Sleek Economies

I've got a thing for nice cars.  I always have.  I was the kid doodling jacked-up Mustangs and Barracudas on the margins of my geometry notebooks when I should have been paying attention in class.  I subscribed to Car and Driver when I was fourteen.  I went with my dad to help haggle for his new car when I was 15.

The vehicles I've owned in  my adult life haven't reflected that hankering.  They've been practical and inexpensive, because my Scots blood can't abide with the thought of spending more money than absolutely necessary.  I also prefer efficient cars, because...well...the planet isn't exactly cooling.  Still, the desire remains, and where my day-to-day is functional, every once in a while, I'll rent something that scratches my itch for power and comfort.

So when the wife said, "hey, let's rent a car for our upcoming road trip to Nashville," I knew exactly what I wanted.  We were travelling just under two thousand miles total over nine days in a rambling VA-NC-TN-KY-WV-PA-WV-MD-VA loop, serving up a mix of mountains and long stretches of superslab, and nothing but nothing is better at devouring miles than a Benz.  

The best of the Benzes is their flagship S Class, particularly in its W222 form, which was produced from 2014 to 2020.  Big, luxe, comfy, and powerful, it was a land-yacht designed for the Autobahn.  With a standard four -liter twin-turbo V8 putting out a nudge over four hundred and sixty horsepower from beneath that long hood, it's serenely capable of humming along all day at 110 while your seat gives you a hot stone massage and lightly perfumed air wafts through the cabin.  It's the sort of car driven by old-money patricians and Russian oligarchs.

Back when people bought cars, that is.

Americans don't really drive cars all that much these days, preferring Compact Utility Vehicles, SUVs, and light trucks.  We like to ride high, and the long low sleekness 1980s-me had always assumed would be the norm for future cars in the 2020s never came to pass.  That means taller and blockier profiles, which means aerodynamic inefficiency, which bites deep into our national fuel use.

That comes at a cost as we travel the wide open spaces of our nation, and I was reminded of this as I reviewed the fuel consumption data at the end of the trip.  

That big ol' Benz, with which we...er..."made good time"...over mountains and plains, as state after state whisked on by?  

Over the whole trip, it averaged just a notch over 27 miles to the gallon.  That means, excessive and powerful though the car was, it was more efficient than the average American light vehicle, which...according to the EPA in 2022...got 26.4 miles to the gallon.  

With two of us in the car, we got more Person-Miles-to-the-Gallon than had I taken the same trip alone in a Prius.  It was nearly twice as efficient as flying.

Not, of course, that being ecologically minded was the point of our trip, but it was a peculiar truth to encounter.

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.

This is My Rifle

We still know so little about Thomas Matthew Crooks.  Almost nothing.  Not that we care, not really.  Who was he, again?  That was, what, whole weeks ago now?  Who even remembers that?

Still, as Crooks enters the dismal company of American presidential assassins, attempted and actual, it would seem that we'd know something about him.  But we don't.  Not his motivations, not his precise state of mind, nothing about what drove him up onto that sloping rooftop.  He'd have no lines to sing in a dark Sondheim musical.  

But we do know a great deal about his rifle.

It's an "AR Style 556 rifle," or so the reports told us, which is a fairly vague description.  That type of rifle is produced by scores and scores of manufacturers.    There are hundreds of variants.  Saying you were shot with an AR is like saying you were hit by an SUV.  It could mean a whole range of things.  It's almost meaningless.

What the AR is is the universal American rifle.  It's utterly generic, the domestic equivalent of the Russian AK.  

So we know that.

We also know, more significantly, when and why the specific rifle Crooks used was purchased.  We know what makes that rifle unique.  

That particular AR is just over a decade old, and was purchased by Thomas Matthew Crooks' father in 2013.  Why was it purchased then?  It was purchased then because, after the Sandy Hook massacre, there was a real push to ban such weapons.   Sandy Hook was the massacre of twenty children between the ages of six and seven, along with six of their teachers, in the event you've forgotten.  A mother, observing that her son was increasingly insane and obsessed with violence, decided that the best thing to do was purchase him a gun and take him to the range.  She was the first to die.  Then he went to his old elementary school.

In American gun culture, that horror did not cause a rethinking.  It caused two things instead: first, denial, as the far-right refused to accept that such a thing could happen, and came up with an array of wildly false conspiracy theories, and; second, a panicked rush to buy ARs "before it was too late."  Before they were banned.  Before that right was well-regulated.  The rifle used by Thomas Matthew Crooks that day in Pennsylvania was one of those rifles, purchased by a father of a then elementary-aged child.  The ban, thanks to the Republican party and American gun culture, never happened.

So what does that rifle tell us?  It doesn't speak, of course.  It's just an inanimate object.  But human cultures, idolatrous as they are, imbue such objects with totemic significance.  

That specific rifle represents a particular type of mindset, and a particular spirit in our age.  It's the spirit that sees a weapon used to butcher elementary school children, and says: "I must own that.  I feel threatened unless I have that."  It represents a spirit of fear, and a spirit of retributive violence, and a seductive spirit of pathological selfishness masquerading as liberty.

Following the assassination attempt, there was much rumbling on the far right about how "they" had tried to kill Trump.  But as is so often the case when someone makes vague and ominous statements about "they" saying this or "they" doing that, what that person means is "I."

The through line from right-wing ideology and gun culture to that rifle is as bright and clear as a summer day in Pennsylvania.  

China, America, and Climate

There are things about the American response to China that make little sense to me.

On the one hand, sure, they're not a republic.  I prefer the liberties of speech, movement, and action that are for now still my birthright as an American.  As frustrating as the squabulous ruckus of democratic process might be, there's still much to be said for the protection of individual liberties.  The forcible suppression of religion and ethnic minorities is morally unworthy.  The silencing of those who hold a society to account for injustices and corruption leads only to rot and failure.

Yet most of America's beef with China seems to be economic, which is simply absurd.  Sure, the Chinese are now a global manufacturing powerhouse, supplanting the vastly weakened American industrial base.  Sure, most of that capacity once belonged to us.  But why did that happen?

Remember in 1992, when the Chinese invaded America and took all of our factories by force?

Of course not.  China didn't steal our industry.  American CEOs did.  Wall Street did.  Eager to plump up profit margins and fatten their own absurd salaries, folks like Tim Cook at Apple simply shipped America's industrial might to China.  The Chinese weren't about to say no.  I mean, why would they?  Can you blame them?  For them, it was all win, because they're playing the long game.

I mean, we know they are.  Chinese leadership isn't thinking about the outrage du jour, third quarter profits, or fretting about vacillations in poll numbers.  I mean, why would they care about poll numbers?   Ahem. 

They're looking to what they feel will benefit China not just ten years from now, or twenty five years from now, but a hundred years from now.

Which is why it's instructive to look at how they're approaching the climate crisis, and engagement with renewable energy.  

We Americans are in a reactionary cycle, pushing back against electric cars and solar and wind.  I'll admit that electric cars are a silly solution.  I mean, sure, they're quiet and fast, but dude.  Efficiency, thy name ain't "car."  Buses and trains and a functioning public transportation infrastructure are exponentially more efficient and sustainable.  Back when America was rising to its mid-twentieth century economic height, that's how we got around.  It was at least a viable option, which it is not now in America.  

The opposition to solar, wind, and other renewables?  It's borderline psychotic, and an ideological dissonance.  If you can draw power from the sun that falls on your own land, why is this a bad thing?  If the wind that rustles through your trees can light your home, why would we have beef with that?  Why would we want less efficient bulbs and toilets?  And why are we so programmed to desire large, energy-hogging homes and cars?  Since when were thrift and ingenuity problems for conservatives?

Yet here we are.

The Chinese aren't on the same course.

The Chinese are building electric cars, sure.  But they're going all in on the whole thing.   Unfettered by legal constraints or...paradoxically...environmental regulations, they're building a vast high speed rail network.  They're turning their newfound industrial might to the mass production of solar panels in unprecedented quantities, so many that industrial concerns in the West are up in arms about anti-competitive practices.  It's a battle they've already won, as 80% of the world's solar is produced in China.  They're preparing for a harsher climate.  They're also preparing for the era when fossil fuel supplies are fading.

They're not competing with us.  At this point, we're not even playing the same game.  

Do certain Americans assume this is because they're "woke?"  They're Marxist, which is why I'd rather not live in China, but the CCP is Chinese first.  China is on many levels deeply conservative, which is why...after some naive initial missteps...the communist party there has survived.

They are preparing, with the vision of a culture that spans millennia, for a future that will come.

And we are not.  

Torture and the Integrity of Christian Faith

If you call yourself a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, you cannot participate in or justify torture.  That cannot be so, if your faith is to have integrity.

It would seem an obvious statement, but then, so little can be taken for granted with we human beings.   In the United States, surveys indicate that fully half of the population believes that torture can be justified.  At the same time, eighty three percent of the American population considers themselves Christian.

At a bare minimum and assuming the least possible overlap between those categories, this would mean that over a hundred million Americans are 1) Christian by self-understanding and 2) believe that the torture of prisoners can be justified.

This seems...problematic.

If you follow Jesus of Nazareth, he requires certain things of you.  He expects you do to do more than just fall on your knees saying, "Lord, Lord."  The Christian walk is considerably more than that.  You show your faith when you do what he has asked.  How do we treat others?  More significantly, how do we act towards our enemies?  These things are the measure of our faith, which is not an airy abstraction.  The more violent and coercive we are, the more we allow violence towards others to have a hold in us, the further we fall from being able to call Jesus Lord and have that word have any meaning.

And yet, again, there's that hundreds of millions number.

I know there are all sorts of hypothetical situations that folks spin out there, usually involving nuclear device countdowns in major metropolitan areas.  "You'd have to torture the terrorist then, or all those innocent people would die!  What, don't you care about innocent people?"  These are fabulistic absurdities created to distract the moral attention.  "What if a code key for that nuclear device had been surgically embedded in Jennifer Lawrence's brain, and you only had ten minutes to get it out?  You'd have to lobotomize her then!  What, you care more about America's Celebrity Sweetheart (tm) than the lives of innocent people?"  Such arguments are childish phantasms.

"What right have you to judge who is and isn't a Christian," I have also heard.  As a sentient being, I can observe what Jesus taught, which is remarkably consistent as a system of ethics.  I can observe what he taught, and see that it gives no ground to justify such an action.  If under no circumstances would Jesus have condoned brutalizing another person, and you condone it?  It is both self-evident and logically necessary that you are not acting in accordance with the heart of your faith.

There is nothing, nothing whatsoever, in the teachings of Jesus that can be used legitimately to justify torture.  In the Bible, there are descriptions of torture, acts of brutality inflicted on prisoners.  Those acts are, invariably and without exception, inflicted by the unrighteous upon the righteous.  Jesus was tortured, of course.  As were Paul, and Peter, and most of the early apostles.  There is no Biblical record, or biblical warrant, for Christians doing the same to others.  None.

Romans 13 gets carted out here, that passage where Paul talks about the state having the right to wield the sword.  But remember: this is coming from Paul, who himself had remained steadfastly nonviolent as he was beaten, abused, and imprisoned by that pagan, imperial state.  A state that would ultimately execute him for his beliefs.  It cannot be considered a legitimate sanction for Christian violence.

To those hundred million souls, I would say, again: your belief that torture can be justified--under any circumstances, and for any reason--stands in irreconcilable tension with your assertion that Jesus matters to you.

The two cannot be integrated.

That's not unusual.  Very few human beings are entirely consistent, and many of us believe things or do things that violate our stated moral purpose.  I am no different, and I will not claim to be.  I get irrationally angry.  I hold grudges. I feel greed and envy and the desire for power.  I lust.  Sometimes, on a bad day, I do all of those things at once.

What I try not to do, insofar as I am able, is lie to myself that all of that is just fine with Jesus.  And as what Jesus asks of me is not some little compartment, but my whole self, that's a problem.

Tortured Conservatism

I am a liberal.  When I encounter a reality, I only come to a determination of its worth after considering it for a while.  Which means, paradoxically enough, that I do not reflexively reject all things conservative.

For example, few things, in my experience, are more anathema to conservatives than the absence of a moral core.

If you claim to hold to a set of values, but seem willing to compromise on your values whenever it seems politically expedient or personally convenient, then--by the metric of conservatism--you are an immoral person.  

Untrustworthy.  Vacillating.  Weak of spirit.  Ignoble.  Unworthy of respect.

If, on that big test, you realize that you have an opportunity to pass it by cheating and you take that opportunity, you have failed morally.  If you beat out competitors and get a business contract by fudging numbers, that victory means nothing.  You are personally compromised.  If, in a committed relationship, you choose to engage in a secret tryst with someone else--and aren't caught--your getting away with it means nothing.  You have still fundamentally violated your commitment.

What matters is not your desire, or your success.  What matters is your integrity, your commitment, your honor.  If you fail to fulfill that duty to your values, you have failed as a conservative.

Our nation's willingness to torture represents just such a failure.  

It is a failure because it violates our honor as a nation.  What makes America great, and a country worthy of respect, is that it stands on principles of liberty that transcend even our own identity as a nation.  The freedoms we so vigorously defend aren't just ours.  They are self-evident truths for all people, written into the nature of existence by our Creator.  We value human beings, and the integrity of individual liberty.  It is what makes us different from our enemies.

When we allow ourselves to act in ways that are monstrous and ignoble for the purposes of expediency, we fail.  When we view any means to an end as acceptable, we have ceased to be moral persons, and a moral nation.

"It's not torture.  It's enhanced interrogation techniques," say the lawyers and the politicians and the apparatchiks, spinning and obfuscating and equivocating.  Language, however, is less important than reality.  The Chinese call their vast network of slave-labor prisons laogai, or "Reform through Labor" camps.  The Soviet gulags were called "corrective labor camps."  The language does not matter.  It is the action that matters.  "Enhanced interrogation techniques" include drowning, beatings, exposure to extreme cold, forced standing, "stress positions," and mock executions.  Those techniques are torture, as we would rightly call them if inflicted on an American soldier in the hands of an enemy.

"To say this disrespects our war fighters and intelligence community," cry some.  This is falsehood, a perversion of patriotism, wrapping excrement in the flag.  What matters, if you care about the values espoused by our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, is that you live them out.  That we have soldiers and spies is meaningless.  So does North Korea.  So does Iran.  What matters are the values and principles they are defending.  It is what makes us different.  We treat human beings differently from our enemies, or we are no different.

"It gets results," cry others.  This has truth in it, the sort of truth that makes for the most pernicious lies.  Human creatures, subjected to intense pain, will do whatever it takes to end that pain.  When ISIS beats, abuses, and tortures a captive into "converting" to their perverse and monstrous faith, is that a "result?"  Or is that a lie, told to end the suffering?

"It kept us safe," say still others, stirring our fears, appealing to our craven self-interest.  Bad things would have happened, we are told, ominously.  Bad things did happen.  We stepped away from what makes us a nation worth living in, and worth fighting for.  We dishonored ourselves.  Our founding fathers held such moral cowardice in contempt.

Conservatism, in its most gracious form, is a worthy thing. It is about integrity, about having clear morals and ethics, which you pursue even if you yourself do not benefit from them.

What the warped ethic of the right-wing would have us believe is that America can never be dishonored, no matter what she does.  Such a belief not only betrays the dignity of our republic, but also the essence of what it means to be both honorable and conservative.

Unaccompanied Children

The crisis du jour, outside of the eternal mess of the Middle East, is the arrival of thousands upon thousands of children on the doorstep of the United States.

With bleak economic conditions and violence in their streets, central American families are giving their children up, sending them off to be abandoned at the border of the United States.

Over fifty thousand children so far this year, which in and of itself is a mind boggling number.  Our response, of course, is the usual.  From some quarters, the usual ones, there have been calls for crackdowns.  More border patrols!  More security!  Take the hard line!  That appears to be the course we're on, but it's a problematic one.

These are, of course, children, which makes the hard line just a tiny bit more difficult.  Sure, poverty and desperation are being manipulated by those who profit from the transporting of the children.  Rumor and mis-communication also haven't helped.  But those things are immaterial to the reality at hand.  If we take a hard line as a nation, turning a cold hard shoulder to children who arrive helpless on our doorstep, then we'll have crossed a line as a nation from "being concerned about our borders" to "being evil."  It's a tricky wicket for those who prefer fulminating absolutism as their response of choice.

What's hardest to grasp, though, is just why a parent would send a child off to a distant land alone.

It isn't an act of calculation.  It's an act of desperation.  If you have children, you know just how hard such an action would be.  How desperate would you need to be to take that action?  To pack your child up, and send them off to the mercy of an unknown shore?

How can we understand that level of desperation?  How can we frame it, particularly those of us who draw from the long story of my faith?

My own denomination has made earnest statements about the issue, both heartfelt and practical, although a little lacking in theology or clear grounding in our faith.  And that ground is there, without question.  One image seems to pop most cleanly for me from the great sacred story of scripture.

A mother living under intolerable oppression casts her child away to an utterly uncertain future, abandoning them to fate, hoping against hope that they will survive.  That child washes up at the feet of the powerful.

The scriptural analogy seems so obvious.  Am I the only one who sees this?

Perhaps it's the scale of it that makes us miss it.

Fifty thousand Jocheveds, and the Nile running thick with baskets?   What a strange and terrible age we must live in.

Freedom, Faith, and the Jefferson Bible

The original text, handmade by Thomas Jefferson.

Yesterday, the boys, the missus and me decided to head out of the house and roll into downtown DC to do a little museum hopping.  We're remarkably blessed to live so close to the Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall, which are 1) an amazing resource open to the American people and 2) free.   Gotta love you some "free."

There were a couple of exhibits that struck our fancy.  The little guy was big into hitting an exhibit of American military history.  The big guy, while feigning early-teen disdain, called our attention to a display of art based on the photoluminescent creatures that live in the ocean's depths.   My wife was looking forward to an interactive display, in which you could blend your facial features with that of a proto-human.   I will not share that picture, although it was amusing, for reasons having to do with wanting to sleep in my own bed tonight.

The two donor Bibles.

Me?  Well, I wanted to see what is popularly known as the Jefferson Bible.

As a religious studies graduate of Mr. Jefferson's University, this little tome has some iconic power for me, and seeing the thing itself, right there in the case, well, that was cool.

In the event you've not been aware of it, the Jefferson Bible is Jefferson's fairly straightforward attempt to create a text that he found amenable to his Enlightenment Deist sensibilities.   Jefferson, being an eminently rational and philosophical soul, well, he had some trouble with the Bible generally.   His faith...and he was a faithful person, in his own way...really did not extend to being able to embrace the more supernatural elements of the Christian faith.  Miracles?  Angels you could hear on high?  Ancient legal and purity codes?   He just couldn't get there.

Still, he'd been impressed enough with what he had learned about the teachings of Jesus to feel they were worth reading and studying.   So he created his own "Bible," entitled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

He did not do so by engaging in a careful scholarly re-translation from the most ancient and reliable of texts.  Nope.   Instead, he took a couple of bibles.  Then, he cut out the parts he liked, and pasted them into another book.   That's it.  Hey presto, Jefferson's "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

It's striking for a variety of reasons.

First, given the context, it was a relatively...um...bold thing to do.  There were plenty of proto-Americans who would have looked rather unfavorably on slicing up a Bible.  There are some even today, although if they've ever cut and pasted a verse into a document, really, honey, it's the same thing.  And you don't get that "Founding Father" status unless you're willing to stand up boldly for what you believe in.

Second, I was struck yesterday at how Ol' Tee Jay managed to inadvertently create a document that looks remarkably like the "Q" source proposed by redaction criticism, that collection of sayings and teachings that both Matthew and Luke most likely had in common, but which has been lost to history.   That was, of course, not his intent.   Jefferson couldn't have cared less about the connection to prophetic literature or to Torah.  He was a busy man, what with a nation to create and all.  He was just pickin' the stuff he liked, without really focusing on the way that the text linked to other texts. 

Third, in creating this document,  Jefferson was doing what most Bible readers do anyway.  We read the bits we like, and focus on the bits we like, and ignore the rest.  We may not go all kindergarten on it with our scissors and paste, but we're perfectly capable of doing that in our minds.   And Lord knows, we do plenty of it, constructing our own understanding of what is valuable and what is not.

There's both necessity and danger in that, of course.  If we get our sorting right, we end up focusing on the parts of the Bible that should be most radically defining.   If we get it wrong?  Well, that can take us into all sorts of odd and delusional places.   But Mistah Jeffahson was discerning enough that he caught most of the good stuff.

Finally, staring at this Jesus mashup cobbled together by a bright soul nearly 200 years ago, I found myself being thankful for the country that he helped form, a country in which we're free to believe as we wish, and where no human being can force belief upon any other human being.   We can persuade and argue and debate.  But we remain, within those boundaries, wholly free.

On this Thanksgiving week, that's a vital and real blessing to remember.

The Flag of the Fifty-Second State

I find myself once again lamenting that the American Revolution is over.

It is, you know.  We can tell this because for all of the flag-waving and Constitution-thumping that passes for red-meat patriotism in our Republic, we are completely uninterested in any spread of our system of government beyond its current portion of the North American continent.

On the one hand, we proclaim that our form of government is an expression of a universal, the greatest and most marvelous and most...cough..."exceptional" way of living together that humankind has ever discovered.  All should look to us, and want to have what we have.  On many levels, this is true.  Our freedoms are truly God-given. 

But our actions as a nation show we really don't believe it.

When a people rise up against tyranny, yearning to breathe free, it does not even begin to occur to us that perhaps...perhaps...one day the United States could be more than just American.  The values of our Constitution are not viral, not on a global scale. We are not, gosh, what's the word, "evangelical" about our Republic, not when it comes to actually having others become a part of us.  When we reached the rolling breakers of Hawaii, we said "Aloha" to Manifest Destiny.

That's the "Goodbye" Aloha, not the "Welcome to Honolulu International Airport, I'm wearing a grass skirt and giving you flowers" Aloha.  Just to be clear.

We do not think that other peoples...of different colors, and speaking different languages, and of different faiths or no faith at all...could ever be a part of "We The People."

It does not even begin occur to us that perhaps the best way to spread freedom would be to stop propping up "our" despots and pouring out military aid, but to say...we have a system of government that will guarantee you the right to be free and to have a voice.  Join us!  In exchange, you'll get two Senators and as many representatives as you deserve, and equal protection under our laws.  We mean what we say, dagnabbit!

In an alternate universe, perhaps that might be true.  You know, the one where Puerto Rico was the fifty first state. 

But in this universe?  Here, it's not even an option.  Instead, we continue to prattle on about how wonderful and exceptional we are, while showing the world through our actions that we really don't mean it.

America's Always Done It That Way

America is, or so we are often told by people who should know better, a Christian nation. It's a fairly common refrain among those on the far right, those who would self-describe as ultra-conservative. They see resisting change as a battle against the forces that are gradually, insidiously turning this country into some unrecognizable socialist horror. You know, like the People's Republic of Canada. Change is to be resisted.

I found myself yesterday musing at the irony in this.

Conservatives in America tend to be church folks. And church leaders know that the kiss of death for any church comes when it is governed by one particular and pernicious phrase: "We've Always Done It That Way." As a theory for the primary cause of church demise and decay, it's well tested. If a congregation is not open to change, not open to responding creatively to the new challenges in its community and the world, then it will die. It might take a while. But that church will eventually calcify and crumble and fail, because it has ceased to be a living entity.

Here I'm not talking about changing the central governing values of the church. I'm talking about changing the structural and procedural mechanics of church. You know, the crap that doesn't matter. Big, vibrant churches...which, paradoxically, are often the conservative ones...know this. You modify the form, while maintaining the essential content.

Observing the intensity of the resistance to some seemingly obvious and necessary structural changes in our country, I marvel that a nation filled with successful churches should be so ferociously resistant to change. Take, for instance, our approach to transporting our selves and our stuff. A car-based system of mass transportation is obscenely inefficient, abusively wasteful of both our time and our natural resources. But we LIIIIKE it. It's the way we've always done it. It feels comfortable. So even though it can't be sustained, we resist any efforts to change it. Just drill more! Just make more roads...so long as you don't make us pay for them. And keep gas cheap, so we can drive our big lumbering Suburbans just the way the Founding Fathers intended.

We choose to ignore that things are changing. We refuse to realize that the easy and abundant energy that comes from carbon-based sources of energy was the only thing that makes the inefficiencies in our system possible. We close our eyes to the approaching end of the Oil Age. We are, as a culture, like that college-town church that clings to organs and stained glass and high pulpits and robes. It might, for a time, survive. But eventually, clinging to forms and structures that no longer reflect the reality around us will be the end of us. Assuming we're not dead already.

Any halfway competent pastor could tell you that.

Mental Illness and the Courts

This last Friday, I began my day by going to court. It was, finally, time for the hearing for the young man who...impelled by voices...barricaded the entrance to my church. Though the church itself did not press charges, the state did. Law enforcement tends not to smile upon people who refuse to respond to a direct request.

We'd been praying for him in worship, but prayer needs to stir action, and so I'd doing more than that. I'd visited with his family, and visited with him in the state psychiatric institution where he was involuntarily admitted.

So it felt rather peculiar to be subpoenaed by the prosecution as a witness against him. That felt particularly odd as I sat in the courtroom with his family.

The courtroom experience was interesting. There seemed to be two clear types of case before the court that morning.

Most of the folks there were there on minor charges, like possession of drug paraphernalia or DUIs. They came in under their own power. Most had either lawyers or public defenders. Things for them went rather quickly, usually with a guilty plea followed by a commitment to do a treatment program.

Then there were other folks, whose charges were equally minor...typically trespassing. But they didn't enter the court on their own.

They were brought in handcuffed and in shackles, with officers flanking them. These folks appeared to have one primary thing in common. No, they weren't supervillains. They weren't unusually violent, or charged with heinous crimes.

Instead, every one of the shackled souls were rather obviously mentally ill. Several were homeless, or had been until they'd either disturbed the peace or been arrested for trespassing on private property. They were coming from custody at state run institutions. Some seemed to really struggle to understand what was happening to them. Others seemed clearly disoriented and/or agitated.

It was clear that for most of these individuals, cycling endlessly between incarceration and homelessness was the norm. It was the pattern of their lives. One fellow in particular had been through the court more than 25 times. If anything, the whole system seemed woefully dysfunctional, part of a feedback loop that crammed the docket of the court and left, really, no-one for the better.

Back in the middle part of the 20th century, folks like this were typically part of either state-run institutions or homes. But in the 1980s, as part of the "everything government does is wrong" movement, those institutions were defunded and shuttered. The idea was noble: let's put people out into their communities. Let's have localities care for them. Of course, localities didn't have the resources or the infrastructure to deal with the folks being dropped on their doorstep...so they didn't. Now, thirty years later, our mental health system is, for the indigent, desperately threadbare. Left to wander unsupervised and unmedicated, they are funnelled into our system of justice...and out...and in again. They do not compute.

The young man whose actions brought me into court that day seemed more lucid, and had served time, and was released into the custody of a confused but caring family. My hope and prayer is that he escapes the pointless, benighted cycle that our society inflicts on those afflicted with mental illness.

Tightening Our Belts

Over the last six months, I've been trying to get back into shape. Pastoring is a sedentary vocation, and by the end of last year I had managed to amass some pretty considerable mass. At five nine point five and one-seventy, I wasn't technically obese. I was only on the very cusp of being overweight.

But the weight I had was all nearly entirely fat. I still had the stick-like legs I've always had, but muscle tone was barely discernable. I'd fallen out of the habit of regular and intense exercise, through a combination of my own inertia and the stressors of life and church. I wasn't doing or feeling well.

To my dismay, I found I couldn't even really run if I wanted to, which would not have served me well in the event of a zombie outbreak. Sure, I could have out-lumbered the old-school George Romero zombies, but anything faster than that would have been problematic.

My body was still a temple, sure, but that temple now involved several sprawling additions shoddily built by incompetent contractors.

I remembered my pastor friend Bruce, who let weight lead to depression which brought on more weight in a spiral that eventually killed him.

So for half a year, I've been slowly but surely whittling away at myself. I started at two workouts weekly, and then ramped that up to one day on, one day off. I've been ratcheting back on the carbs, meaning the pretzels and the chips and the beer, and replacing them with water, fruit, or protein shakes. It hasn't always been easy, particularly the beer. Sigh. It's hard kicking yourself out of a pattern of life.

But I feel better. Not only am I thirteen pounds lighter and now only two pounds from my goal weight, I'm also considerably stronger. Measured in what I can curl or press, I'm nearly twice as strong as I was at the perigee of my flaccidity. It has required effort. If I am going to continue to be leaner and stronger, that effort will need to be sustained. Permanently changing your pattern of life is the only way out of obesity and weakness and decline.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why America can't get this through our collective heads. Yeah, we're the Fattest Nation In the World (tm), but I'm here not thinking about our individual corpulence. Instead, it's our collective overconsumption of material goods, coupled with our willingness to go deep into debt to sustain that pattern of consumption.

As our current stimulus driven "recovery" sputters, and our jobless rate stays high, there is talk in DC of yet another temporary stimulus. Let's borrow more, say the pols, because it's all about jobs and getting back into our previous pattern of growth. "We can't cut back now," say they. "Americans need jobs! Now is not the time for financial austerity!" This is politically expedient, sure. If you're pouring borrowed money into your district, you're much more likely to get elected.

But it is also, in the long run, going to destroy us. There will never be a right time. Never. Not ever. In order to create the consumption pattern that existed before the market meltdown in 2008 and 2009, we financially overextended. It was false prosperity. It was fat. Relying on temporary stimulus after temporary stimulus to "jump-start" the economy reminds me of the person struggling with their weight who bounces from fad diet to fad diet, making no headway. We're popping pills and drinking Super Big Gulps full of diet Coke while snarfing down whole bags of Doritos.

Unless we change your whole pattern of life, eating right and exercising more, things ain't never gonna change in our Body Politic. At least, right up until that last massive coronary.

A Reasonable Decision in Our National Interest

There's been a tension here in D.C. lately that troubles me. Well, there've been many tensions, but this one bugs me more than about 74.375% of other issues. On the surface, it's a little budget thing, but it feels to my admittedly overtuned sensibilities like a harbinger of a potential future. Let me elucidate, and you can tell me if I'm being paranoid. I do tend to be that way, you know.

There is a disagreement rumbling around the community here in DC between the Department of Defense and the Congress. The Secretary of Defense is deeply aware of the major crisis that our national debt will eventually cause. Defense Secretary Gates is particularly concerned that the military will be impacted by this debt, and is pressing for some reductions in military spending. In particular, he wants pay increases and benefits for our troops to be limited to a level that's rationally sustainable. There are also several weapons systems that both he and top military brass want discontinued as cost-savings measures, like the development of an unnecessary new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or building unneeded transport aircraft.

Arrayed against Gates and top military brass are our elected representatives in Congress. Congressmen and women want to be seen as Supporting Our Troops (tm), and have passed numerous laws increasing the mandated benefits for troops and vets and their families. That's a surefire way to get votes, kids. Surefire vote-getting way number two is to make sure that the defense contractors who have positioned factories and offices in their districts continue to produce the weapons systems that produce jobs for folks who vote.

They haven't raised revenue to pay for those expenses, of course. That would mean breaking their promise to Never Raise Your Taxes (tm). It's not one or two members of Congress who do this. It's the nature of the critter. This is just how our representative democracy works. It may also be how representative democracy finally fails.

I'm pretty progressive, and would unabashedly accept the label "liberal." But when I see this disagreement between our unelected military leaders and our elected representatives, I find myself thinking the military is willing to act in the national interest, and Congress is not. By focusing on their own electability and narrowly drawn local interests, our representatives are making decisions that will cripple us as a nation. This seems obvious. They only do this because we make them do it, of course, but we'd rather forget that. Top brass, well, they're making the hard decisions that need to get made. It's the way the military works. That I should have that response is telling.

What worries me, seeing this, is that eventually the debt will hit the fan. We might see massive cutbacks in spending coupled with an increase in taxes. This would be painful, but would preserve the integrity of our republic. Being the pessimist that I am, I doubt this will happen. We would never, ever, ever elect anyone who would do this. If someone slipped through and started making the changes necessary to turn our debt around, we'd run 'em out on a rail.

More likely, we'll eventually see some form of default. When that happens, things will get bad in a way that makes the market seizure of 2008-2009 look like salad days. In that atmosphere of genuine crisis, I can see...and to a certain extent, feel...the temptation to set aside a clearly broken system of governance for one that gets the job done. If it's an emergency, then emergency measures would need to be taken for the security and well-being of the nation. Would we trust Congress to do this?

Or would we, perhaps, see how patriotic and hard-nosed and well-organized the decisions made by our military leaders can be in a time of crisis? Why not turn things over to them for a while, you know, until things have improved?

I can see how people might think this was a reasonable decision in our national interest.

Productivity and Progress

This morning, as I chatted with a couple of moms at my youngest son's bus stop, they were talking about the struggles that one of them was having with the whole "going back to work" thing. With a kindergardener and a preschooler, there was a job opening that she was struggling with. Should she take it? Should she schlep across the metro area for hours every day to go to a part-time job...one that might sprawl out into a full time job? Her life was already full of kids and household and pets, and the prospect of cramming work into it as well seemed intimidating. Yet it felt almost compulsory.

I'd actually been thinking about that over the last few weeks, particularly as more reports have come out describing the job market as the equivalent of a stagnant, algae covered economic pool. As workers are driven to be more and more productive in order to hold on to jobs, and businesses streamline their processes to make themselves more efficient and competitive, those pressures would seem to lend themselves to...well...fewer jobs. Or fewer total hours worked, rather. Yet we continue to scramble to produce more so that we can buy more.

Back when my parents were in the workforce, the vision of the American workplace of the future was rather different. Increased productivity would result in...more leisure. More taking it easy. If advances in technology allow you to produce in four hours of work what used to take eight hours, then you don't put in twelve hours of work to produce three times as much. The sane thing to do would be to take the remaining four hours and go for a nice walk in the woods. Or play with your kids. Or find some unmet need in the community and volunteer your time to help meet it.

We haven't done that.

Instead, particularly in my area, not only do we work longer, we now are ALL expected to work longer. Looking up and down my street of humble ramblers, I see households that used to only require one full time income to maintain. In those houses, there are now families that struggle to make ends meet on two full time salaries. The stressors that this produces are considerable. They take considerable toll on relationships, on parenting, and on marriages. Heck, on our happiness as human beings. We fret, and we struggle, and we worry, and things come apart.

So...why are we going backwards here? Why, if we are so much more productive, are we so incapable of living lives in balance? It all depends on how you define progress, I guess.

Cars, Community, and the Snowmapocalypse

Back in the 1990s, there was a little book by Robert Putnam, a Harvard political science professor. The book was entitled "Bowling Alone," and chronicled a strange movement in American life. Americans had always been social people, community oriented and engaged. We seemed compelled to gather in voluntary organizations, which were the seed beds of our democratic inclinations. We also gathered to pray and play, and the bonds of our local organizations wove us together into a whole.

Putnam documented a shift in the American ethic, as more and more neighborhood associations withered and died. We seemed to no longer care about our communities, or about the folks immediately around us. Even community pools and bowling leagues seemed to be drying up. We would "bowl alone," rather than in leagues. He argued that this was a trend, and that it was unsettling. It got buzz. Some folks agreed with him, and fretted. BowlAmerica disputed his premises. He did the talk show circuit for a while, which is pretty much unheard of for political scientists. He milked it for a while, and then faded off into comfortable academic obscurity.

But for all the buzz and hubbub amongst the talking classes, Putnam's thesis of social and political disengagement had...well...a little flaw. When folks would ask him why this was happening, he had absolutely no clue. None. No governing thesis. No subtle intuition. The closest he got to it was to suggest that maybe we watch too much teevee.

This last week, those of us who live in and around Washington DC got a hint as to the real cause of the decline in our civic life, which seemed to elude Putnam. It isn't television.

It's the automobile.

For one week, we've been without consistent access to our cars in this town, as the Snowmapocalypse (tm) has pounded the bejabbers out of our road system. I've driven our car just twice since last Friday, once to go get a couple days supply of pizza on the night of the first storm, and again so that the family could just get the heck out of the house in the lull between the first and second storms.

In that time, I've repeatedly met and talked with neighbors as we shoveled and walked to the nearby grocery store. For days, folks were exchanging greetings, talking about both the snow and life in general. The neighborhood was suddenly not full of cars. It was full of faces. Yes, they were under hats and wrapped in scarves, but the neighborhood stopped being filled with passing Toyotas and Hondas and Fords. It was populated, suddenly, with human beings. Who, naturally, we'd want to nod or smile or talk to.

As we drop back into our sealed transport pods, we're going to lose a little something. Yeah, I know, we get our social primate jollies other places now. Here in the blogosphere, for instance. Or on Facebook or Twitter. We also get in our transport pods and go to far flung activities for the kids, or to the mall, or to our Jesus MegaCenter to share some inspirational screen time with three thousand strangers. There's a sort of community there, right?

Perhaps. But it isn't the same. Being sealed away from our neighbors as we go about our business has an impact on our communities. It undercuts our situational awareness of one another, and dehumanizes a huge proportion of our daily lives. A nation that has conformed itself to the culture of the car will, inevitably, be a little less social. A little less community-oriented. A little less open to the give and take that is at the heart of democracy.

A little less American.

Islam: The Enemy Within?

The tragic Fort Hood shootings has generated some interesting recent correspondence. Being a pastor and all, I've somehow gotten onto the email lists of a series of organizations that assume I think the same way they do.

The most recent message was from a place proclaming itself the Freedom Center, which appears to be mostly a guy by the name of David Horowitz. He informs me that "radical Muslims have infiltrated America's Military." He likes to use boldface when something is really important. I suspect he uses the same approach while talking. There is , according to Horowitz, a "vast internal threat in this country, and we need to fight it."

That threat is Islam. Well, he calls it "radical Islam," but given that objective research shows that American Muslims are moderate and well-adapted to our pluralist society, I think he's casting his net a little more broadly. In fact, once you read his website, it's clear: all Islam is the threat. It is, for Horowitz, an inherently bad religion. Every Muslim is a potential threat. Having attempted to ratchet up my panic level, Horowitz then hits me up for money to support his organization, which is, as he describes it, a voice in the wilderness that needs my $25. Or perhaps that's a voice in the wilderness. Lord help us if he ever discovers the caps lock key.

Were it just him shouting, I might not worry. But all of the American Right is beginning to take up that hue and cry. Krauthammer was on about it yesterday in the Post...the idea that namby pamby liberals aren't aware of the terrible threat posed by Islamic jihad. About how the Fort Hood shootings were enabled by the politically correct folks who just lack the testicular fortitude to come right out and say that the problem is Islam. Not in Afghanistan. Right here.

Unlike many of my liberal brethren, I struggle occasionally with Islam. Not with Muslims. Not with what most Muslims are today, living lives of charity, humility, and submission to God. I also don't let the fanatics define Islam for me. Every faith has it's nutjob fringe, and the ignorant hatred of the mullah-fired mobs who protest and stomp around has more to do with political oppression and poverty. My greatest struggle has been with the Qu'ran itself, which I have pored through intentionally seeking commonality with the ethical heart of the Christian faith, and have been disappointed. But that's another post for another time.

What I see happening on the American Right now is a hunger for an enemy. Major Hasan was not a fifth columnist. He was a nutjob who glommed on a hateful ideology that has no real purchase in this nation. He's not part of a "vast internal threat," any more than the Holocaust Museum shooter was representative of a significant neo-Nazi resurgence in America. As Americans continue to struggle economically, and paranoiac populism takes hold in the core of one of our two political parties, there's real danger that neo-cons and political infotainers will seize on the fears of many.

If America's economy starts to badly tank, and we start looking for scapegoats, that poison will spread. It already seems familiar, cut from the same cloth as another American movement that bellowed and fretted over an unseen enemy within. Lord help us if it takes hold.

Yet Another Reason for Us To Hate Canada

The American far right just hates Canada.

Canada is, if current rhetoric on the right here is to be believed, as much a threat to freedom as Nazis or Maoists or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We know this because their nationalized health care system...or anything like it...is a sure sign of a nation that has utterly given up all personal liberties. You can see it in their relative lack of stress, and their easier pace of life, and the slow thoughtfulness of their media. It's an alien world.

I hear some of them may even speak French.

While Canada trundles along genially, we are, as a nation, headed for insolvency. Neither of the American political parties are willing to take anything other than the most feeble ritual pats at our endlessly growing national debt. At some point, our vast credit as a nation will run out. It may not happen soon, but it will happen, as surely as a month-long drunken bender eventually ends with you waking up in a pool of unidentifiable fluid next to a snoring Samoan woman in a New Orleans flophouse. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience. No sir.

No country has ever done what we're doing, spending vastly more than we commit to the national treasury for decades, and not suffered catastrophic economic collapse. Not once in the history of humankind.

It's going to be bad.

Yet on Veteran's Day, as I was contemplating America's coming financial apocalypse, I realized there's another reason for the American Right to fear Canadian influence. What would happen to America financially, wondered I, if we didn't just think about having a similar health care system?

What if the military of the United States of America was the same size as the Canadian military?

We share similar land masses. Neither nation has hostile neighbors. Though we fret endlessly about energy security, our Canadian brethren don't seem to have any trouble gassing up their Ford F-150s. They innovate. They have a solid business community. They brew good beer. They seem to be doing fine.

We'd still have a decent little army, one more than capable of defending the homeland. To that small professional army, we'd add in the 80,000,000 American gun owners. You NRA members would be willing to use your guns to defend American soil against tyranny, right? That's what you keep telling us the Second Amendment is for, after all. You keep waving Old Glory around and telling us that gun ownership is a sign of your patriotism. It's why you have the Director's Cut of Red Dawn in your media cabinet. So...I'm calling you on it. You are now eight thousand divisions of Light Infantry Reserves. Hoooah! Wooolver-EEEEns!

We're also a democracy, the beacon of freedom and tolerance in the world. If that's true, we should have friends. Allies. Don't we? Those folks North of the border would help us out if things got rough. As would the Brits.

And if that wasn't enough and things got real ugly, we've got enough leftover Cold War ICBMs to slag pretty much anybody. Ain't nobody gonna mess with us. So...why not? Let's downsize.

What would the effect of a Canada-sized military be on our national treasury? The net effect of that decision would be to save the United States taxpayer over $550,000,000,000 a year.

That's a chunk of change, almost real money, but it's only a small downpayment on the debt, which stands at $11,000,000,000,000 and rising. We'd have to make it a pretty much permanent change to have any effect. But if we did, in my lifetime, we'd be back in the black.

It'd work. And the world would be no more dangerous. America would be equally safe. I mean, why not?

It's not like America is addicted to that military deficit spending, eh?

Pesky, pesky Canadians!

Going Slower

Yesterday, the usual Maryland traffic that impedes my progress as I go pick up my sons from the synagogue had snarled into an impressively static nightmare. Long lines of cars piled up along small suburban back roads, inching forward in small, sad increments. Had there been an accident? None could be seen. Was there construction? Nope.

Things just...weren't working.

As it turned out, that was the problem. An aging computer traffic management system in Montgomery County had gone down. It had been chugging along since it was installed in the Carter administration, and while it's slated for replacement, we're not there yet. The system is what makes the lights go in a logical sequence to maintain traffic flow. While all of the lights still worked, they didn't work together. It was every light for itself, cycling from green to yellow to red with no relation to what the other lights were doing. Without intentional management, the whole network of roads could no longer handle the volume of traffic, and things...as Chinua Achebe once put it..fell apart. What folks in Montgomery experienced was remarkably like the entropic snarl of Nigerian traffic, the legendary go-slows that sometimes gridlock the blighted city of Lagos for days.

Yesterday, we had a little taste of what I think will inevitably come to America. We have become, as a nation, utterly self-oriented. We don't see beyond our own individual interests, so we're not willing to work together or make any concessions for the common good. We are utterly oblivious to the complex infrastructure that is necessary to maintain a modern society, and snarl and grumble at the idea that we might have to pay one thin dime of our hard-earned money to maintain our roads and bridges. As those systems crumble and fade, our grumbling will grow louder...but as long as we maintain the conceit that you can have something without paying for it, we will continue to fade.

Star Spangled Subversion

I've had an odd old daydream this summer, one that recurs now and again.

It happened before the recent Fourth of July fireworks display, but it's been mostly popping into my head at the beginning of swim meets. The meets begin with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. I have rather mixed feelings about the Star Spangled Banner. On the one hand, I strongly associate it with America, for some reason. It does, for reasons of repetition at events of significance, stir in me a certain patriotic feeling.

Then again, I'm not one to allow sentiment to get in the way of critical thinking, or of deeper sentiment. That thinking and my gut tells me, much to my dismay, that our National Anthem is a pretty undeniably craptacular song musically and lyrically. It's a pain in the voicebox to sing. It requires too much vocal range for most mortals, and while it can soar in the right hands, it can also collapse. While I can do it, I have to work not to drift into a warbling falsetto as I attempt to hit the laaand of the freeee.

That's true for most of us, and it's unfortunate, because the "land of the free/home of the brave" part is pretty much the only moment when it comes close to being a song that describes what's important about America. Otherwise, it's mostly a song about a flag with stripes and stars, and about kicking the behinds of those who oppose us. That's true of the first verse, which is all most of us know. Up until the very last line, it could just as easily be about the broad stripes and bright stars of the national flag of Uzbekistan.

It doesn't get any better when you move on to the other verses. In fact, it gets considerably worse. From the second verse, which contains such memorable lines as "where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes" to the entire third verse, which goes:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

It's blood and death and booyah flag waving, wrapped in archaic 19th century poetry. And again, up until that last line, this could be describing some particularly impressive Uzbek battle victory. That's fitting, because the song was originally not even about the flag or the principles of our constitutional republic, but a remembrance of a victory at Fort McHenry. It was, in fact, originally titled "The Defense of Fort McHenry."

So my fantasy, my daydream, my little Walter Mitty yearning, is that at some point, at some event, the person called up to sing the National Anthem will put their hand over their heart, look to the flag, and open their mouth.

What comes out, though, would not be "Oh say can you see, through the dawn's early light..." Instead, all those gathered with hands over their hearts would hear:

"O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain..."

I'm not sure how people would respond. Grumbling? Confusion? Likely. But I'm not sure there'd be booing, because we all love that song.

Quite frankly, that's because it's a more American song.

The Inviolability of Israel

American politics is littered with third rails, topics or subjects that can't be broached or addressed in any meaningful way without frying the individual in question.

BZZZZZAP.

I think that was recent nominee for a senior intelligence position.

That highly electrified rail is the complex relationship between the United States and Israel.

On the one hand, Israel is a parliamentary democracy. It's an essentially free state in a region that is defined by monarchies, despots, and repressive theocracies. It has every right to exist, and exist in peace. It is also a reliable and natural ally for our constitutional democracy.

On the other hand, Israel is a nation state, with all of the flaws and foibles that exist in such entities. It is not perfect, any more than the United States...or any of us individually...is perfect.

After it's most recent election, Israel now is governed by what may prove to be an unusually truculent coalition of nationalists and ultra-nationalists. Given the ongoing provocations by Hamas, the results of the recent election were predictable. Human beings who perceive themselves as under attack will always seek hardliners to protect them, and Israelis are no exception.

Their new foreign minister, for instance, is an ultraconservative supporter of the expansion of settlements, who views any suggestion of negotiations with Israel's opponents as evidence of treason. He supports the institution of mandatory loyalty oaths for Israelis, to the point at which he's at odds with some of the ultra-orthodox, who view this as a violation of Torah. Their new prime minister is a hard core hawk, and one of the architects of the ill-conceived wars in Lebanon in the 1980s. Take this cadre of leaders, add in the militants on the other side of the equation who need conflict to justify their existence, and the odds are good that things will at some point get messy. Or rather, messier.

The challenge, of course, is that many folks have a great deal of difficulty "supporting Israel" if that support requires every Israeli action to be a priori correct. In the United States, those views are largely held by American conservative Christians, whose attitudes towards Israel are governed by a strangely warped biblicism. Using a few verses of scripture picked out of context, suddenly even speaking a word of concern about Israel becomes forbidden. Israel is God's Country! You can't say anything bad about the Land of the Promise! At least, not until after Jesus comes back, at which point they'll all either bow down before him or go to hell.

This is particularly strange given where the Bible stands on the subject. Pretty much the entire prophetic literature is filled with invective against Israel and Judah. God is endlessly pissed off at the stubbornness of His Chosen People, and does a fair amount of kicking their butts. That doesn't break the covenant, mind you. He still loves 'em. But when they step away from covenant and/or become tools of injustice, they are not above being held to account. As far as God is concerned, Zion is not inviolable.

The challenge, of course, is how to articulate a concern for justice without seeming to threaten the integrity of that often embattled democratic state. Progressives and liberals in the U.S. generally do a pretty crappy job of this, falling into rhetoric that only alienates them from the very folks they're trying to influence. My own denomination has managed to do a pretty clumsy job of it, alternating between open dialogue and destructive invective.

Not sure the way out of this one...but it's a serious conundrum.