The Terrible Honor of Small Church Pastoring

Midway through this past Friday, I was pretty much done with my sermon.  It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I was puttering around the house.  As I often will, I stopped by my laptop to check social media.

There, in Messenger, was a brief note from the wife of a member of my congregation.  It informed me that a young woman who grew up in my church, a college student home for Thanksgiving, had died in a horrific car accident early that morning.

I've been at my little church for thirteen years, and one of the things about sticking around at a small church is that you must abandon the idea that you're there to be "the professional Christian."  In a little Jesus tribe, effective pastoral leadership requires the development of intimacy.   Authority is far less formal in small churches, not a question of degrees and ordination certificates, but of being there to walk side by side with other disciples.  It takes time and presence.  If you stand at an emotional and spiritual remove, either high up on a leadershippy balcony like you're Rev. Dr. Musk or fenced off behind a razorwire thicket of professional self-care boundaries, you're not serving the small church effectively.  You aren't the Transformative Disruptor, or the Professional Counselor, or the Political Activist, or the Management Specialist.  Competent pastors of small churches can be those things, but they aren't primarily any of those things.  You are a Friend among Friends.  

That can be a place of great joy, as baptisms and weddings aren't just duties, but part of your own story.  It is a place of regular sustaining grace, as small church worship is not a chore, or a place of performance, or a platform for theological posturing.  It's where you worship.  When folks are in a place of rejoicing, you rejoice and delight with them.

But Christ have mercy, does it hurt when the people you love are hurt.

I'd known A since she was a bright-eyed little girl.  Known her father and mother and stepmom and her little clatch of newly found sisters.  She'd drifted away from attendance in late adolescence, as activities and work schedules and the energies of young life became more of a focus.  I would still see her regularly, and we'd talk, enough that I knew the smart, driven woman she was becoming.  Her death hit hard, because her life mattered to me personally.  As do the deep wounds in the souls of her family.  You feel their pain in your bones, literally physically aching in sympathetic resonance with the agony of friends enduring an seemingly impossible loss.  

After I sent that email to my church leadership, and the other to the whole church, I had to go take a hot shower, because I was so shaken that I felt chilled, my blood running cold.  

Were I the senior pastor of a sprawling megachurch, such a tragedy in my flock would be more of an abstraction, less visceral.  It'd be hard, sure, but at a remove.  It wouldn't hurt as much. 

I wouldn't want that.  

I don't want life lived in numbness, with my attentions absorbed in organizational dynamics and the sterile processes of polity.  Small church pastoring demands patience, and it demands resilience, and it requires your faith to be a rock beneath your feet, because it also requires that you feel.

The Great Houses

I am, without question, not a fan of Donald J. Trump.  But he's going to be president. 

I am also a lifelong Beltway Insider.  Born here, raised here, pretty much the entirety of my life.  It's where I own a home, purchased back in the late 1990s for what felt...at the time...like an exorbitant amount of money.  Two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars, for a 1,300 square foot brick rambler in Annandale, and even with family help, it was a bit of stretch.  

We bought in because it was where my wife and I both planned on working, and because it was near family.  More broadly, it's our cultural expectation that buying in will give you equity in a home, which is better than just dumping money into rent.  When home prices go up over four...or eight...or twelve...years, selling off means you profit handily from the purchase.

Our rambler, for instance, is worth 200% more now than it was two decades ago.  The house my parents bought, and in which my mom still lives?  That's worth about 1,100% more than it was in 1975.

Again, I'm a Beltway Insider born and bred, which means I've seen what happens when administrations change.  Folks hoping to work with the new regime come bopping into DC, seeking housing to buy.  For most of the fifty five years I've lived here, that's been a good bet.  

Out there, I don't doubt there are Trumpy politicos thinking they'll get a piece of DC Real Estate.  In that knowledge, I'm reminded of my Lord and Savior's insistence that one love one's enemies, that one go the extra mile, that one offereth up one's cloak also and whatnot.

So to them, a warning about buying a house here:  Don't.

Knowing the sensitivities of Trumpy folk, let me note that even if you are the great Cornholio, I am not threatening you by saying this.  You'll be fine here.  Folks are generally neighborly in these parts, if a little prone to being overly work focused.  Some eye rolling and muttering may be encountered, but that's as far as it'll go.

No, the reason not to buy in to the housing market in the DC area is, if you voted for Trump, precisely because he may well do what he promised.  If the Department Of Government Efficiency has even a fraction of the impact Elon and Vivek insist it'll have, it'll tear an iceberg sized gash in the Titanic of the DC housing market.  

Many thousands of workers, gone.  Departments eliminated.  Agency budgets cut to the bone.  The broader economy here will be significantly impacted.  No matter what your opinion on governmental size may be, the impact of that would be gobsmackingly obvious: a sudden explosive decompression of the local economy.  I know what that looks like here.  Things got noticeably leaner here a bit during Al Gore's reinvention of government.  Then back in the subprime crisis of '06 and '07, home prices collapsed, leaving folks with mortgages they couldn't afford and houses that were worth half of what they paid for them.

In my own neighborhood, houses were just abandoned.  Meaning, the owners closed and locked the doors and disappeared.  The two little ramblers at the top of our street, both identical to our own?  They sat empty for years, the grass growing high, the only signs of life being the county violation stickers and foreclosure notices on the front doors.

Ever take a long walk through Flint, Michigan?  I have.  Following the closing of the Buick factory there in the nineties, entire neighborhoods were abandoned.  Home prices went to functionally nothing.  That's what it looks like when the primary industry of a region shutters or significantly retracts.

So, in the interests of being honest to even those who are my political enemies: don't buy a house here.  

You don't want to tie youself to this market right before your own choices destroy it.

Just a friendly warning.

I've also got something you might want to be aware of regarding continuing to live on this planet, but hey.  One thing at a time.

The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

I will, on occasion, see folks pitching up suburban survival gardens.  We suburbanites are anxious creatures, dimly aware of how vulnerable we are if everything were to suddenly go south.  In response to this anxiety, I'll occasionally see some bright-eyed influencer who's packed their quarter-acre full of raised beds.  I'm hashtag self-sufficient, they'll hashtag say!  Hashtag blessed!

I'm under no such illusions, and am quite aware of how far I am from being able to provide for my needs from my property.  Self sufficient I ain't.

Well, I am in a few things.  My garden plots yield 100% of the garlic that I require on an annual basis.  29 heads of garlic came out of the ground this last May, and I expect they'll carry me comfortably through to May of 2025.

I also produce 100% of the basil we use for cooking, as I've got a four by four bed dedicated that sweet, delightful herb.  It fills the area near the carport with a delightful fragrance during summer and fall, and produces enough basil that this year I finally got around to drying and saving it.  Sixteen cups of basil dried down to fill a medium-sized spice jar, which is more than enough to overwinter.

I'm angling towards providing all of my own rosemary, having put in two plants this year.  I've got mint out the wazoo, because mint being mint, the issue isn't cultivating it, but keeping it from taking over the entire garden.

So I'm getting close to being herb-self-sufficient.  

But that's pretty much it.  My suburban quarter acre simply can't provide enough to sustain a one hundred and seventy five pound omnivore, let alone two of us.  

I mean, I could pretend it did, if I turned and cultivated every inch of arable soil in my light-filled front yard.  With fencing and several greenhouse enclosures, I could stave off the chipmunks and squirrels and deer that take a substantial portion of my yield.  That would increase production by a factor of ten.  

Which sound great, but as I only produce about 1% of my total caloric intake from my own garden plots, that'd still leave 80% remaining.

I could, I suppose, cut down every single tree in my back yard, converting that area into an urban farm.   But...where would I get the leaves for my compost pile?   Driving to Home Depot to pick up plastic bags full of soil kinda stretches the meaning of "self-sufficiency."  And where would the water come from?  I don't have a well, nor could a well be relied upon in a long dry season, particularly if my densely packed neighbors ever drank or washed or flushed their toilets.  

Rural folk may think they have it better, but the reality is a little different.  Yeah, you've got more land.  But how do you till that soil?  How do you plant and grow?  Americans agriculture is now completely machine-reliant, and those machines themselves rely on a vast and convoluted industrial network to provide the fuel that runs them.  How often do you need to refuel a combine?  How often do you refuel your truck?  That's the extent of your self-reliance right there.  Without those refineries and tanker trucks, that John Deere is just a lump of expensive metal.

The reality, for most American human beings, is that we're not even close to being able to meet our own physical needs if something...or someone...sabotaged the systems that sustain our existences.

Always a fun thought.

A Measure of the Temperature

My garden is almost entirely shut down for the year.  The beds are nearly all emptied, the final straggling tomatoes and beans and okra uprooted and shredded for compost.  A layer of leaf mulch covers the soil in the beds where I'd put in two new rosemary plants, and should keep their roots cozy over the cold season.  Two beds of garlic went in back at the beginning of October, and should be on track to yield their savory harvest come May.

 But I've still got an item of unfinished business that niggles at me.  My asparagus bed just won't quite stop growing.  

Asparagus, in the event you don't know, is a fernlike plant (closer to the lily, genetically speaking), one that grows around six feet in height.  The asparagus we eat are the first tender shoots that rise in the spring, which can be harvested for six or eight weeks before ya just let the plant grow.   Asparagus rootstock, once established and well tended, can provide nutrition for a generation.  In order to harvest it, you've got to cut down the ferns in late fall, as I have the last three years.  You put a nice blanket of leafmulch atop the bed, and tuck it away for a nice winter rest.

To do that, you have to wait until the tall, delicately formed plants end their annual growth cycle.  This year, they're just not stopping.  

About a third of the ferns have browned and died off, but the majority remain green and vital.  I'm sitting there, tapping my foot, looking at my watch, but they're in no hurry. 

All it takes is one good hard frost to shut them down, but...that frost hasn't come.  Not yet.  Historically speaking, first frost in the Midatlantic comes in mid to late October, but this year, it didn't.  Instead, we got a record-breaking stretch of drought, coupled with anomalously warm weather.  That happens more and more, because of course it does.  That frost is nearly a month late is...well, it's something notable.  Something real.

The longer the asparagi pump energy back into their roots, the stronger the plants will be, so I'm not going to rush them.  That unfinished task will just nudge about in the back of my mind, reminding me of something undone.  

And something a little...wrong.

Of Blue Skies and Deserts

I have been on social media since social media first crawled its way out of the primordial sludge of the internet.  I was there on MySpace.  Xanga.  Facebook.  Ello.  Twitter.  Mastodon.  And now, BlueSky.

Without question or exception, the best social media experience I ever had was Xanga.  I was on Xanga for years, and my arrival on BlueSky brings that medium to mind.  Xanga existed before microblogging became a thing, so posts and engagement there were more long-form.  Connection wasn't algorithmic, 'cause this was back in the day, kids.  You searched for and chose areas of interest yourself, and assembled your own networks.  There was no blocking, because, well, you couldn't.  So, sure, there were trolls, but they couldn't hide.  Troll someone, and they could see your profile, as could everyone in a group.  

There were no bots, because in 2004, bad actors hadn't figured out how to do that yet.  There was no tracking or gathering of data on users, because, again, that wasn't yet a thing.  There were no ads, because the internet was young and free and wild.  The content on a person's Xanga was mostly their own writing. 

It was, to be honest, a pleasure.  You really got to know people as people, and even the neoatheists and fundamentalists I jousted with became friends of a sort.  It's been nearly twenty years, and I am still in conversation with some of the souls I connected with there.

But Xanga died, because...well...there was no way for it to stay in operation.  There was no revenue, and no plan for revenue.  No ads.  No subscription.  No harvesting the activities of users to sell to advertisers. When Facebook rose and started sucking in the users, things began to go south.  Decreasing participation meant less venture capital, 'cause there wasn't any way to pretend it could be sustainable.  They tried a subscription model, but it failed.  They tried a reboot, but it failed.  It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, but it never found a path to long term viability.

As millions upon millions of users flee the propagandistic shores of X and the now-aggressively-censorious algorithms of Facebook, the challenge facing BlueSky is the same.  It's great.  I mean, a lovely place to connect.  Again, it reminds me of Xanga.

And not just in the good ways.  There is no publicly stated path to BlueSky viability.  Servers and moderators and infrastructure require an income stream, and scaling up from an experiment in federation to a sustainable platform will demand resources.  It's all buzzybuzzbuzz right now, but it'll need more than butterfly farts and biz-speak daydreams to keep it afloat.

A good social media platform is, I will note, worth paying for.  The subscription model is the single best way to ensure adequate revenue for that form of social exchange.  It guarantees platform stability, and is ultimately less predatory than the Meta model of viewing the data of your users as your product.  It also adds a transaction cost that limits botfarm incursions and gives a traceable trail to trolls and predators.

Alternately, it could lean into federation, becoming a more user-friendly version of the sprawling mess that is Mastodon.  

What's the plan?  Well, for now there isn't one, at least not one that's been shared.

I do hope it succeeds, but in the meantime, kids: don't get too attached.    

Failing to Fail

Being able to fail is a gift.

All of us do fail, now and again.  Some of our failures, like my experiments with new plants in my garden, are trivial.  There was that time I believed a few chattery Youtube gardeners and Reddit posters who swore up and down that you could plant "potato towers."  Just plant taters at the base of said tower, and they'll grow and grow and grow upwards as you add compost to an ever rising wire-frame.  Did it work?  Nope.  Potatoes don't do that.  Lesson learned.

Or the time I didn't move slowly and patiently through the process of installing a light fixture.  Or the time I rushed and didn't properly torque down the oil drain plug on my motorcycle.  Mild electrocution and/or struggling not to crash as you slide wildly on the highway are nice gentle reminders to take your danged time, son.

There've been worse failures.  My first church failed.  It was a long shot revitalization effort, but there were plenty of times I didn't speak up when I needed to speak up, or let my tendency to anxious paralysis prevent me from doing what was needed.  There was pain, there was reflection, there was correction.  Eventually, I realized there was no path, and spoke that truth.  When folks wouldn't hear it, I stepped aside.  It was rough.

If we do not fail, we do not learn.  But what if we cannot fail?  If pride and ego prevent us from ever seeing our own contribution to a misfire or a catastrophe?  Or if admitting failure is ideologically unacceptable, as it requires us to admit that the whole ethos of our chosen tribe is flawed.  Then we will fail, and fail, and fail again, until all is ruin and our lives are a bitter wreck.

And here lies a deep challenge for the next four years.  This isn't another list of what the Democrats did wrong, and here's how to fix it, and blah blah blah.  And sure, progressives can struggle sometimes with course correction, particularly when they've "progressed" into a new "truth" that doesn't actually reflect reality.  I'm naming a larger challenge. 

We're about to have a government that doesn't know how to learn from failure.  Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting failure.  The MAGA ethos is similarly inclined.  Everything is someone else's fault.  Or failure never happened, it's really success, in the same way that January 6, 2021 was a beautiful day of love and peace, and the COVID years were the best ever, and nonstop nationwide riots and civil unrest during the inchoate brutalism of his first administration must have all been something we imagined in our pretty little heads.  

The information ecosystem Trumpism created to serve its Lord and Savior simply won't admit error.  It's a closed loop, sealed off from reality.  It is numb to negative input, which means that it is oblivious to damage it does to itself, right up until that damage becomes life threatening.  Like, say, someone who has lost all sensation and circulation in their feet, as my Dad did late in the process of his dying from CHF.  

This is pretty much exactly what happened in the old Soviet Union.  Back when I worked at the Aspen Institute, one of the studies my program funded looked at how environmental degradation helped hasten the collapse of the Eastern Bloc powers.  Under communist rule, untreated waste filled the rivers, and unfiltered emissions choked the air, and all of it was swept under the rug by The Approved Media.  No counterpoint was admitted, and disloyalty to the party line was actively suppressed.  There was no system for critical feedback, no way of course correcting.

Even when people started getting sick, their illnesses were ignored, and their complaints about the obvious cause were silenced.  But it kept worsening.  Family and friends of communist party leadership sickened, as the blight of unfettered and unaccountable industry spread.  It reached a point where everyone knew, because the rivers were dead and the hospitals were full, and all of a sudden, the apparatchiks refused to crack down on the activists.  Like silencing voices criticizing the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, or naming the causes of the actual fallout from Chernobyl, these failures to fail cost the Soviet Union its existence.

Because if you cannot admit failure, there's no way to learn from it, and you will fail existentially.

Putting Conservative Christians in Detention Camps

Looking at what we can anticipate from the upcoming administration, one action in particular stands prominent in my attention.  It's perhaps the most dissonant of the paradoxes facing this country as we move towards the next four-or-so years.

On the one hand, there's the fervent turnout of evangelical and conservative Christians, who voted en masse for Donald J. Trump.  

On the other hand, it's the stated intent of the forty-seventh president to...on day one...start rounding up conservative and evangelical Christians and forcibly taking them to camps.   

Generally speaking, this is not the way that most of the folks who voted for Trump would frame this commitment, but it's an entirely accurate way to describe what's planned.  

The plan is mass deportation, on an unprecedented scale, as tens of millions of undocumented migrants will be rounded up and returned to their countries of origin.  Given the logistics of such an endeavor, detention camps will be necessary.  If we're thinking only as selfish consumers, it might occur to us that this will cripple our ability to harvest crops, resulting in price increases and shortages.  But if we're thinking as Christians, there's that other consideration.

We know, with certainty, that most Latino immigrants profess to be followers of Jesus.  In the region of the world from which they hail, between 75% to 80% of the population are Christian.  They are Baptists and Pentecostals, independent evangelicals and traditional Catholics.  Those who risk their lives to reach our borders are no different, which is why so many reach out to Christian communities (or form their own churches) upon their arrival.  They are fleeing a combination of things: economic hardship, violence, and political oppression, particularly those trying to escape the oppressive leftist regime in Venezuela.

Again, American conservative and evangelical Christians voted, by a strong supermajority, for an administration that is planning...very first thing...on mobilizing the military to forcibly round other Christians up and ship them to detention camps, which is perhaps the least Christian response imaginable.  

Jackbooted soldiers herding Christians into trucks parses more like an Antichrist thing, or it was the last time I cringed my way through parts of one of those barely watchable Left Behind movies. 

Even more odd, to my eyes, at least, is that most of the immigrants America will be forcibly detaining aren't progressives, or leftists, or even liberal.  They're conservatives.

Latinos are many things, but most of those who come here are faith and family folk, the sort of people who are willing to risk their lives for the opportunity to work hard.  They are, as the protagonist of a novel of mine once noted, really just rednecks.  They like trucks and beer and dancing.  They like fireworks and cowboy hats and traditional family structures and Hey-zuus.  If America put the resources required to deport them into welcoming them in, they'd be Republicans for generations.

I know, I know, they're "illegal."  If you think that ultimately matters, you're welcome to lecture Jesus on immigration law and secure national borders when you stand before him on the day of judgement.  You might also try telling him about how they don't speak English, so they aren't really Christians, which I'm sure he'll appreciate.  Or how you believed Trump when when he belched out the slander-pander that they were all murderers and rapists.  I mean, it's not like showing hospitality to the stranger and mercy to the foreigner in one's land is ever mentioned in the Bible.  He'll understand that you put country and race before Christ, which he's totally cool with.  Ahem.

Que dios tenga piedad de tu alma.

The M Factor

Post election, there's a whole bunch of Monday morning quarterbacking going on amongst the chattering classes, trying to figure out why the recent election took the turn that it did.

For lefty-types, it's because the campaign was too moderate.  For moderates, it's because the campaign was too left-wing.  For MAGAs, it's because Trump is Jesus and can do no wrong and always wins no matter what because God!

Having tracked the polling, day by day, for most of the last six months, there seemed to be two inflection points of most significance.

The first came following Biden's disastrous debate, and with Harris entering the race.  That was, understandably, a game changer, as the whole game changed.  For a while afterwards, the metapolling had stabilized, with Harris consistently up around the three point margin necessary for a potential Democratic victory, both in the popular vote and in the electoral college.

But that stability shifted in the month prior to the election, and the trendlines shifted.  By the time we reached election day, metapolling showed Harris significantly underperforming Clinton's 2016 final polls, which...by my own gut metrics...meant a more substantial loss.

As best I can tell, one particular event rested at the inflection point where things began to notably shift: the entry of Elon Musk into the race.  

Note, I'm not saying: Elon Musk's endorsement.  He didn't just endorse someone in the race.  That endorsement dropped back in July, before the Republican convention.  During the last month of the campaign, Musk entered the race.

Musk pushed Trump hard, inserting himself into the campaign in a way that was unprecedented in my memory.

It's not just that Musk's X began to aggressively pitch pro-Trump content, and used algorithms to tamp down other voices.  It wasn't just Musk pouring millions into the campaign.  It's the weight and presence of Musk's entire sprawling business empire.  Progs and leftys like to snark at his business achievements, and I'd be the first to note that there's a major hype factor in everything he does, but...still.  

Musk isn't just a celebrity.  He is, very visibly, the richest man in the world, and wealth in our culture is a both a mark of success and a social proxy for power.  Musk says, as the richest man in the world: I'm with Trump.

And then, with that still in the public consciousness, in front of all our eyeballs comes SpaceX catching a booster in midair.  Kvetch and quibble all you want, but it was an undeniably impressive feat of engineering.  Into the subconscious of Americans, goggling in awe at the rocket's red glare, came the thought: he's with Trump.    

Then there's a robotics event, filled with droids and self-driving cars and robotfuturebuses.  As the hype machine interfaced with the inevitable hot-take resistance, into the subconscious of all Americans came the thought: he's with Trump.

Then you're driving, and you see a Tesla, and another Tesla, and another Tesla.  In my neighborhood, the most common car to arrive with a temporary tag lately: the Tesla Model Y.  There's one two houses down.  There's one four houses up.  Another one across the street from that.  That's not even counting the derpy but utterly distinctive Cybertruck, which catches the eye and reminds you, when you look at its absurd proportions:  he's with Trump.

Then, with his rockets and his robots and chatter about Musk's wealth all around us, every Harris ad pitched to me included a tuxedoed Elon laughing at a swanky party.  The goal was to make swing voters grumble at Trump, at his pandering to the billionaire class.  What I'd think, every time I saw one of those ads, was that Democrats were reminding the average American that the most public avatar of material success, wealth, and power?  he was with Trump.

I don't share our cultural assumptions about the merit of wealth, given how my Teacher challenged and rejected that very principle among his own people.  But I'm not everyone, and while I know that all that glitters is not gold, it's a very human mistake to make.

We do love our Mammon.

On Living in an Oligarchy

Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, I was reminded of the limitations of social media.

Those reminders have been present throughout this election season.  In 2016 and in 2020, posts containing my reflections on the state of the election were places of extended conversation.  They were shared, and shared often.  

This year?  Crickets.  Part of me got to thinking, you know, perhaps it's just that I'm boring.  And, honestly, it also felt a little repetitious.  A little dull.  Why just say things over and over and over?  I stuck to pictures of my garden, and limited my posting to my blog and the twelve people who read it.

But it wasn't just that.  Meta has changed.  Facebook was once all about friends, about leveraging the human pleasure of interacting with familiar faces.  That was their whole business model.  I'd scroll, and it'd be people I knew from every phase of my life, intermingled with the occasional ad.  That was the point.  

Now, it's not about faces.  It's primarily content pages and advertising.  The shift has been slow, but it's a completely different landscape today.

In the Meta media ecosystem...Instagram, FaceBook, and Threads...we also know that political posts have this season been suppressed by redesigned algorithms.  For major influencers, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, that following's baked in, but for normies like myself with just a few hundred souls tagging along, the potential for a post to go viral has been muted.  This is by design.

Among my friends and colleagues who skew progressive, there were increasing reports of community standard violations, for infractions that seemed picayune or absurd.  Posts about the climate crisis.  Posts critical of far right-wing foolishness, entirely legitimate as political discourse.  Posts about nothing political at all.  Posts that would once have been utterly par for the course.  All of it, suddenly taken down.

At the same time, in the weeks before the election, my FaceBook feed was suddenly dominated by posts from a single person pitching Trumpy talking points.  He wasn't someone I know, or am close to, or have ever meaningfully interacted with, just a fraternity brother who'd graduated a few years before I entered undergrad.  He was all Trump, all the time, and if you'd read my feed, you'd have thought he was my best friend in the whole wide world.  He was delighting in being a troll, in being provocative.

It was odd.

Then, yesterday, I was hit with my first Facebook community standard violation.  

Six months ago, I'd created a FaceBook page for a work of satire I self pubbed back in 2022.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, because what else are you going to say about a politician who has most of the American church in his thrall, while at the same time being precisely and in every way the opposite of Jesus?  To make it clear that it was satire, the book is written in the voice of Satan himself, and it calls out both the decadence and falsehood of Trumpism and...at the same time...challenges Christians who allow hatred for Trump and his followers to consume their souls.  Love your enemies, as a command, isn't contingent on your enemies being the ones that are easy to love, eh?

I'd posted on that page for most of last year, dropping relevant writings from theologians and commentators.  And then yesterday, two days after the election, the page was suddenly suspended.  Why?  It was in violation of newly revised community standards, for "impersonating another person."  

So...you write a book that is clearly satire, and clearly mark your media as a page promoting a book written IN THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF...and you're "impersonating another person?"  What, people might think I'm actually Satan?  I mean, ok, fine, some might, but...what and the what?

I asked that the decision be reviewed, a process that required checking one of four prewritten replies, each of which was written to subtly suggest I might be in the wrong.  The response came seconds later.  Denied, all content removed, all by an "admin," which clearly it wasn't.  This was a machine at work.  The corporate algorithms had spoken.

Here, were I ignorant, I suppose I'd whinge about First Amendment rights.  Mah Rights!  Mah Rights!  

But I wasn't speaking in America.  I was on Facebook, and Facebook isn't America.  

Meta pages or groups or profiles reside in a corporate media ecosystem.  They're not our property, nor are they the public sphere.  We are in a space controlled and managed by a global conglomerate, run by and for profit, one whose interests are engagement and eyeballs for the purposes of selling our data and advertising to us.  That's the whole business model.  Freedom of speech isn't relevant.  If, like X, Meta wants to suppress political or religious discourse that they feel does not benefit them, they can.

Constitutional protections do not apply in oligarchic systems.  I have no right to a Facebook page, or a Facebook profile.  None of us do.  There are no freedoms when our every interaction is owned by corporations.

It's something we need to remember.

The Tail of the Night

The last couple of years, I've had trouble adapting to the time change.  Not Springing Forward, which one would think would be more difficult as we anguish over a lost hour.  But Falling Back, where you get that whole extra hour of sweet morning sleep.  I haven't been falling back well.

I'm not quite sure why this is.  Perhaps a middle age thing.  Or perhaps because I don't rely on an alarm to wake me most days.  I just get up when I get up, which...as the days shorten...tends to be right before the crack of dawn.

These last few mornings, I've been fully awake at 5 AM, which...not too long ago...was 6 AM.  This is well before the sun lights the morning sky.   I'll lie there for a bit, which typically involves morning prayers and reflections on the necessities of the coming day.  Then I'll slip out of bed as quietly as I can, endeavoring not to disturb my sleeping wife.  The dog will stir, eager for pets and breakfast and a morning walk.   

Once I've got the coffee on, that is.  After he's eaten, together we step out under a sky dark and speckled with stars, and into a neighborhood still unroused from sleep.  The birds aren't yet singing.  No cars whisk off to work or school.  All is quieter.  Not just the neighborhood, but the city itself, the omnipresent hum of gigatons of wheels on asphalt barely a tiptoe.  Foxes scamper about, occasionally stopping to glare at the silly human and his dog, so rudely intruding on their pre-dawn hunt.

It doesn't feel quite like morning, but like catching the tail of the night.

I rather like getting up early.

The Dull Grey of Morning

Yesterday for the first time in my adult life, I paid only passing attention to the election.  I'd already voted, weeks before, because early voting is a thing that we can just do now.  In part, that's because my wife works as an election officer, and votes early herself.

But there was no obsessive checking of final polling, or reading final prognostications, or doomscrolling.  

Instead, I read scripture in preparation for my sermon.  I did yard work.  I had a helpful call with a Presbytery staffer.  I took Mom shopping, and we went to lunch.

When evening came, again for the first time in my adult life, I didn't track the proceedings.  There was no evening spent with laptop open to granular county-level results, as talking heads chattered on the big screen. Instead, I read a novel.   

There didn't seem a point. It seemed clear, as the last few weeks had progressed, how the election was going.  One never knows, of course, but the metapolling trendlines seemed to be going a very certain way. 

I didn't want to endure that, to track along frantically scrabbling for handholds as the paths narrowed to nothing.  It was possible that I was wrong, but...improbable.  So at a little after 10 PM, having finished the book, I went to bed.  Rache was so worn with the stress and work of her day that she soon joined me.

When I woke, I took my time, and did what I always do.  There was no rush to a screen.  What had happened had happened.  

So I prayed.  Got out of bed.  Fed the dog.  Started the coffee.  Walked the dog.  These things must happen.  As our pup trotted down our driveway, the paper wasn't there yet, but that was no surprise.  It's often late when there are late-breaking headlines.

Above me, the sky was grey and featureless, a dull haze obscuring the deep blue of morning.  Perhaps just mist.  

Or perhaps the windblown smoke from wildfires now burning in Pennsylvania.

Merciless Nature

This last week, I began the process of finally putting my garden to bed for the winter.  As we enter November, the cold days have begun to slip in, here and there, although peculiar warmth has been sticking around more of late.  Still and all, the trend line has been cooler, and my summer garden is now gone.  

I'd tried okra this year for the first time, and pulled the last of the plants from the soil a few days ago.  That included seedsaving from the dried-out pods, which is one of the easiest and most satisfying things imaginable.  The pods even kinda sorta open up for you, each chamber splitting neatly, hinting at the seedstock within.  It just requires a little twist of a blade, and...pop!  Out tumble a dozen or so dun brown spheres, looking for all the world like misshapen ball-bearings.  Then you move on to the next chamber, and the next, until from a single pod you've received fifty or sixty potential future plants.  I dedicated three beds to my okra experiment this season, two four-by-eight and one four by four, and just one pod gives enough seed to do that three times over.  The ten pods I used for my seedstock gave me enough seed to turn the entirety of my property into an okra patch.  I'd have to cut down all of our trees, and level our house, so that's not going to happen.  Still, it's such an impossible potential abundance.

Life is like that, because life has to be like that.  If it wasn't, if it didn't produce wildly and wantonly, it would die, because nature is utterly without mercy.  Ten of my twenty okra plants never produced a single seed, as they were devoured by deer, every leaf consumed, the stalks left standing stark and denuded in the soil after two straight weeks of rain flushed my repellent spray from the leaves. Though okra is heat and drought tolerant, we also had another record setting hot-spell this summer, which stalled growth, and several more of my plants just never went to seed at all.

Elsewhere in my garden, other plants also struggled.  My bush beans, usually prolific, were stunted by the heat.  My butternut squash, devoured by chipmunks as soon as the first sprouts rose from the soil.  The squash, I replanted, and replanted, and replanted, but chipmunk hunger drives them around even the most carefully constructed barriers and netting.  I only saw a yield of three modest squash, about one-fifth of what had been normal.  My sunflowers, which have graced a corner of my garden for years?  All but a single seed-head were devoured by squirrels. Still, I have seed for next year, and am plotting and planning necessary adaptations.

The only way living things survive is to spam themselves into the world, producing and adapting and producing and adapting until finally something sticks.  

Before the modern era, we humans were like that, too.  

I was reminded of that recently, as I prepared a sermon on that little passage about Jesus blessing the children.  It's a sweet little passage...right up until you think about the why of it.  

Kids used to be, well, they weren't the gravitic center of adult life the way they are now.  They just didn't last long enough.  We had babies, and they died, and had babies, and they died.  You could be healthy, and well fed, the offspring of wealth and privilege, but still, children died.  Just ask Mary Todd Lincoln about that one, eh?  Or ask my ancestors, literate souls, who recorded the losses of their beloved children in their diaries with a stoic acquiescence.  Most human beings who came into the world didn't make it to ten years of age.  We tried everything we could, until we found modern medicine and penicillin and pasteurization.  

Absent functioning antibiotics, unspoiled food, and effective vaccines, life was consistently, relentlessly short. 

For the last few Sundays now, I've also been leading a group through a thought-provoking book about forgiveness, and about the central place of mercy and grace in Christian faith.  As we discussed the notable absence of forgiveness in Western pagan culture, the thought came to me: well, I mean, forgiveness isn't particularly natural, either.  Nature doesn't let us make errors.  Choose wrongly, and it "corrects" our mistakes by removing us from existence. 

We've forgotten this, clearly, as the voices of our ancestors are drowned out by the cacophany of our short-attention-span consumerism and the synthetic realities of social media influencer culture.  Nature still exists, and we've forgotten that nature, once provoked, gives no quarter.  It is utterly unforgiving, ruthlessly exterminating the weak, the unproductive, the foolish, and the forgetful.

Death is, after all, a natural remedy.

What We Have to Offer

 It was a familiar moment.

With our worship service finished, I'd stepped out of the doors of my sanctuary, where I greet each of the congregants as they depart.  It's a pleasant enough thing, one of those rituals of church life.

As I stepped over the threshold, I saw a man standing at the edge of our parking lot.  White, middle-aged, and a tiny bit worn, he'd clearly been waiting for the service to conclude.  The moment he saw me step from the church, he bustled forward eagerly, making a beeline for the dude in liturgical garb. 

He introduced himself, earnest, eager, and intimate, shaking my hand.  "Can you help me out today, pastor?" He leaned in close to ask if we could talk in private.  I agreed, and when the line of parishioners had concluded, I stepped aside to hear him out.  In this case, it was that he had cancer, that he'd lost his job, that he was three months behind on rent, but needed only one month right now so that he could stave off eviction.   

As it so happens, my little church (along with the other churches in our town) works with a local nonprofit that can handle emergency financial requests.  Housing assistance, utility assistance, emergency food, all the needs a person in crisis might have.  They pay the utility or landlord directly, and provide connection to other service providers for longer term support, including emergency medical and dental helps.

I said, "Sure! We work with this organization to help folks out, one that might be just what you need."  I started to describe it, and how it works.

I was halfway through my third sentence when all the expression left his face.  I mean, it was like flipping a switch.  The smile and the eager light in his eyes just went Click.  He grunted out something that I didn't quite catch, turned on his heel, and walked away briskly without another word.  Beelined back to the parking lot, back to his car, and drove away.

That was that.

I was offering to help him get exactly what he said he needed, but...well.  That wasn't what he wanted.

It got me to wondering, as I reflected on his abrupt departure, what it is that we Jesus folk have to offer those who arrive on our doorsteps seeking something.

There's no question that my visitor had real and material need.  Perhaps not the need he was articulating, but this was a soul who unquestionably wasn't doing well in life.  But was food...or housing...all he needed?  Is that the heart of his struggle, or does that go deeper, to something more essential in his nature?

Does he have a sense of purpose in his life?  A community in which he feels belonging?  A vision of how valuable he is as a person, leavened with the truth of what a mess we all are, and a path to move from one to the other?

That's kind of what we do, the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

But again, that's probably not what he was looking for.  

The Truth about Your Enemies

I am not Kenneth Copeland's biggest fan.

He is and has been representative of a form of faith that betrays, to the best of my discernment, the essence of the Gospel.  It's brassy and loud and materialistic, celebrating and centering wealth and power in a way that is utterly alien to Christ's teachings.  It puts pastors on gilded pedestals to be adored and showered with lucre, and as such is indistinguishable from hucksterism.  It's an Elmer Gantry cosplay, far as I can see it.

But in pitching out a post noting Copeland's newly found political focus, I bumped into an oddity.

Right after the mess of the last election, videos circulated of Copeland laughing maniacally at the notion that Biden had actually won.  It was, as presented, more than a little insane, as he and his congregants howled and hooted.  I mean, here.  Watch this:

It's...well...demonic.  Like the cacophony of the possessed, creepy as hell in the most literal of ways.  

As I dug about for a version to pitch into my last post, though, I came across this, from the Independent, a British news outlet.  It's from the same event, only with a tiny and important snippet of context added.  Copeland leads in to the cacophony by noting a Johns Hopkins study that suggests laughter alleviates pain.  Watch this:

It's still politics from the pulpit.  It's still validating a false narrative.  It still gets...weird.  

But it makes what we're looking at seem less like demonic possession or insanity.  It's more like a masterful act of rhetorical manipulation.  First, there's a clear on-ramp for his right-wing listeners, something to gain rational assent.  It's a Hopkins Study!  Laughter, even faked laughter, alleviates pain!  He's set the stage, offering an appeal to authority, and any reservations or rational objections are lessened.

Then he's faking laughter, being intentionally obvious about it, so that it's clear to his audience what he's doing.  He's not possessed.  He's clearly in control, and being silly.  They laugh at that, of course, both in on the joke and caught up in the joke.  He's got them.  The endorphins and the crowd dynamics kick in, and they're utterly, willingly, in the palm of his hand.

Is Kenneth Copeland a charlatan?  Of course.  But he's good at it.  Smart about it, even.  It's a talent, a craft, a skill, one shared by hucksters and demagogues alike.

One must give credit where credit is due, eh?

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

I have developed, over time, a mental frame-set for understanding the fabric of American Christianity, and the place of most Christian public figures in that frame-set.  There are progressives and conservatives, public theologians and writers, activists and mystics, fundamentalists and liberals.  There are a wild array of denominations and theological perspectives.  On top of that, there's a healthy dollop of send-me-your-money charlatans, name-it-and-claim-it hucksters who live lavish lives fleecing their flocks.

That latter group is well known to me, particularly the leadership of the "Word of Faith" movement.  These are the pastors with the Gulfstreams and the Bentleys, the massive sprawling mansions and...in some cases...their own international airports, built on the dime of their church, tax-free, of course.  Those folk have gotten called out in my sermons on the regular, because their warped version of Christian faith is...well, it's an abomination.

I know these pastors.  And I know the most influential leader of that movement.  

Which is why it was a little odd reading an article about the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism and finding...Kenneth Copeland? 

In today's print version of the Washington Post (which you might have missed if you cancelled your subscription), I read the following, describing a pro-Trump rally at a Louisiana megachurch:

"We have every right there is to tell the Devil: 'You take your hands off this nation!'" roared televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who put on a U.S. flag jacket and red MAGA hat when he took the stage.

The scene could have come from any of the hard-right Christian road shows now barnstorming the country, with a focus on swing states in a razor-close election.  Extremism analysts say the tours serve as both a get-out-the-vote juggernaut and power flex for a Christian supremacist movement that aims to transform the church the same way MAGA did the GOP: by forcing out moderates.

Ministers like Copeland preach that Christianity is the bedrock of American identity and should influence all aspects of society, ideas central to Christian nationalism."

This is a new game for Kenneth, and in focusing on the political extremism, the Post did kinda miss that angle.  Copeland has, for decades, been most notable for both his wildly flamboyant preaching and the brazenness of his grift.  "Christian hard-liner?"  Hardly.   He's the capo dei capi of the Word of Faith Prosperity Gospel movement, owner of that international airport, possessor of multiple jets, and lives in an estate that sprawls even by Texas standards.  Because, again, private jets need room to land, baby!  He is the worldliest of the worldly, the alpha wolf of that pack of wolves.  Politics?  Nationalism?  Those were the realm of the actual fundamentalists, the Jerry Falwells of the world, whose battle was against modernity and liberalism.  Copeland was...and is...in a wholly different business.  There was a time when conservatives had issue with the Word of Faith movement, when they called it out as heretical, unbiblical, and a blatant con.  There was a time when a Republican Senator led an investigation into Copeland, concerned that he was just a scammer hiding behind a Jesus mask.

Now, though, it's Kenneth Copeland we find front and center as the face of right wing Christianity, wrapped in the stars and stripes and wearing a MAGA hat.  Like the rest of the Prosperity Gospel movement, he's been all in with Trump from day one...birds of a feather, and whatnot...but that's got nothing to do with Christian Nationalism, or a country governed by Christian virtues.

He's in it for the same reason that Elon's in it: there's money to be made.  Because freedom of religion means freedom to believe anything you want, eh?  What right does anyone have to say that getting rich off of the Gospel is a bad thing?

It's pure predatory Mammonism from a high priest of AmeriChrist, Inc., being packaged in the flag, injected straight into the veins of the gullible and the desperate, and bears precisely zero resemblance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Post Gets Cancelled

I have subscribed to the Washington Post forever.  As long as I can recall.  

My Dad, being a journalist, always got the paper, and when we were stateside and home in DC, that meant the Post.  Overseas, it'd be a carefully selected assortment of local papers, plus the International Herald Tribune, which was, at the time, a joint venture between the Post and the New York Times.  

When my friend with a paper route went on vacation, I'd fill in for him delivering the paper, back when a Post arrived on the doorstep of every other house.  I'd trundle about in the dark of the morning, pulling a cart full of newsprint, grateful that I wasn't going to be doing this every day.

The arrival of the morning paper has remained a part of my life, and it's been a welcome respite from the chattering distraction of online media.  It's a dying thing, fading away like so much of twentieth century culture, its place usurped by the cuckoo hullabaloo that passes for news on tha socialz.  

The Post's recent decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time since Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were contending has caused an avalanche of subscription cancellations.  My social feeds are full of outraged progressive friends publicly declaring their disgust, which is their right, even if it's a wee bit on the nose.  It's also the tiniest bit ironic.

I mean, what are progressives going to read now?  The New York Times?  I mean, the Times endorsed Harris, straight up.  But Progressives loathe the Times, because the Times is...I don't know...too DavidBrooksy.  The Times is, without question, less progressive than the Post, a distinction that has deepened in the years of the Post's ownership by The Jeff.  In fact, under Bezos, the Post has become notably more intersectional, as a younger leaner newsroom focuses on all of The Issues.  There are times where more-conservative-I will roll my eyes at yet another representation article or thinkpiece centering the margins, not so much because that's offensive, but because it can get a tick monomaniacal.

This is the paper y'all are cancelling?  Do the substantive coverage and the clearly progressive slant of the editorial board not matter?  Do you think that a newspaper editorial board endorsement in 2024 is changing a single vote?  That both of the Trumpists who still read the Post will be, oh, golly, I'd not factored the Post endorsement into the equation?  Of course it's an exercise in capitalism realpolitik by the corporate master of the Post, for whom AWS is a waaaaay more lucrative venture.  Of course Trump is a catastrophic mistake, and a marker of the perilous decay of the Republic.  And sure, it's hard being so pointedly reminded that Democracy Dies in Darkness is a nice slogan, so long as it doesn't threaten the profit margins of our All-Powerful Oligarchs. 

But even as it chafes under the leash of The Jeff, the Post still tries for journalistic integrity, still attempts to shine a light that isn't partisan, but seeks that elusive objectivity so necessary for the functioning of liberal democracy.  There's value there, one that shouldn't be cast aside lightly or impulsively.  

I think back to my father, the journalist.  Dad was also a lifelong Republican.  The sort of Republican who, back when he was young, worked for the party by standing on the street corners in Queens with a bullhorn.  Dad would swear, up and down, that the best president of the 20th Century was...um...Richard Milhous Nixon.  The EPA!  Got us out of Vietnam!  Rapprochement with China!  It was a familiar refrain, and not exactly a thing we ever agreed upon.

But Dad still subscribed to the Post.  

If a Nixon supporter could still subscribe to the Post, well, yeah.

Staying Away from My Crazy X

I've been on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter for over a decade, and I think I'm finally done.

I wasn't ever particularly fond of Twitter as a medium.  It was always too shallow, too reactive, too fragmenting of mind and focus.  I mean, "microblogging?"  It was always going to be the sort of thing that rewarded the hot-take, the provocation, the knee-jerk reaction.  Whenever I'd spend any significant time with it, I'd feel...dumber.  Angrier.  More trivial.

There were ways around that, though.  Tweetdeck worked nicely to focus in on the content that had value.  Artists and musicians.  Science feeds.  Thoughtful, faithful voices and reliable commentators.  Those feeds were delightful.

But now, that's a privilege I'd have to pay for, from a platform that's starting to do real damage.  It's a seething hell-pit of lies and umbrage, and the monstrous falseness of bad-actors there is now nearly impossible to avoid.  "Truth" is completely obscured, and where truth and falsehood are on a level, the pernicious and the absurd tear a soul apart.

Like, say, in the recent and lingering insanity around Hurricane Helene.  When a platform is actively promoting accounts that spread lies, gossip, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and that promotion is sabotaging relief efforts?  It's actively harmful.  That was, for me, the threshold event, the line too far.  I've got enough rightwingers in my feed that I saw the falseness being shared, saw the sudden centering of pure weather-control delusion.  

I also don't appreciate being forced to follow Johnny Ketamine, having him arrive in my feed whether I wish to encounter him or not.  It feels too much like I'm reading the Corporate Approved Newsthoughts, and is too reminiscent of something I read in Mussolini's autobiography.  The key to fascist success, Benito argued, lay not simply in projecting force on the streets, as parades of flag bearing blackshirts performed their dominance display.  It required having your own radio stations and newspapers, creating a media ecosystem that you controlled completely.  Truth Social flailed around trying to become what X already is: an implement of social control right out of Fahrenheit 451.

X had become, preposterously, the "media of record," with "tweets" being taken as quasi-official public statements.  If you're traditional media, and you want a controversial hot-take from some rando, it'll serve that up in a heartbeat. If you're an agitator or professional gadfly, you can burp out a hundred characters and stir an ephemeral controversy.

I didn't want to put in the time there, to constantly react and tend and feed the beast.

It's not necessary for my life.  It's a crap medium for conversation and relationship building.  It fragments our thinking and disrupts communities.  It's a threat to the Republic, and a threat to the integrity of Christian faith.

So I'm done.  

When We Forget How to Pray

Praying in the right way makes a difference.

This statement, to me, is a no-brainer.  Of course it makes a difference.

To others, it might come across as absurd, preposterous, utterly meaningless.  Prayer, or so our secular culture asserts, does nothing.  It's the lazy response of people unwilling to do the work, a willful distraction from dealing with an issue that requires effort on our part.  Offer up a thought or a prayer in the face of a crisis or a tragedy, and you're going to catch some shade.

I've pushed back a little bit on this, and will continue to do so.  Our thoughts guide our actions, eh?  Unless we're thoughtless, mindless automatons, who just do whatever the algorithms targeting us tell us to do.  Prayer, done rightly, grounds us in something greater.  It is thought, sacralized.  It calls for change where the capacity for change lies beyond us.  It orients us towards a deeper purpose.  As taught by Jesus of Nazareth, that deeper purpose is a radical compassion towards neighbor and enemy alike, and a casting aside of the temptations and brokenness of the world.  

Praying, for Christians, is in its most essential nature expressed in the Lord's Prayer, a short, simple call for right relationship with our Creator and a reorienting of our priorities.  Do we pray for wealth?  No.  Just our daily bread.  Do we pray for power over our enemies?  Nope.  We pray for forgiveness and justice.  I explore all of this in THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, my upcoming devotional.  The Lord's Prayer is not a prayer meant to get us what we want, but a prayer meant to change how we want, and who we are.  

If, that is, we are paying attention to the meaning of those words, and haven't forgotten who taught us to use them, and why.  Because even that most fundamental prayer can be nothing more than self-absorbed chattering if our hearts are unchanged by it, or we've lied to ourselves about what Jesus demands of us.  We can pray it absently, oblivious of the demands it places upon us.  We remain unchanged.  We can utter the words, but they can become just a shell of their intention.

Or we can attempt to bend the prayer to our will.  Take, for instance, the invocation of that prayer by the crowd that gathered on the sixth of January in 2021.  Before marching on the Capitol in an effort to violently overthrow the results of an election, a pastor led those gathered in the Lord's Prayer.  It was an affirmation of group identity, a public display of piety, an effort to bless what was to follow with the imprimatur of Jesus.  What was to follow, as it turned out, was violence in the service of a lie.  It was, quite pointedly and in the most accurate use of the term, blasphemous.

The words were invoked, but the content of their character had been torn away.  On that day, those who prayed succumbed to temptation, to the self-serving lie of a brazen demagogue, and gave themselves over to the brokenness that comes when the desire for power rules.

Because it is so easy to forget the most essential nature of prayer. 

New Carpet

Over the last week or so, I've been taking apart our basement.  Twenty five years ago, when we launched into the joy that is American homeownership, one of the very first things we did was replace the basement carpeting.

Our predecessors in the house had a sweet old dog, and, well, the basement smelled of elderly dog and mildew.  Out came the ratty old carpet, and in went brand new high traffic Berber, ready to face the challenges of our growing family.  Two boys grew to adulthood in that basement, tracking in the dirt and debris of life.  There were two decades of spilled wine and dropped plates of food and that one time my I tried to move a leaky chainsaw from the workroom to the yard.  We got a puppy of our own, who lived out her fourteen years of life almost entirely housetrained, except when she wasn't.   When she passed on, we got a new pup, whose whole life in shelters meant he wasn't quite clued in to what to do in a house.  He figured it out after a few haphazard months, at which point we looked at our carpet.

The "new" carpet looked, well, it looked worse after two decades than the one we'd inherited.  It was a ruin.

So we bit the bullet, wandering over to a nearby strip mall where a genial middle-aged Lebanese salesman with a smoke-graveled voice soft-sold us through the process.  

But to get that installed, everything needed to come out of the room, and that's where we keep most of our books.  Seven bookshelves laden with books, gathered over a lifetime.  Books from college courses, not touched since I was younger than my children.  Books that neither my wife nor I can remember reading.  Books neither of us liked.  Books so devoured by time...or my father-in-law's dog...that they were functionally unreadable.

On the other hand, there were magical books.  Brilliant novels.  Insightful nonfiction.  Children's books imbued with memories of little boys right before bedtime.  Books that belonged to my grandparents, some of which had notes written on slips of paper within, little echoes of voices long silent.

So for a week, I went through all of it. That which had value, we kept.  That which might have value to others, we donated.  That which was worthless, we discarded.  For the latter two categories, a quick check by the missus, to be sure I'd not consigned a beloved book of hers to oblivion.  Even with both eyes over all of it, there was a whole bunch of worthless stuff.  

Every single tome in that room was considered, reviewed, and sorted.  I dismantled every shelf.

Reflecting on that this last weekend as I recombobulated the recarpeted room, I found myself thinking about deconstruction with soft new carpet beneath my feet.

"Deconstruction," or so it's called in certain faith circles, describes the process of taking apart one's faith.  

Challenge every assumption!  Tear it all down!  In doing so, or so the argument goes, you'll end up with something that's more authentic.  Unless you're willing to abandon every presumption, you're not really deconstructing.  Embrace the utter uncertainty, and from the shadows of the unknown, a new and more genuine way of being will emerge.  So the argument has gone, ever since I first heard it many moons ago in my days amongst the Emergent tribe.

There's a certain logic to that, to the application of criticism to everything.   

But whenever I consider deconstruction as a methodology of the faithful, it falls short.  Forget everything you have learned, cries the Dismantler of All Things, and I say, no, I don't think I'm going to do that.  That's a fool's errand, quite literally.  There are hard-won truths that shouldn't be set aside, values that can't be cut away without savaging one's integrity as a person. Those truths, once discovered, aren't something you abandon.  You refine them, sure.  But you don't start from scratch, over and over again.  You don't pull the rug out from under yourself.

Take our basement, for obvious metaphoric example.   Change happened.  Hundreds of books vanished, along with old dead electronics and useless bricabrac.  Dust was cleaned from everything.  A table that served no purpose but to clutter up the space was moved into our storage area.  

But I didn't just toss everything away.  Every change was a considered choice.  And the process of change was measured against a clearly defined goal.  We love books, and want them in our life.  We like the way the space has come to be.  That's not to say that change shouldn't happen, but insofar as we are the agents of that change, it should reflect what matters to us.  It is a guided process.

With intention, our books and our home theater system went through a sorting and staging, everything placed just so.  When time came to reassemble the room, it came back together quickly and neatly, newer, better, and yet at the same time familiar.  

Whenever we change the place that we call home, we must do so with an end in mind.

What Lurks in the Hearts of Men

Last night, as darkness fell and the temperatures dipped into the upper forties, we changed our Thursday night routine a bit.  Typically, Thursday nights are when Mom comes over, has dinner, and we'll watch a movie together.  "Mom Movie Night" has been going since Dad died, and is a continuation of the movie night I'd do over at their place when I took a caregiving shift every Thursday.

It's a fun little tradition, but every once in a while, it's good to mix it up.

Instead of a movie, we went old school.  In our hearth, the first fire of the season crackled away happily.  The wood, from a long dead chestnut oak, one I'd bucked and split and stacked myself back in February.  I'd worried that it might not have cured enough, but I needn't have...it lit instantly, and burned bright, casting warmth and flickering light into our living room.  Mom settled into a rocking chair near to the fire, a pleasure for old bones.

Our diversion for the evening was an episode of The Shadow, a classic radio-age drama from nearly a century ago, the one that begins with the voice of Orson Welles melodramatically intoning the catchphrase: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow, of course, after which there's an evil laugh so utterly absurd you can't help but grin at it.

This being a product of America in the 1930s, it was sponsored by Clean Burning Blue Coal, the very finest Pennsylvania Anthracite.  Nothing, we hear, is more healthy for your family in winter than Clean Burning Blue Coal in your home furnace, available now from your local dealer.  Ah, America, how little ye have changed.

I've listened to old radio dramas before, and they're a very different creature from the entertainments of this era.  I enjoy movies, particularly those that involve visual artistry.  I enjoy gaming, too, again, particularly when games do something unique and brilliant.  But practical effects and CGI aren't quite as magical as that sense you start to get in the depths of a well crafted radio drama.

It's far less passive.  Through an admixture of sound effects and deftly directive writing, you find yourself gradually succumbing to a sense of place.  You're in that car, chasing the villains.  You're in that crypt, slowly filling with water.  I've often wondered about the impact of this sort of storytelling on the minds of a culture.  Our capacity for imagination is engaged as a partner, in the same way that it would have been around the fire in times primeval as the tribe's storyteller spun out another tale, in the same way that it is when we are deep in the thrall of a riproaring pageturner. 

If we are shown everything, I often wonder, does it impact our capacity to imagine?  We, who see and hear everything we want, who can disappear into virtual worlds crafted in intricate detail, which require nothing from us at all?  

Weighty questions, but last night, they were of less interest.  

Instead, we enjoyed the primal pleasures of a woodfire's warmth and the spell cast by a well told yarn.  

"They" Are Coming for Your Jobs

Con-men, pickpockets, and parlor magicians all have one significant thing in common: Distraction.

Distraction is what makes sleight of hand possible, as the magician subtly shifts your attention from the thing they're actually doing to the thing they want you to be seeing.  With your eyes and mind focused on one thing, you miss the card being moved, or the ball being palmed.  It's magic!  How delightful!

Pickpockets are a little less delightful, but the principle remains the same.  There's a bump against your shoulder, and a muttered excuse me, and you don't notice your phone or your wallet snicking out of your pocket.  Years back, a group of Gyp...sorry, Roma...kids tried that on me in Italy, but they were still learning, and the little hand that clumsily reached for my wallet only got a whack as a reward.  Pickpocketing's a dying art, I fear.

Con-men and scammers, though, are now everywhere, and they're far more successful at their trade.  The key, again, is to keep your mark distracted, off balance, and so focused on what you want them to focus on that they miss what you're actually doing.

Like, say, the three men above.  One is a casino magnate and reality television star.  Another is a private equity venture capitalist.  The third is a tech bro, and the richest man in the world.

They've been saying a whole lot about immigrants stealing jobs from Hard Working Americans, dirty violent immigrants with bad genetics, all here to take what rightfully belongs to Us.  "They" are the enemy, the thieves of our future.

But who is saying this?

The casino magnate and reality TV star?  

He's a master of the art of distraction.  "Fill the space with bullxxxx," as Steve Bannon described it, and .  Bad dirty lazy dark-skinned foreigners coming for your jobs!  Communist Fascist Marxists! His sketchy profiteering business ventures...NFTs, cheap Bibles, watches marked up 200%...would have once caused outrage, but not if that outrage is turned against migrant workers.

Who is saying this?

The private equity venture capitalist is claiming that immigrants are stealing jobs, and, notably, buying all of the houses that should otherwise go to Americans.  But the big trend, lately, is not for immigrants making minimum or subminimum wage as day laborers and farmworkers to somehow manage a $500,000 mortgage.  It's for private equity firms to snap up single family homes, which they then rent out at a premium.  But, hey, don't look at that!  

Who is saying this?

The Tech Bro and Richest Man in the World is pouring billions and billions into AI and robotics.  He's pitching a robot car, along with self-driving trucks and buses.  He's pitching androids.  To do what?  What are those for?  What is his vision? 

To replace Uber drivers, delivery drivers, and truck drivers.  To replace line workers and service workers and front desk clerks.  To replace forklift drivers and warehouse staff.  Because if you can lease a bot to do the work, why would you even need human beings?  You wouldn't.  It's part of the great shiny vision of the future, a future where the Workers of the World can't Unite because there's no more work left for them to do.

It's utterly, damnably obvious.  

If you're not distracted by the shine and sparkle in your eyes.

Descending into Crazytown

 

As a boy, I found the Second World War endlessly fascinating.  I'd devour books on the subject, and found WWII aircraft endlessly fascinating.  

I mean, I still have a favorite aircraft, all these years later.  It's the P-38 Lightning, naturally, it being the fighter of choice of Richard Bong, the most successful ace of the war.  Twin engines meant greater survivability, it packed a heavy punch, and while it wasn't nimble, it could outclimb almost all of its adversaries.  Why do I still know all of this?  It's just in there.  All this stuff still bops around in my brain.

I remember, too, talking with my maternal grandfather about the war.  Grandfather was a mathematician, and in that capacity worked on the home front as part of the science-side of the war effort.  But his cousin died aboard the Arizona when it was sunk by Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor.  One summer, when visiting them down in Georgia, I asked him about the Germans.

I found Nazi Germany confusing when I was a boy, because while it had some really cool aircraft, it was also obviously and purely evil.  Every defining feature of evil was present: lies, brutality, horror, the desire to dominate, blame, bitterness, and a valorization of violence.  And yet Germans, insofar as I was aware of them in the late 1970s, weren't monsters.  They weren't inherently stupid people, and were often quite the opposite.  They made rock-solid cars.  They were our friends again.

My question, to my Grandfather: what happened?  How could a people who were really no different from us do such obviously horrific things?

His response came after some reflection.  "I think, honestly, that they all went crazy.  Really actually crazy."

Grandfather introduced me, then, to the idea of mass psychosis.  An entire group of human beings can become consumed by the same collective delusion.

Which, clearly, is where we are now.

We are in a place where vaccines are considered a Big Pharma Conspiracy.  Where crazy blatant racist lies against migrants legally in this country are spouted at the highest levels. Where an entire party is organized around a Big Lie.  "Truth" is no longer grounded in objective reality.  

And Lord, does that go deep.

There are rumblings about fluoride in water.  Talk of secret cabals controlling the weather is now acceptable political discourse.  The idea that we are being subjugated by chemtrails is taken as a topic of serious conversation.

I mean, fluoride?  WEATHER CONTROL?  CHEMTRAILS? 

These are markers of the vintage 20th century paranoid delusional, definitively, stereotypically so, the sort of thing you expect to hear That Guy talking about.  You know That Guy, the grizzled one six houses down, whose high-fenced yard is cluttered with old rusted hulks, who has ten bolts on his door and cameras everywhere, and who either looks at you furtively from behind his blinds or buttonholes you for a nice long wild-eyed harangue.

If this is what we're talking about as a people, seriously talking about, there's no question that a substantial portion of the population has kind of lost it.

And in this Republic, they're all voters.

Guess I should fasten my seatbelt, and put my chair and tray table in their locked and upright positions.