Pastor Feelgood

This last weekend, the local news in the Washington DC area included chatter about a worship service.   A local sports-o-tainment-megaplex was going to be filled to capacity, celebrating the arrival in town of Joel Osteen, America's Favorite Televangelist (tm).  It was a revival of sorts, called  Hopefully Hoping In Happy Shiny Joy Town America, or something to that general effect.

Osteen is arguably the best known pastor in the United States.  His church teems with tens of thousands of worshippers, sprawling across a campus as big as the Texas that spawned it.  His books sell by the truckload and Kindle-full.  And when he came to town, tens of thousands came out to see him.

Osteen also frustrates the bejabbers out of many other pastors.  His relentlessly chirrupy message of God's Big Hope-ity Wuv might be one of the few things that fundamentalists and progressives can agree on.   We both hate it.  O Lord, how we hate it.

We hate it because Osteen simply will not engage in any of the Important Issues that define so much of Christianity.   Abortion?  Homosexuality?  Politics?  He just won't get into it.  Nope.  Won't do it.

We hate it because what he preaches is sort of kind of the Word Faith movement, that nothin' to do with Christ's teachings gospel of prosperity in which God gives us all good things if only we trust enough to give ourselves to Him.  Oh, and if we give generously.  If you've got a need, don't forget to plant that seed!  The Lord will provide!

But even that is so watered down with such shiny shiny niceness that it somehow manages not to feel as crass and grasping.   Everything is washed out in the brilliant lens flare of his huge toothy smile.     Give us some exegesis, cry the pastors. Where's the context, cry the pastors.  But no.  There's little Bible talk.  There's just feelgood anecdotes and catchphrases, pouring out in a great firehose of affirmation, loving you in all the goodness that you are.

And it works.  Lord, how it works.  Folks come pouring in, which is perhaps the most frustrating thing for evangelicals and progressives alike.  That, and Osteen seems to have recently become the go-to-guy for faith stuff, making him increasingly the Billy Graham of this era.  What that says about this era I'll leave to your own ruminations.

A few years back, I took the time to actually read and review one of Osteen's books.  It doesn't really matter which one, because they're pretty much all the same.  What struck me most at the time was not that the book was utterly devoid of theology and only tangentially related to what Jesus taught, because I expected that.  Osteen is much more of a motivational speaker/presence than he is a theologian or scholar.  I also wasn't surprised that the book was...errr...how to say this nicely..."uncomplicated."

What surprised me was that I found myself obliged to admit was that much of the "life-livin'" advice meted out was not wrong.  Once you filtered out the 10% or so of Prosperity Magical Hoo Hah, the remainder of what Osteen focused on was just good advice.  Be positive, towards yourself and others.  Don't be selfish.  Try to find the good in any situation.  Give generously to others.

I also found myself forced to cede that a focus on negativity, conflict, and dysfunction leads, surprisingly, to negativity, conflict, and dysfunction.

Yeah, there's not a causal link.  Bad things happen to good people, Jesus being a prime example.   And just glossing things over with a happy varnish doesn't magically make them better.  It can have the opposite effect, in my experience.  Being blithely unaware of your own failings consistently gets you up poop creek without a paddle, no matter how confident you are in yourself and God's love for the Wonder that is You.

Then again, an orientation towards the good does increase the likelihood of the good actually occurring.   It's hard for naturally-pessimistic me to swallow, but positive inputs do increase the probability of positive outputs.  And Lord have mercy, is Osteen positive.

As much as he's not my cup of tea, and as devoid of substance as I find his writing and teaching to be, I just can't find it in myself to work up a good head of umbrage about him.  He doesn't teach people to hate.  He doesn't vilify or condemn or curse.

And that hair...I mean, really.  How can you hate that hair?

The Shuttle Goes Down

I was there the first time around.

As a lifelong Washingtonian, I can remember back to that day in the mid-1980s, as the shuttle Enterprise was flown around the Beltway on the back of a 747.  It was awesome, as a young teen, to watch as it soared by.  I stood on a bikepath overlooking the highway, and the jet roared low and slow overhead so everyone could get a good long look.

It was amazing.  That image, of the iconic silhouette, of the reality of the first orbiter, well, that's still burned into my cortex.  It's an important memory.

It was an emblem of America's commitment to peaceful space exploration.  Oh, sure, the Enterprise herself was just a testbed, a functioning prototype.  But it was a profoundly hopeful thing to witness with my own eyes.  Here was powerfully real evidence of our nation, committed to the future.  We were making it happen.  We were getting it done.   The prototype?  On her way to be stored by the Smithsonian at Dulles, where one day a museum would rise to house her.  Other shuttles, a fleet of them, promised to open low earth orbit to all manner of exploration.  And then?  The future seemed filled with possibilities.

Today, the shuttle Discovery made the same rounds.

Across my Washington DC area social network, there was much excitement.  Pictures snapped from smartphones and culled from local media sources popped and repopped on Facebook.  The local newsradio station hummed with shuttle sightings.

So exciting!  A real spaceship!  Right there in the skies above the Nation's Capital!

I can't quite feel the same excitement now.

In the place of the Discovery, there is nothing.  Oh, there are and were plenty of pipe-dreams.  We'll go to Mars, said a president!  We'll set up a moon base, said a candidate!  Sure we will.  That talk is nothing more than the yarns told by your always-broke uncle, spinning a story about how he's going to make it big from the same sofa he's living on in your grandparents basement.  It's just not real.

We've become a nation that has forgotten the effort required to make things like that happen.  Our drive for space has faltered.  Our capacity for heavy lift to orbit is functionally zero.  We have no real plans to get back on track.  NASA's funding is waning.

Heck, even North Korea, a starving, struggling, mostly insane backwater tyranny, shows more motivation to get into space.   We're content to stick out our thumbs and let the Russians do the work.    Or not do anything at all, except perhaps weaponizing the program so it can be funded covertly.  Going into space as a nation requires resources, which means paying for it, which means taxes.  We've forgotten how to do that after years of being told you can get something for nothing.  That is and always has been the easy lie of charlatans, quacks, and politicians.

So now we have nothing, and are too distracted and unfocused as a nation to even realize we should be ashamed by that reality.

The possibilities that the Enterprise represented have faded.  The future that the Discovery worked towards is not to be seen.

It may yet resurface.   I hope it does.  But today over the skies of Washington came a reminder of how quickly future becomes history, and how easily potential can be lost without both commitment and effort.

In Washington, Even the Telemarketing is Different

Telemarketing is back. Despite our desperate efforts to drive a stake through it's heart with the Do Not Call list, there are always ways around it.

Over the last three months, for instance, I've gotten two different versions of the same phone "survey." It isn't a survey at all, of course. It purports to be a survey. "We're not selling anything," says the happy person on the other end. "We just need a few minutes of your time."

What they've done during that time is fascinating. It's marketing, wrapped up in the guise of market research. It's the corporate equivalent of "push-polling." Push-polling, for those of you who aren't attuned to such things, is a form of political "research" that involves the caller asking you questions like this:

Caller: On a scale of 1 to 100, how would you describe your perception of Candidate Smith's personal integrity, with 1 being Satan and 100 being Jesus?

You: Um...maybe 70?

Caller: Thanks! Now, if you were aware that Candidate Smith eats human flesh and compulsively sodomizes cute little baby bunnies, how would that influence your rating?

Obviously, Candidate Jones is payin' for that call.

What's fascinating about the push-poll calls I've gotten recently is that 1) they are efforts to influence people inside the Beltway and 2) they are blatantly funded by corporate interests. The calls begin the same way. They ask what you do for a living, and are fishing for folks who are influential. They want to know if you work or have ever worked for a political party, a political action committee, a law firm, a think-tank, the Pentagon, the IMF or World Bank, the administration, or the legislature.

As a lifelong Washingtonian, I can check two of those boxes. Yeah, I was an administrative flunky, but hey, that wasn't the question.

Then, they get into the pitch. The first call asked about perceptions of health care coverage...at Walmart. I was then given a huge volume of detail about just how wonderful Walmart is at caring for it's workers. "And how would that change your opinion, sir?"

The second call, which came last night, followed the same format. It asked about my perceptions of foreign investments in the United States, and foreign purchases of American companies and assets. I was then pitched a line about a particular development conglomerate based in the United Arab Emirates, and their wonderful concern for local interests in the communities where they slurp up properties and businesses. Gosh. I wonder what folks in the U.A.E. are up to? Maybe...thinking about buying tons of undervalued American companies? And wondering what the "leadership" of the country might think about it? Hmmm.

It almost makes me wish they were trying to get me to switch phone service or extend my car warranty. Sigh. The joys of living inside the Beltway.