the remembrances that had been hung on them still dangling from the crosspieces. He did not speak to reporters, and no reasons were given.

Thirteen seedlings have appeared on the far hill – the taller of the two – since Wednesday. A marker near the pinnacle reads: “These 13 burr oak trees have been planted on this hill as a memorial, one for each special person who had their life taken. I will pray for each family every day. – Scott.”

At the crest is yet another memorial site. At one end a variety of Christian ornamentation hangs from a crude wooden cross. I’m struck, as I have been for days, by how powerful a moment this tragedy has been for Christianity. A bit of context – I grew up Southern Baptist but left the church in my early 20s. I never rejected the lessons I learned growing up, but the institution of the church seemed to have nothing to do with morality or spirituality any more. Now I consider myself a neo-pagan, although that term is fairly broad as I use it, and a friend once listened to me for a few minutes and concluded that I was a “Jungian” pagan. I’m fortunate to have Christian friends and family who see through the trappings and accept the person underneath.

I offer this information only to explain why I feel somewhat left out by the healing process. The moral authority here has been usurped by Christianity – at the local level the churches have been the center of most gatherings, and nationally our Vice President shared the stage with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the famous Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. In the entirety of the memorial sprawl, which contains hundreds of thousands of individual expressions of mourning, I found precisely one overtly non-Christian religious symbol – a small Star of David on a sign placed by the Montessori School. There is another spot where I encounter sun and moon symbols often employed by neo-pagans. The largest sun ornament is attended by what I believe are Norse runes, but the symbols hang from a cross.

The Grief of Other Tribes

I don’t make these observations to diminish people’s faith – on the contrary, while I’m not a Christian, I have taken comfort in the fact that the community has a belief system which can be called on in a time of crisis to lend support and provide meaning.

But non-Christians are in pain, too, and as I faced the wooden cross on that hill Wednesday I wanted to offer some gesture in my own spiritual language, my own symbology. I was wearing my pentagram, a symbol which for pagans symbolizes the sanctity of the natural world and the human spirit (and which is all-too-often mis-associated with Satanism), and wanted more than anything to hang a symbol of my spirituality alongside those of the Christians in my community as a statement of unity.

But I feared the gesture would be misconstrued by many, if not most, visitors to the hill, and in such a time of pain I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would intrude upon the grieving of others. What if somebody mistakenly took it to be a Satanic cult mocking their sorrow? So I was forced to a compromise. I was also wearing a Celtic cross, an ancient pagan symbol often taken by Christians as reflecting their faith (since it’s a cross, after all), and I placed that on the wooden crosspiece amidst rosary beads, angels, and more crosses. The crosspiece itself is plastered with a bumpersticker reading “No Jesus No Peace, Know Jesus Know Peace.”

But a bridge has to be built between the normal and the marginalized. Christianity is our dominant religion, but there must be a space for those who find spiritual truth in other places, just as our schools must make room for kids who dress differently and don’t fit into the accepted idea of what normal is. On Saturday I decided to take a chance, and I hope my gesture can be accepted in the spirit it was intended. A small white board sits on the ground beside the “trench coat” sign I described earlier. I brought a marker with me, and I knelt in the mud and wrote this: “My tribe grieves with our Christian brothers and sisters. We may walk different paths, but we are all children of the divine. We love you.” I signed it with my online handle/craft name, Road Angel, and drew a small pentagram.

I can manage my own spirituality well enough, but can’t help noticing that even in the wake of a crime which resulted in at least small part from the failure of conventional society to respect those who are different, my own mode of expression was limited and prescribed by the dominant belief system. I thought back to whoever placed the sign saying that all people who wear trench coats aren’t killers – we praise individualism and tell our kids to be themselves, not to bow to peer pressure, to express their uniqueness, etc. But identity is negotiated, and self-image often fights a losing battle with the perceptions of the larger community. And now these children, these outcasts, must prepare to face people who are pledging to “be more vocal and assertive” about their beliefs.

I said earlier that there were shrines to individual victims, and the clear heroine of the tragedy, if number of tributes is a fair indicator, was Cassie Bernall. When the gunman asked, “Do you believe in God,” her affirmative reply was her death sentence, but it was also her entree into immortality in the Christian community. She died in what most Christians would see as the most noble way possible, as a martyr affirming God, and the Rev. Graham assured us Sunday that she was ushered directly into the presence of the Lord for her faith.

Cassie Bernall was indeed a heroine, even for those of us who don’t count ourselves as Christian, because these days we so rarely find somebody whose courage is genuine enough that they will die for their convictions. If I were faced with such a moment, I hope I’d have her bravery, but we never really know until the barrel rests against our heads, do we?

Again, however, there’s an element to the story that disturbs me. A major news outlet reported that for a time Cassie was involved with witchcraft and paganism (although what this means precisely is unclear). She was apparently locked in her room for a few days and was then sent by her parents to a Christian “boot-camp” where she rediscovered Jesus.

If this is an accurate accounting, then we have another dire example of the rage to conformity plaguing our culture. No matter how productive we might see the result as being, no matter how happy and loving Cassie Bernall turned out, the essential dynamic remains. The message is clear: we’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure our kids don’t become like those trenchcoat/goth/Satanic/loser/geek/punk outcasts. Different. Bad. We need to understand that the pressure that brought Cassie back to Christianity is the same pressure that drives other youths to less noble ends.

Are Our Arms Really Open?

When I started writing this I don’t think I had a point, but maybe I have come to one through remembering what I saw. If I have, this is it: in this time of pain and grieving, we have to insure that it never happens again, but perhaps our best-intentioned efforts are doomed to failure.

The community has been hit harder by these events than anything I have ever seen with my own eyes before, although tragedies of equal or greater magnitude happen somewhere in the world on a frighteningly routine basis. Before last Tuesday I was, like so many other residents of the Denver Metro area, somebody who lived here, but who wasn’t from here. I’m a North Carolinian by birth and have always considered myself a Southerner. But as I grappled to understand why this tragedy hurt me so deeply and so personally, I finally came to understand that somewhere along the way this has become home. I wasn’t an outsider looking in anymore – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have torn my community.

So when I look at the imperative above – make sure it never happens again – I can’t help worrying that my community is missing something important. If the culture’s failure to accept differences in others contributed to this deathlust, as the killers said it did in their diaries, then how can we help being concerned when our community is uniting around messages and images of conformity instead of diversity? Somebody in a trench coat reached out with that sign – “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers” – but I haven’t seen the community of normalcy reaching back. The media coverage and the church services (some of which were televised here) have celebrated the All-American and the Christian, and in doing so they provide a powerful balm to people in need. But the others – the outcasts, the trenchcoats, the goths, the geeks – all those who fail to fit the conventional ideal, they were ignored, or worse, scapegoated, and so an open wound in our culture continues to seep.

These kids probably don’t really want to join the church youth group. But how much good it might do if they knew that the church youth group wanted them, wanted them as they are, and was willing to love and accept the person beneath the black clothing, the person hiding behind the pale makeup, the person who isn’t very good at sports, the person who finds solace in dark and tortured music, the person whose most rewarding moments of personal acceptance come in the imaginary triumphs of his or her role-playing game characters. How much good it would do for them to know that they don’t have to buy several hundred dollars worth of Nike and Gap clothing to be validated as human beings.

And if you believe that church youth groups aren’t like that, I should explain that a large part of why I walked away from the Christian church was that all the youth groups I was associated with during the first twenty years of my life were even more cliquish and less tolerant of those who were different, new, or simply uncool than my high school was.

Time will tell. But in this issue we may have an answer to the question on everybody’s lips, a question you see repeated over and over in the cards and posters littering Clement Park: “Why?”

If Cassie Bernall becomes an icon whose memory stands for inclusion, we will have made her death and those of her classmates meaningful beyond measure, and we will at least know that their tragic passing was not in vain.

But if, in the aftermath of Columbine, we fail to understand and bridge the gulf between “normal” and “outcast” then we will be doomed to continue asking why as hate and rage and loathing lay their claim on other schools in other communities around our nation.

B&W photography by Heather Butler.

Previously

• The enduring lessons of Columbine
• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
  

I always marveled at how some of my friends worshiped the writing of Orson Scott Card. Maybe, I thought, it’s because we’re North Carolinians and he’s from Greensboro. From my perspective he was nothing special, at best, and has in the last couple of decades evolved into perhaps America’s most overrated science fiction author. Ender’s Game was prescient in its way – in a world where weaponry is so technologized that war is a video game, of course kids can be uber-warriors. But when the boy is made into some kind of equally uber moralist and philosopher (or whatever the hell Speaker for the Dead was about) I smelled the pungent aroma of self-indulgence that so often attends SF writers of a certain stripe.

The Alvin Maker series was even less bearable. We were doing fine in Seventh Son, clipping through an interesting enough little story (assuming you could get past the inexplicably patronizing treatment of Native American names) and then – the damnedest what the fuck passage in all of known literature. Those of you who have read the book will recall the scene I’m talking about – the quilt sequence – and those of you who haven’t should read the book just to say you’ve been there.

At this point it was clear that Card was too goddamned full of himself by half and that the only reason the rest of us existed was so he’d have people to be more clever than.

Until today, however, I thought Card was merely a badly overrated writer. Now, though, we’ve learned that he favors criminalizing homosexuality and overthrowing any government that tolerates teh faggots. Witness, if you would:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books…to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens.

And:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

His words, not mine.

In a way this is validating for me. I knew there was something a little wrong with the boy, but couldn’t fully articulate what it was based on his masturbatory fictional style alone.

It will be interesting to see how his fans react. I personally have some literary heroes with political skeletonry in their closet (Eliot comes to mind) and cognitive dissonance loves company…

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys.

We’ve learned a lot over the past decade, though, and as we mark the tenth anniversary of Columbine, let’s begin by recounting three important lessons.

1: The authorities cannot be relied on. From the emergency response through the investigation process, Columbine was a case study in how not to.

I hate to be overly critical of police because they really have to do a hellish job, but that day witnessed one of the worst failures by a law enforcement agency that we’ve ever seen.

Two officers exchanged fire with one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, then stopped — as they had been trained to do — to wait for a SWAT team. During the 45 minutes it took for the SWAT team to assemble and go in, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 10 of the 13 people they killed that day.

The killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift SWAT team finally entered. But the SWAT officers took several hours more to secure the place, moving methodically from room by room. One of the wounded, teacher Dave Sanders, slowly bled to death. [Source]

If this is the book on how to operate, explain to me exactly why you need a SWAT team in the first place. Events would have played out more or less identically if the SWAT budget had instead been allocated to Parks & Rec.

The good news, as the article goes on to explain, is that the meltdown at Columbine led to “active shooter” training, which is credited with making police officers across the country far more effective in these kinds of cases.

Sadly, there’s no indication at all that the longer, more mind-numbing process of investigating and reporting has been improved. “Quagmire,” “spin,” “cover-up,” “embarrassment,” “lost” and “hidden” reports – at every turn those charged with getting to the bottom of the worst school shooting in history acted like they were auditioning for roles on CSI Hooterville.

If the whole story – or at least most of it – is known today, it is despite these officials, not because of them.

2: Religious interests will colonize your grief for their own ends. As I walked the grounds of Columbine and Clement Park a few days after the massacre, I was absolutely staggered at the extent to which the tragedy had been transformed into an explicitly Christian extravaganza. Which was a little fascinating, since it wasn’t a Christian school and unless you were sucker enough to believe that there was a religious tint to the killings (there wasn’t – more on this in a minute) the tragedy had about as much to do with Jesus as it did Kubla Khan. Still, the impromptu memorials prayed, beseeched, questioned and promised in a distinctly evangelical way that had to make non-evangelicals a little uncomfortable. After all, this was their town, too, and I can say with absolute certainty that it didn’t matter what your religion was or wasn’t. Columbine was personal and the grief it engendered was profound.

It wasn’t just my imagination, either. One prominent local minister said he felt like he’d been “hit over the head with Jesus.”

To top it all off, Billy Graham’s lackwit boy Franklin parachuted in to preside over a nationally televised Mournapalooza service. No doubt some were comforted by the presence of a bona fide religious carpetbagger, but it’s hard to see, looking back, how the needs of the community were actually addressed by the self-serving machinations of a C-list opportunist.

To put it in Chaucerian terms, we could have done with a little less Summoner and a little more Parson.

3: The mainstream press values the narrative above the facts. They were goths! It was the Trenchcoat Mafia! They were targeting jocks, blacks and Christians! Cassie Bernall said yes!

Lie. Lie. Lie, lie, lie. And damnable, intentional lie. Local and national “reporters” could have been outperformed by monkeys with Ouija boards.

Not that the run-of-the-mill press bumbling came as any real surprise – journalistic malpractice is well-known in Colorado. But ineptitude is one thing. Outright, overt, premeditated lies are quite another, and that’s exactly what both of Denver’s mainstream papers – the Denver Post and the recently-defunct Rocky Mountain News did when they ran the “Cassie Bernall said yes” story as fact. They knew, by their own admission, that it was false, so why did they lie? Well, the lie seemed to be providing comfort to a grieving city.

Take that as the foundational operating principle for a free press and see where it leads…

If some of us have sort of moved on, then, if we have somehow clawed our way to a modicum of closure, it has been against a backdrop of secrecy, deceit, ineptitude and a pervasive moral pathology born of evangelical self-righteousness. Whatever insights we have attained, whatever emotional peace we have found, it has all been accomplished without the help of our community’s central institutions. As a result, I suspect that many of us mark the tenth anniversary with a little anger, a little bitterness.

There’s not much I can do about that except to suggest that what happened ten years ago today was not a one-off. It has happened since and it will almost certainly happen again, and my deep suspicion is that these kinds of events arise, in part, as a result of the dysfunctions noted here. That is, the governmental breakdown, the evangelical circus and the unforgivable duplicity of those who were granted particular 1st Amendment freedoms so that they could safely tell us the goddamned truth were not results of Columbine. Maybe I’m cynical, but it seems to me that these flaws in the fabric of our society existed well in advance of 4.20.99 and it’s hardly surprising that a sick system would spawn broken children capable of unspeakable barbarism. Nor is it surprising that the system would then cannibalize those children and their victims in order to slake its spiraling lust for ignorance and hatred.

Whatever was wrong ten years and one day ago is still wrong.

Next

• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
• Columbine and the power of symbols
  

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last night we had dinner with my daughter’s future in-laws. They are devout Christians, members of an ultra-conservative evangelical mega-church.

As we sat down to eat, they asked if anyone minded if they said grace. We smiled and went along with it, but the truth is I do mind. I think coming into someone’s home and imposing your belief system is unspeakably rude and completely unacceptable. What if I belonged to the Sacred Church of Zoophilia, and I came to dinner at your house and asked, “While you dish out the salad, do you mind if I have sex with your cat?” To me, talking aloud to Jesus and forcing me to listen in on the conversation is much the same thing. And after dinner, when the inevitable sales pitch came, we turned it away as gracefully as possible.

Marrying into an evangelical family is a very depressing prospect. We know they’re going to try again: They have to. It’s a central tenet of their religion. We can look forward to a semi-eternity of being cornered at joint family events and quizzed about our relationship with Christ.

But as I sat there, smiling outwardly while I inwardly thought dark thoughts about building a huge fence around Texas and herding all the evangelicals in the U.S. inside two by two, I had an epiphany. We “seculars” and evangelicals need each other. It’s pretty obvious why they need us (because someone needs to propose and implement rational social and economic policy,) but except for the comic opportunities provided by Sarah Palin, it may be less obvious why we need them.

Reason number 1: They keep us honest, more or less. Every group, political or social, goes too far if there’s not a countervailing force. And if you completely wipe out the opposition, the one that replaces it can be much nastier than the one it replaced, like substituting a muscular and energetic Islamic movement for a decrepit and doddering Communist one. Evangelicals (and the right wing they are joined with at the hip) provide about the right level of resistance to keep the current majority in the U.S.—progressives who are secular in practice if not in name—on the up and up. I mean, be realistic, are we that sure about all our ideas? Of course not, we understand the concept of unintended consequences and can cite any number of ideas (like housing projects) that seemed good at the time that turned out really bad. At least we can count on the Evangelicals to scream “No,” no matter what we propose. That forces us to pause for a minute and consider whether our ideas are really right. The Harlem Globetrotters used to travel with their own team, the Washington Generals. Every so often, the Generals would even win a game, but their real job wasn’t to compete, it was to allow the Globetrotters to show off their considerable skills. Think of the Evangelicals as our collection of slow, tubby white guys, just out there to make us look good.

Reason number 2: They do things the rest of us won’t do, like fight wars and run into burning buildings and play pro football. I have no way of proving this, but I’d wager that if you looked at who is in the military or works in our police stations and firehouses, that there is a disproportionate number of Evangelicals and devout Christians in the mix. Maybe the whole idea of the afterlife makes you inclined to do stuff that those of us with only one life are reluctant to do. But it’s a fact: It’s Evangelicals and devout Christians who put themselves into harm’s way for the rest us. And that’s true if the task is to defuse roadside bombs in Iraq or face down armed meth heads or collide full speed with three hundred pound men for our entertainment. You never see a prayer circle at a safe sporting event, like the PGA or ATP Tours, but there’s one midfield after most NFL games. Evangelicals seem far more willing to risk life and limb for the things they believe in passionately, and they tend to be passionate people. And very seriously, we should appreciate anyone who is willing to put his or her life on the line for the public good, whatever their motives.

Reason number 3: They do other things the rest of us won’t do, like live in Mississippi or Oklahoma or Nebraska. Now this one is a little less serious than the last two, but it’s still true. There’s a reason CNN’s map is all red in the south and western mid-west. It’s because that part of the country is full of Evangelicals who are happy to live in places the rest of us are reluctant to even fly over. These are places that are flat and ugly, lit by flares from oil wells and heavy with the stench of feed lots and pesticides. Most of us want to live near water or mountains, where the restaurants are good and the jobs are plentiful, not in some forgotten backwater where the best job going is principal of the local high school. But somebody has to live out there, or there would be no meat on the shelves at our local grocery, no gas stations between Chicago and Flagstaff and another 30 million people in San Bernadino County. Better them than us.

In other words, Evangelicals are like vultures – unsightly, but a necessary part of the ecosystem. So what if I don’t like them? They fill a role. And maybe instead of rolling my eyes at my future in-laws, I should appreciate them a little more.

Next: Why we need Jesse, Sean, Al and Rush. Really.

__________

John Harvin is a writer, novelist and executive. He has traveled and worked in more than forty countries and lived in Chicago, New York, LA, Mexico City and Sydney. He has published five books and his work has appeared in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, LA Times and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, among others. He is particularly proud of the EQMM short story, because he thinks somehow this makes him a pulp author like Raymond Chandler. (Sadly, the book critics have not yet seen the connection.) He has way too much energy for his own good, and when not working or writing or spending time with his family, he rides ultra-marathon bicycle races, does triathlons, scuba dives, skis, works on his farm in Indiana and thinks.

Dr. Slammy was kind enough to put up a post earlier today that shows just how un-Christian people who call themselves Christians can actually be. And then I happened to be listening to my favorite Goth crooner, Voltaire, when one of my favorite songs came on: “God Thinks”, from Voltaire’s Almost Human album. Enjoy.

God thinks all blacks are obsolete farm eqipment
God thinks the Jews killed his son and must be punished
God thinks the white man is Satan
God, they know what God thinks

God thinks we should all convert to Judaism
God thinks we must all be Christians and
God thinks we should all embrace Islam
God thinks the only true religion is Hinduism

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re a waste of flesh
God prefers an Atheist

God thinks all people like you are evil
God thinks all people like you are an embarrassment to creation
self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own protection

God thinks the sun revolves around the Earth
God thinks there was something very wrong with Copernicus
God thinks abortion is murder and
God thinks everything that science gave us is wrong
God thinks women deserve it
God thinks AIDS is a form of punishment

I hate people who blame the Devil for their own shortcomings and
I hate people who thank God when things go right

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re an idiot
God prefers a heretic

God God
God thinks all people like you are evil
God thinks all people like you are an embarrassment to creation
self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own agenda

God is a liberal
God is a democrat
God wants you to vote republican
never trust a man who puts his words in the mouth of god
and says that it’s absolute truth
its lies and it smells like death
its all in a day’s work taking money from the poor
Why do you think that God would need your dirty money
if he wanted to start a holy war?

self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and use His name for your own protection

God thinks puppies need to die and
God thinks babies need to drown
’cause God is neither good nor bad
God is you and me
God is Everything

(Lyrics from LyricsTime.com)

But I’d like to offer this wish of seasonal cheer, no strings attached. No agenda, no proselytizing, no offense. Just the outpouring of a full and warm heart on the 25th of December.

It is Christmas Day, and my heart’s naïve hope is that it could stand for what it is ought to be in the broadest cultural sense – an occasion to wish peace on earth and good will to all. Whether or not one believes in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as God come into human history, the nativity myth is filled with simple beauty, and the ancient yuletide traditions it has become associated with have for centuries celebrated the triumph of light over darkness in a bleak world. To say “Merry Christmas” is, for me, to affirm that light and share its spirit with others, whether or not we embrace the same religious practices or none at all.

I explained this to my 10-year-old daughter earlier this week, when I wished a Merry Christmas to the stylist who trimmed her hair before her picture with Santa.

“Mom!” responded my socially sensitive, Boulder-raised daughter, as we walked out to the parking lot, “What if she doesn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“Well, I suspect she will recognize that I was sharing a warm wish with her, and will take it as just that,” I replied. I was willing to chance it.

When I was in Nepal during Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, I was caught up in the revelry of the holiday, recognizing in the proclamation of light in darkness, knowledge over ignorance, and love over hatred, ideals for all humanity. I did not have to be Hindu to find an empathetic appreciation for this celebration — and far from being offended, I found it an occasion to find joy across cultural divides. Ditto for the invitation my daughter received to a classmate’s Hanukkah party. She’s begged me to try my hand at making the tasty latkes she was introduced to, and I’m going to try my progressive Protestant best to emulate them.

But as the holiday season comes round again each year in the U.S., I feel a heavier emotional burden in negotiating the unfortunate minefield that our well-wishing has become. No matter what one says, our greetings are too often seen as political statements, rather than sincerely intended.

“Merry Christmas,” in some minds, has become a militant rhetorical weapon wielded by Christian conservatives. See, for instance, Pamela White’s column in the Boulder Weekly, which condemns Focus on the Family for instigating a boycott of businesses that opt to wish “Happy Holidays” to their customers, rather than a Merry Christmas.

“Happy holidays,” likewise, which was once an alliterative phrase with an encompassing festive appeal – like “Season’s Greetings” – has now become a hallmark of political correctness and hostility to Christianity, for many. The similarly all-purpose “Have a good holiday” that the grocery checker sends me on my way with has ironically become as uncomfortable as “Merry Christmas,” (including perhaps for the atheist who rejects all “holy days”).

No matter what we choose to say – or not say — we have attached so much tense political baggage to our expressions that the season can feel harsh and scary, rather than standing as a moment in our annual calendar when we can come together in all our diversity, respect our various traditions, and celebrate peace and love amidst the ongoing horror of global wars, fears over collapsing economies, and the tedium of quotidian demands.

Even our musical heritage is reflecting this anxiety. I’ve noticed we no longer hear traditional Christmas carols on retail music systems in December – no Joy to the World or Hark the Herald Angels Sing, no Silent Night. Just an insipid barrage of Jingle Bell Rock and cheesy pop versions of Sleigh Ride. Are these old pieces of sacred music so potentially incendiary that we must remove them from our shared cultural lexicon, insisting that they stay exclusively in the private sphere so that in a generation or so, few may still be familiar with them outside a church? If we follow that logic, we may as well shun Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio from our classical radio stations (the handful that remain). I’m sorry, but I find this overly zealous self-censorship foolish.

Europeans, who are not remotely as religious as Americans but becoming just as socially diverse, aren’t nearly as hung up as we are about seasonal salutations and religious references. To my eye, they have a sense of perspective and reasonableness that we tend to lack.

Americans, we need to lighten up. Rather than impoverish our collective spirits and cultural heritage by eliminating specific expressions of the holiday season from our shared spaces, including the dominant realm of commerce – or saying nothing if we are afraid we won’t “get it right” — can’t we just enjoy our cultural collage, including our religious traditions, with a little more mercy and lightheartedness?

Delight in the glow of the Menorah, enjoy the fresh scent of a twinkling fir, burn a yule log and revel in the return of Ol’ Sol, rejoice that a humble babe born in a cattle stall was sent into the world to challenge might and materialism…

In this spirit, I wish you a very Merry Christmas indeed, and I welcome your reciprocal overtures to me, whichever kind-spirited tradition they are grounded within.

…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone.  He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice.  He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.” He’s declared that those who do not believe in God should not be allowed to hold public office.

“Tone,” my well-toned ass. At the risk of reopening some delicate old rhetorical wounds, the difference between Warren and James Dobson/Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson is lipstick.

Oh, and he also believes that God wants us to whack Ahmadinejad. Good thing for him that Warren is a moderate, huh? Just imagine what a real conservative Christian would want to do to him.

So, what is Obama thinking here? Possibilities include:

1: The Uber-Unity Angle: I know Obama is hell-bent on being a man for ALL the people, ALL the time, regardless of whatever sorts of barking loonery they profess great faith in, and I’m sure this is part-and-parcel of his realpolitik theory about getting us past our partisan divisions. I’ve written before about the ways in which our power-elites have played us against each other, and I’m not a fan of artificial divisions. But at the same time, I don’t think we want everybody on the team – not unless they join on the right terms. There are people in America who don’t need to be courted or united, they need to be changed, and until this happens you’re inviting disaster.

2: The Strictly Personal Angle: Maybe Pastor Dan is right – maybe Barack just likes the guy. I don’t know that this makes me feel a whole lot better, but by the same token, no politician ever got elected by pandering to the likes of me.

3: The Use ‘Em and Lose ‘Em Angle: Perhaps Obama is just about tossing the fundagelicals a bone to make them feel like he’s representing them, too. If so, Warren doing an invocation is something I can live with as long as that’s all he’s doing. I won’t like it (listen, I’ve read the Constitution and Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, so to my understanding the word “God” should never occur in any remotely official legal context) but if this is the extent of Warren’s involvement in the next four to eight years of my life I suppose I’ll hold my nose and deal with it. But if this well-heeled neo-Puritan becomes an intimate consultant and policy driver I might not be quite as forgiving. Nor should you.

Whether it’s 1, 2, 3, all of the above or none, this is a bad move by Obama. You don’t effectively promote unity and progress by handing the show over to a guy who has offended every American with a working brain. So – off to a bad start. Maybe the change we can believe in comes later on the card.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an inauguration to plan for and I can’t find my Ouija board or my official Increase Mather prayer book anywhere….

This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. In a brilliantly crafted scene, he explains to Shore that

You pro-choice people, you need Roe vs. Wade. You’re desperate for it. Not because you’re sure of your opinion, but because you’re not. You need to cling to that ruling as moral validation for a position you’re not entirely comfortable with, deep down.

Denny Crane, indeed.

There’s more than a grain of truth in Crane’s accusation. Pro-lifers have the luxury of absolute moral certainty, you see. Life begins at conception, they insist, and therefore abortion is murder. Period. And life is the most sacred thing on Earth. Is this formulation without its problems? Of course not – it’s about as inane as are all incredibly simple answers to incredibly complex questions. But it is simple, and if you’ve ever been to a pro-life rally you understand that this crowd is not inherently drawn to complexities.

Pro-choicers? Well, the pro-choice side of the argument is a tad more complicated because it’s not really about abortion at all. Let’s be clear on something: pro-choice does not equal pro-abortion. I have never in my life met a single human being who was pro-abortion. Not one. Such a person may exist – we’re a nation of over 300 million people, after all, so somewhere out there a freak-fringe analogue to Fred Phelps may be running loose. But so far I haven’t met this person. (My fellow Scrogue, Dr. Wendy Redal, advises me that Warren Hern of the Boulder Abortion Clinic may come close to fitting that bill, at least in the eyes of some.)

So while the two camps disagree violently on what the law should be, they have one very important thing in common: pro-lifers and all pro-choicers hate abortion. Just about all of them. The problem is that the pro-choice camp is forced to confront complexity. While abortion is bad, how do we legislate against individual freedoms? More to the point, whom do we trust to so legislate?

This is where the rubber hits the road. The truth that we don’t talk about very often is that a number of folks on the pro-choice side of the street are extremely conflicted. Many, I suspect, are uneasy with the proposition that abortion, in all contexts, should be treated as a simple matter of choice. However, they recognize the pro-life movement for what it is – an insidious theocractic wedge into governance – and they believe it to be worse, on the whole, than abortion.

It’s probably safe to say that a healthy majority of pro-choicers think this way about the anti-abortion crowd. Some of us perhaps know a thoughtful, conscientious pro-life advocate who has arrived at the position without the aid of reactionary theology and who craves a solution that doesn’t trash our individual liberties. But if we do, this person is the rarest minority. In point of fact, nearly 100% of the visible opposition to Roe v. Wade in America emanates from socially conservative evangelical Christianity. I’d probably be overreaching were I to suggest that most of these people would gladly subjugate the Constitution to their ministers’ various interpretations of the Bible (however ill-informed they may be), but by the same token you’d be naive to pretend that there isn’t enough of that very dynamic to concern those of us who think Jefferson meant what he damned well said about the wall between church and state.

Bottom line: there are a lot of pro-choicers in America whose positions have very little, if anything at all, to do with abortion per se. Instead, they “cling to that ruling” because they do not, cannot, will not trust those on the other side of the police line with their liberties. Nor should they. Those who would legislate based on facile, tragically misunderstood, millennia-old mythologies must not, under any circumstances, be emboldened in their quest to legally codify America’s status as a Christian nation – not as they define “Christian.”

What I believe. Sort of.

To this point I have been speaking, perhaps too generally, on behalf of others. So let me talk more directly about what and how I think.

First, do I believe that abortion is wrong? Maybe, but “wrong” is a loaded term. Wrong by whose standards? I believe abortion is usually a very bad thing, because at the bare minimum it exacts a lasting toll on the woman having it. There aren’t any occasions I can think of where an abortion is a cause for celebration. The only times I’d count abortion as “not so bad, on the whole,” are in cases of rape or incest, or where the woman’s life is threatened or where the fetus proves to have some form of birth defect.

Yes, I’m generally okay with abortion in the case of certain kinds of physical and mental defects. Each day children are born under circumstances guaranteeing that their lives will be miserable. I find that abhorrent. Life is a remarkable thing, but a life of torture is worse than death. Mercy, and an enlightened sense of responsibility toward those doomed to suffering, this is a higher value, I believe.

I certainly do not believe that abortion is a sin, though, primarily because I reject the foundations from which the current use of the word “sin” arises. By now I hope I’m clear on this subject: your religion and your conscience are yours, but you have no right whatsoever to export your religious beliefs onto others. If you have reasoned yourself to a pro-life moral position, I respect that and we can talk about it in good faith. If you believe it because somebody told you that’s what Jesus thinks, we have nothing to talk about, and you absolutely should not be allowed anywhere near a policy-making apparatus.

Do I believe that life begins at conception? No. At least, not in any way that’s relevant or actionable from a policy perspective. Depending on how you define things, life may begin before conception – I mean, eggs and sperm are alive, right? Is this really a road we want our various legislatures wandering down?

What I’m a lot more concerned about is viability – at what point is the fetus capable of living outside the womb? Do I have a problem forbidding the aborting of a viable fetus? Well, unless we’re talking about one of the instances I note above, maybe not. But these kinds of procedures are far more rare than most pro-lifers would have you believe.

In any case, I’m not a scientist, nor am I a physician. I’m willing to take guidance on this question from those who are experts in the study of physiology and medicine. And yes, I do think it’s possible to have this conversation productively and in good faith.

So, I do believe we should get rid of abortion, then? Well, I think we’d all be better off if there were so few abortions that the subject pretty much never came up, and that when there was an abortion the circumstances surrounding it were wholly uncontroversial. But overturning Roe v. Wade would no more accomplish this than the volumes of statutes currently on the books are preventing murders, robberies, rapes, child abuse and jaywalking.

So How Do We Get Rid of Abortions, Then?

We Americans have a bad habit of addressing the symptoms instead of curing the disease. Unfortunately, you’re never going to treat a sucking chest wound with a band-aid.

The first steps to eliminating abortion in America – assuming that’s really what you’re after – require us to address the actual causes: poverty and sub-standard education. Levitt and Dubner do a nice job of examining the socio-economic conditions surrounding abortion in Freakonomics, and let’s simply note here that if abortion is a scourge in the United States, it’s not the educated and well-off neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt of the damage. To be sure, privileged girls from the best schools in the lily-whitest gated communities in America’s most respected and white-flightest suburban enclaves do get themselves into the family way on occasion, but there are few more effective prophylactics, if you will, against unwanted pregnancy than the family and communal stability engendered by top-notch education and a clear sense of opportunity in life.

Unfortunately, we’re coming off what may prove to be the eight dumbest years of governance in our history. The decade of the 2000s will not be remembered for advancing learning in our society, and it’s hard to find a better example of educational malfeasance than “abstinence-only” sex ed. Bush and his social conservative henchmen have pushed the hell out of this particular anti-educational affront to coherent policy-making, and at this stage the only controversy remaining is whether abstinence-only makes no difference or whether it makes things worse.

I expect that, upon his inauguration, we’ll see Barack Obama confronting these issues in his social and economic agendas, although whether his administration will genuinely work toward a level playing field and universal opportunity or if it will simply settle for a few cosmetic nips and tucks around the fugly spots remains to be seen. However, if we get serious about making the most of every mind and turning some of our rhetoric about how all children can grow up to do whatever they set those minds to into actual reality, then we will see dramatic drops in the abortion rate (along with corresponding decreases in all kinds of anti-social and criminal behavior).

And for our pro-life readers: that’s what you really want, right? Right?

The Real Argument

This whole thesis is one I’ve been carrying around for quite some time. It has long been obvious that our nation’s most violently divisive argument wasn’t really about abortion at all, and the basic dishonesty of this, of our collective willing suspension of disbelief, has griped me to no end. To be clear: there is no disagreement in America today, nor has there ever been, about abortion. There is almost nothing that we agree on more unanimously, in fact.

Instead, abortion is the field on which a battle is being waged. It’s as though we’ve confused the turf at the Meadowlands with the game of football. Put another way, the abortion “debate” is about abortion in roughly the same way that the Civil War was about real estate in Manassas, Gettysburg and Chattanooga.

What we call the abortion debate is better understood as a conflict over human rights. More deeply, it is about Modernity vs. Fundamentalism. Are we a nation governed by reason and law, or are we a nation governed by the priesthood? Do we believe that individuals are endowed with certain inalienable rights, or do we trust TV preachers to tell us what rights God wants us to have? Will we insist on a system that adapts and evolves as our society grows and learns, or will we cling desperately to a system that refuses to acknowledge that change even exists?

Put bluntly, will we live in the 21st Century or the 16th?

I’m willing to have debates, so long as they’re conducted intelligently and in good faith. But for too long we’ve been conflating things, tangling ourselves up in rhetorical sucker plays and refusing to acknowledge what’s really on the agenda. That has to change if we’re ever to make any progress toward resolving our fundamental differences in a way that allows us to move forward together.

I’m game, but I wonder how many are with me.

Change We Can Live With

Obama will take office on the promise of “change we can believe in.” He promises that things will be different, that we’ll step past the partisan divisions that have set us at each other’s throats for so long.

So maybe this is the moment. Maybe this is our opportunity to find a way of addressing abortion in a way that is legitimately about abortion – that is, to discuss it in terms of science and the deeper social conditions that underlie it instead of in terms of reactionary, fear-driven theology.

Before this can happen, though, President Obama will need to restore government’s respect for the Constitution, a document that has suffered tremendous abuse in recent years. Governmental research functions will need to be returned to the control of actual researchers and we’ll have to stop pretending that anti-science is actually science. No more fundamentalist litmus tests, no more faux “debates” about facts that are settled, no more obeisance to those who think that Leviticus is a peer-reviewed journal.

Maybe now is the time for this. Or … maybe not – I mean, how hopeful should I be as long as Obama is still taking Rick Warren seriously? (For a wonderfully detailed look at the … ummm, quagmire … facing Obama, see Sarah Posner’s new American Prospect analysis on “The Truth About Abortion Reduction.”)

I believe that when these things are accomplished, we’ll all be surprised at how many people are willing to sit down at the table and honestly discuss their opinions about issues that have heretofore not been open to discussion.

Denny Crane was right: many of us are uneasy about being forced into an absolutist position over something we know to be nuanced and complex. I, for one, hope the time is approaching when intelligent people can begin untangling those complexities in an environment that’s free of suspicion and fear.

James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise.  Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore.  Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.

The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization.  The document is so over the top that it’s garnered the usual media buzz, which is the goal of the group’s media strategy, according to Focus senior vice president Tom Minnery.  Unfortunately, the press finds such extremism more riveting than the message of a Christian political organization like Matthew 25 that supports Obama and candidates who are likely to promote the moral values expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and which takes as its scriptural mandate Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Whoever crafted the 15-page letter clearly had a creative heyday while indulging paranoia at an unprecedented level.  The letter, which is as likely to amuse as to appall most Christians who are more moderate and rational than Dobson’s devotees, outlines a world so transformed in just four years that it has become unrecognizable.  Consider these 15 (and the letter contains more) “natural” outcomes if Obama is elected, most of which are fomented after a 6-3 liberal majority takes over the U.S. Supreme Court:

• Boy Scouts disband after refusing to allow homosexual scoutmasters to sleep in the same tent as young boys

• First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids

• Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples

• Military must offer “sensitivity training” for troops forced to accept enlisted homosexuals

• The Supreme Court declares that “proselytizing speech” does not have the same protection as other speech, and Christian ministries are banned from college campuses

• Nurses who do not wish to participate in abortions will lose their jobs, and doctors who deliver babies at hospitals must perform abortions or lose their licenses

• The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn

• States are allowed to ban guns, and illegal gun-owners face stiff fines or prison terms

• Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions

• The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq prompts a take-over by Al Qaeda, which in turn has carried out terrorist attacks on four U.S. cities

• Russia reclaims most of the old Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria while UN & NATO fail to take action

• Latin America topples toward communism as the U.S.’s pro-Chavez policies give Venezuela more weight

• A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80

• Periodic blackouts are the norm after a moratorium is instituted on new oil drilling, nuclear plants and CO2-emitting coal power plants

• Business owners and entrepreneurs have moved overseas in droves to avoid higher taxes, with a huge loss of U.S. jobs

Wow, that’s one efficient administration.  Even when G.W. Bush had both houses of Congress, a majority of Supreme Court appointees, and two-thirds of federal judgeships in his court, the American political and cultural landscape held relatively steady.  That’s not to say that another four years of Republican control wouldn’t instigate a significant shift farther right – or that change won’t happen under Obama — but a scenario like the one Focus paints in this letter is as ridiculous as it is underhanded in its efforts to exploit the worries of religious conservatives who are beholden to fear rather than faith.

And to push the insult further, it turns out that some Christians themselves will be to blame.  As the letter’s author, “A Christian in 2012,” states in an effort to explain how all this happened, “In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

As a result of these naïve voters’ ignorance, the country has become a pawn in the takeover by “the agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, [and] the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe.”  Heaven help us.  That’s a lot of agendas.

Capitalizing on fear has been a mainstay in the religious right’s persuasion tactics, just as absolutist governments have perpetuated through history.  Fear has always been the most powerful weapon tyrants have utilized to engineer consent to power, or to mobilize people into attacking other nations, races, ethnic groups or cultures. It is always fear that precedes fascism.  And it is ironic that in trumpeting the threats to freedom posed by this litany of “leftist” agendas, Focus on the Family and its ilk would seek to replace existing freedoms with a form of government that leans dangerously toward theocracy.

But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.”  The Book of Matthew tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers.  It is these, the scriptures say, who will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.

Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God.  Rather – as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.

In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat.  I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.  Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you?  He answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail.  Now that would be a transformed world.  In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd, whom shall I fear?”  Indeed, the most frequently expressed command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.”  Focus on the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here, for your copying-and-pasting convenience, is a transcription of some of what you just heard:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Nigger running for president, you need a first stringer. He’s definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep – or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin – she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda – a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but… I dunno, it’s just kinda… a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash… because we’re not!”

As I always told my writing students: show, don’t tell.

Clearing a Low Bar

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate
Shout loud in the crowd “Watch
them beat us all down.”

At this point, I’m trying to imagine what I can add that isn’t superfluous. That racism still exists, in tragic amounts, isn’t a revelation to anyone with more than six or seven functioning brain cells, although being confronted anew with this kind of evidence is still jarring.

What’s different, though, is what I said back in June.

Make no mistake, in the coming months you’re going to see the ugliest artillery that our nation’s drooling, inbred hatemongers have at their disposal. The looming prospect of a nigra in the White House is going to bring the vermin out of the woodwork, out from under their rocks and out into the light. It’s going to incite the well-heeled country club elite to crank up the meme machine with every sort of subtle, codemongering dogwhistle it can manufacture. The truly ignorant and hateful are going to be liquored up on rhetorical bile of the lowest sort and those who live further up the social ladder are going to be provided with a variety of messages that let them vote white without having to admit to themselves that they’re fundamentally just like the snuff-suckers in the trailer park across the tracks.

This is a good thing. Let me say that again: this is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because we’ll never defeat an enemy that can safely hide from scrutiny. This is a disease that’s only going to be cured with copious amounts of very bright light.

We will not fear your mask. Because what we believe in doesn’t need to hide.

In this election campaign, let’s invite the Klan and its fellow hate groups out into the light. Let’s get their hoods off of them. Let’s show all their videos. Let’s make sure that everybody gets to read their brochures and visit their Web sites. Let’s hand the microphone to their most eloquent speakers and stand aside. Let’s get them front and center and make sure America sees, in all its slack-jawed, toothless glory, precisely what racism looks like.
…
And above all, when we hear racist code masquerading as legitimate, issues-based messaging, let’s not be afraid to say “excuse me, but will you take off your hood?”

It’s decision time, and I’m ready for a referendum on hate. How about you?

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we won’t have triumphed finally and completely over ignorance. Our culture is, at its very core, anti-intellectual and frighteningly tolerant of the willfully stupid. We fetishize shallowness and vote on whether or not we’d like to have a beer with the candidate. We mock “elites,” sort of. We’re too thick to recognize real elitism when we see it, but we can be relentless in our abuse of those born to meager means who, through little but their own intelligence and hard work, rise up to make something of themselves. Our ability for self-deception is unmatched in the entire civilized world.

But an Obama victory (which looks more likely by the day) would nonetheless mark a milestone: we would have arrived at a point where a man of non-white (or half non-white, as the case may be) heritage can be elected to our highest office. As my colleague Whythawk has observed, that actually says something pretty good about America, given how few of our fellow industrialized nations can say the same.

“We suck less,” though, isn’t the sort of shining-city-on-the-hill standard America has traditionally prided itself on setting (even if only rhetorically), and while being the first to clear a very low bar is something to note, it’s not something to get too puffed up over. This is especially true when we have millions of citizens howling for the corpse of Barack Obama. It’s especially true when our media institutions ignore the filthiness happening right before their eyes. It’s especially true when these disgusting public spectacles are funded by a hyper-rich power elite that’s willing to spend whatever it takes to keep us ignorant and at each other’s throats.

As for the premise that McCain is no racist, well … racist is as racist does, don’t you think? He got his back up at the suggestion that he was somehow like George Wallace, but in what conceivable way is that charge less fair and valid than the slanders his campaign has slung in Obama’s direction?

And why should we taken seriously McCain’s late-to-the-dance attempts to rein in the hate that’s been committed in his name? His actions in recent years have made clear that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the White House, Bob Dolizing himself to a degree that Dole himself could hardly have imagined. Tack this way on the advice of advisers, pander to the Right to shore up the base, let Karl Rove bully you out of your VP preference, let slip the dogs of Race War… Why would I or you or any other thinking American regard this as anything besides a tactical maneuver driven by research showing that undecided voters are turned off by it?

None of Us Are Free

In “None of Us Are Free” (written by Barry Mann, Brenda Russell and Cynthia Weil), Solomon Burke sings

None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us is chained.
None of us are free.

Clearly, large portions of America remain chained. Our Cracker Problem persists, and what ought to be most disconcerting is that it not only exists in the heart of Georgia, in Outback Ohio, in pro-America Virginia or in a Republican Women’s club in California. It not only thrives in the minds of elderly whites who preferred Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. It’s not only alive and well in organizations like Stormfront and the League of the South.

No, the problem is that racism, racemongering and race-baiting are alive and well at the very highest, most public levels of our democracy: our presidential election process. And it was put there, on full display, and sanctioned by one of the only two parties that ever really stands a chance in any national election.

On November 4th, let’s hope for an epic thrashing of those who seek to profit by trading in hate and ignorance. Let’s further hope that those who can’t and won’t evolve get the message loud and clear: crawl back underneath your rocks and remain quiet until it’s finally your time to die.

But whatever we do, let’s not confuse winning a battle with winning the war. Our Cracker Problem will be with us for awhile longer, and November 5th will be the beginning, not the end.

And when they come to ethnically cleanse me
Will you speak out? Will you defend me?
Or laugh through a glass
eye as they rape our lives
Trampled underfoot by the Right on the rise…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: Ich Bin Ein Auslander