Next Year, I Want a Merry Christmas
On Christmas morning, I found myself driving up the Florida Turnpike toward Ocala and my sister's house where I would be the chef for the day's Christmas dinner. The car was loaded with groceries filling the car with hints of vegetables, fruits and cheeses, promises of wine and deserts. On the car's radio, the St. Olaf's choirs sang Christmas music, much of it music I had myself sung in days gone by in Cathedral choirs. As I looked out across the fog-draped rolling hills of Lake County, I found myself weeping, my mind racing to many happy Christmas Pasts, returning again and again to the dull pain of Christmas Present. And I heard myself exclaim, "Next year, I want a Merry Christmas."
It's not that I don't have much to be grateful for. I have a wonderful, loving partner of 31 years, a beautiful man who grows more beautiful as he ages, a man who understands me better than anyone else and who loves me anyway. We have a house full of animal babies to love, a beagle of 17 years (10-12 is the life expectancy of a beagle), an incredibly affectionate dachshund and two very beautiful cats who periodically deign to be loved and for whose benefit our household is maintained. We have a rental house that is safe, warm and in our own neighborhood as we await our house's reconstruction to be completed. And I work with people I admire and respect, people who share my own curiosity about life and who value intelligent, sometimes impassioned discussion about things that matter. My entire immediate family lives within a hour an a half of me and I live in a beautiful, vibrant city evolving into something potentially dynamic, a city whose oak-lined brick streets and lakes are the home of many memories and many friends from my life-long love affair with Orlando.
All things considered, I am a fortunate man. And I consider myself blessed, not in any smug, self-serving manner that sees G-d as having blessed me (with the accompanying implication that I somehow am G-d's chosen) but simply the realization that my fortune is at least in part due to nothing I have done or could have done to procure it. This in a world where the vast majority of its people live in nowhere close to the comfort level I experience daily.
At some level, I suppose what I am about to say may sound a little like a spoiled child voicing a sense of entitlement. But, having one's basic levels of Maslow's hierarchy met is not enough for the self-actualized human being. And, indeed, not all of the basic levels of the hierarchy are, in fact, secured in my life at this turn of the year into 2006 CE.
The first thing I see each morning as I look out my front window is my own home, still standing in ruins 16 months after Hurricane Charley dropped three tons of our stately old oak tree through the house and into the neighbor's house. Stripped down to the studs of its roof and its walls, windows missing or leaning against walls awaiting replacement in new concrete lined (and hurricane code meeting) spaces, even the flooring itself missing, it is a sad sight. While we entertain visions of a beautiful new home with cathedral ceilings and windows, new tile floors, gleaming stainless steel kitchen appliances, and a new deck and fencing to replace that lost in the storm, that vision has been so slow to materialize that we have both wondered at times if it will ever really happen. Our contractor has proven almost inept at managing his contracts, his lucre often overpowering his judgment on how much work he can actually accomplish, his skills in meeting schedules almost pathologically poor. To change contractors now probably would mean at least 3 months longer wait.
Our insurance moneys for rent and storage space expire March 1. There is much uncertainty about our home, whether and when we may be able to reclaim it. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas, in New Coverleigh, our reclaimed and resurrected home.
My mother was not able to be with us Christmas Day. She is in a rehab center in Ocala where she is learning to walk again after a broken hip. While we took her Christmas dinner, it just wasn't the same. St. Marge has overcome so much in her life - loss of her mother, being farmed out to relatives, tubular pregnancy, cancer, pancreatitis, stroke. Every new event knocks her for a loop. At 79 pounds soaking wet, she is a lean, mean feisty machine. But I wonder which new knock may be more than even a saint can handle. In the meantime, I just want my Mother to come home. And I want her to be at the party when we reopen our new home. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.
The situation at my job became steadily more chaotic as the end of the year approached. Increasingly pressed to demonstrate with empirical evidence that our students are learning in our classes, we've spent more and more time on the Leave No Child's Behind approach I call Pavlovian Learning - data regurgitated upon command, comprehension, context and understanding of its significance optional. Then came news that the Gordon Rule, the 6000 word minimum writing requirement was to be abolished for our humanities courses. Up to now, we've had a club to hold over students' heads to require them to learn to write at college level and to complete written assignments in our classes. With that gone, students will be able to assert with impunity that courses which require writing assignments demand too much. And, of course, the consumer is always right, right?
There is more. With the requirement to grade all the writing gone, the university can now pump our already overflowing classes (45 per section) to 75 a section. The days of me knowing my students are probably gone. The days of talking head lecturing have arrived. (I have more to say about this but it will have to wait for another post.) If this were not enough, the text book publisher has dropped a new edition on us mid-year without notice (I found out when my students said their texts weren't being taken back for refunds because a new edition would be replacing it) and the webct on-line operations I spent a summer term learning (and the next summer struggling to improvise the flakey program) are about to undergo radical change as well. In short, there are few aspects of my job that are stable and predictable at this point. Time will tell how well I deal with those changes. Next year, I pray for a Merry Christmas.
This year my dear cousin, Ansel, lost his battle with self-medication. His bright, zany, compassionate voice no longer rings on the other end of my voice mail, often through the haze of self-induced alcoholic stupor. I miss him. His 49 years on this plane were far too few. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.
This year I have held my breath as our aging beagle has become increasingly gaunt and teetery. Charlie Beagle will not be with us much longer. I also came home last April to my beloved dachshund nearly paralyzed in the back from a ruptured disc. Some $3000+ surgery (and several sleepless nights) later, Julian is his unabashedly joyful self once more, albeit a 10 year old dachshund with a back that must be guarded from jumping onto and off furniture. I doubt Charlie will be with us another Christmas. However merry it may be, it will be all the less so with his absence. Nonetheless, next year, I still want a Merry Christmas.
I write this missive on the eve of a new year. As I watched the sun setting into pools of grey and tan this night amidst skeletal swamp maples awaiting the burst of new growth and scarlet blossoms just weeks away now, I was only too happy to let go of what has largely been a very trying and painful 2005. I am a creature of hope, an optimist by nature, always looking for new births and new starts. I have great hopes for this coming year - a return to our home after nearly two years exile, a mother recovering from debilitating health crises, a return to equilibrium in whatever form it might be able to take these days of scarce dollars and empty empirical approaches to "accountability" in higher education. I savor each moment with my teetery, nearly deaf and blind hound dog, knowing soon I shall have to let go of my beloved companion. Even so, I await 2006 with hope, a guarded optimism and a goal: Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.
Happy New Years, everyone!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Saving the World? We do it all the time!
A member of another list made a comment about saving the world, a topic painfully familiar to me and no doubt to others. Here is the comment followed by my response to it. I'm putting it on my blog so others may consider it but perhaps more importantly, so I can remind myself when I'm feeling particularly useless and my life efforts of little value that what each of us contributes to saving the world, tikkun olam, is essential.
I used to think I could change the world -- that didn't last long. But being able to save a dog from a death sentence somehow justified my existence. since then, they've done so much more to save me . . .
Of course we can change the world. Everything we do has an impact on it. Generosity toward animals challenges cultural values of materialism (which sees animals as things to be used and discarded) and anthropocentrism (human beings as the focus of the universe). Displaying compassion toward other living things teaches a living lesson about the value of compassion. As the existentialists teach us, we live in an often irrational universe yet we are called to make rational choices which have consequences not only for our own lives but for the entire world. It is an enormous responsibility.
I, too, become discouraged with the direction the world is currently taking, particularly in our corner of it here in the US. I want to be able to fix humanity, to stop our warring, deepen our superficiality, broaden our community, open our eyes to the wonder of an incredibly beautiful universe beginning with the forest in the path of the next freeway construction or with my neighbor whose language and culture I do not share. There are days I grieve over the mediocrity for which we are willing to settle. And there are days when I burn with anger at the hateful and destructive ways we treat each other and our good creation.
One of the ideas the medieval church emphasized was the notion of vocation, calling. The middle ages saw the universe as static, thus the place where one found him/herself was where G-d intended for them to be. Martin Luther expanded that notion to value every place on the social ladder one might fall. If one's calling was to shovel manure in the stables, such work was necessary for a functioning society and thus glorified G_d as much as the monk whose vocation it was to pray in the local abbey. (This was one of poor Martin's more noble moments!)
With the rise of the Enlightenment period and the Romantic response to it, the notion of the individual came sharply into focus. No more were roles assigned to human beings, we were called to find our own paths, to follow our own yearnings, to discern and live into our own callings to become fully human.
No one of us is responsible for the whole world and no one of us is capable of fixing it. But each of us is called to a little corner of that repair, the concept of tikkun olam found in Jewish thought. Each of us is responsible for our part. You rescue animals. Others adopts unwanted children. And the rest of us engage our own vocations when we are being responsible.
All of our callings are essential to the whole. None of us is dispensable.
I am only one, but still one.I can’t do everything, but I can do something.Just because I can’t do everything doesn’t mean I won't do the something I can do
Edward Hale, (1822–1909).
Author, The Man without a Country.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!
Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)
US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value simply do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A member of another list made a comment about saving the world, a topic painfully familiar to me and no doubt to others. Here is the comment followed by my response to it. I'm putting it on my blog so others may consider it but perhaps more importantly, so I can remind myself when I'm feeling particularly useless and my life efforts of little value that what each of us contributes to saving the world, tikkun olam, is essential.
I used to think I could change the world -- that didn't last long. But being able to save a dog from a death sentence somehow justified my existence. since then, they've done so much more to save me . . .
Of course we can change the world. Everything we do has an impact on it. Generosity toward animals challenges cultural values of materialism (which sees animals as things to be used and discarded) and anthropocentrism (human beings as the focus of the universe). Displaying compassion toward other living things teaches a living lesson about the value of compassion. As the existentialists teach us, we live in an often irrational universe yet we are called to make rational choices which have consequences not only for our own lives but for the entire world. It is an enormous responsibility.
I, too, become discouraged with the direction the world is currently taking, particularly in our corner of it here in the US. I want to be able to fix humanity, to stop our warring, deepen our superficiality, broaden our community, open our eyes to the wonder of an incredibly beautiful universe beginning with the forest in the path of the next freeway construction or with my neighbor whose language and culture I do not share. There are days I grieve over the mediocrity for which we are willing to settle. And there are days when I burn with anger at the hateful and destructive ways we treat each other and our good creation.
One of the ideas the medieval church emphasized was the notion of vocation, calling. The middle ages saw the universe as static, thus the place where one found him/herself was where G-d intended for them to be. Martin Luther expanded that notion to value every place on the social ladder one might fall. If one's calling was to shovel manure in the stables, such work was necessary for a functioning society and thus glorified G_d as much as the monk whose vocation it was to pray in the local abbey. (This was one of poor Martin's more noble moments!)
With the rise of the Enlightenment period and the Romantic response to it, the notion of the individual came sharply into focus. No more were roles assigned to human beings, we were called to find our own paths, to follow our own yearnings, to discern and live into our own callings to become fully human.
No one of us is responsible for the whole world and no one of us is capable of fixing it. But each of us is called to a little corner of that repair, the concept of tikkun olam found in Jewish thought. Each of us is responsible for our part. You rescue animals. Others adopts unwanted children. And the rest of us engage our own vocations when we are being responsible.
All of our callings are essential to the whole. None of us is dispensable.
I am only one, but still one.I can’t do everything, but I can do something.Just because I can’t do everything doesn’t mean I won't do the something I can do
Edward Hale, (1822–1909).
Author, The Man without a Country.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!
Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)
US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value simply do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The Broken Hearts of Brokeback Mountain
In years past, I have spent many a Saturday morning in local parks by the side of lakes, Book of Common Prayer and lections in hand, meditating on my Franciscan vocation and its implications for my life. I cherish the memories of those times when living under a Third Order Rule of Life was so important to me even as I struggle with what today I experience as the onus of that rule in my midlife.
This past Saturday, I awoke with the realization that the lake again called me. But this time my life was not demanding the Daily Office. Rather, it was calling me to examine a ragged edged hole in my soul that had arisen seemingly out of the blue in the advent of a new film due out in December. And so, amidst the unlikely combination of brazen male hustlers, yuppie joggers glistening with sweat and a couple getting married by the lakeshore, I found a hollow of a cypress tree on the banks of Lake Eola in our downtown park where I perched myself for a couple of hours of reading, meditating and weeping.
Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx from a collection in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. While I do not doubt this movie will end up being superficially billed as "the gay cowboy movie," it is much more than that. As a woman Episcopal priest from Wyoming said on an internet list on which the book was discussed, "It's a love story." It is, indeed, that. And as such, it should prove to be universally relevant to anyone who will actually go see the film. But it is also much, much more than a mere love story.
I am uncertain how I first became aware of the impending movie. I'm guessing someone mentioned it on one of the many internet lists on which I participate. A short google search later and I had located the trailer for the film, produced by the famous Ang Lee of Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger fame. On the very first viewing of the trailer, I dissolved into a mass of blithering, salty tears. Like a singed moth drawn to flame, I found myself watching the trailer over and over during the ensuing week with the same result each time. I felt a sense of dark sadness settling over me. It was that sadness, and the puzzlement as to what power this story seemed to hold over me that awoke me last Saturday morning and drove me into the park, my new copy of Close Range in one hand, my Starbucks grande in the other.
The characters in Lee's film are well chosen for the parts, as it turns out. Heath Ledger does a good job of portraying the detached, silent partner brutalized by his father and then orphaned at 14 when his parents went off the only curve on the highway to town. Jake Gyllenhaal's casting as the more optimistic, sensitive would-be rodeo star appears perfect, his sensitive face able to catch the pain and the ecstasy of this story magnificently. They are beautiful young men, no doubt far more beautiful than the men whose true story they bring to the screen. But their portrayals, courageous in a Hollywood still marked by homophobia and fear of the religious right, will also no doubt allow audiences to enter into the story itself with all of its subplots in a way that perhaps less attractive though more realistic casting might have provided.
So what is the power Brokeback Mountain holds over me? Why did I erupt into not just weeping but deep sobbing as I watched the trailer over the last week, now almost afraid to see the whole movie for fear of embarrassing myself in public? Someone on the list suggested I read the short story and perhaps it would help me see the "inner processes" for which Proulx is apparently famous. That prediction proved accurate.
In Proulx's story, several themes emerge. First, neither of the men feel they have much value in the world, not to others but, most of all, not to themselves. Ennis, the orphaned cowboy whose dreams of graduating high school died in ninth grade with the broke down truck that constituted the totality of his parents' legacy to him, seeks a sense of value from living into conventional expectations. He seeks out manual labor odd jobs, marries a woman he doesn't love, becoming a father of two girls. Jack, the product of a rigid patriarchal family complete with its demanding, stern "stud duck" patriarch, sought value in a short-lived and ill-fated rodeo career and a loveless marriage to a moderately wealthy heiress. Neither had found what they were looking for - until they found each other.
It's funny how radically your life can change when you suddenly encounter your very soul in the face - and heart - of another. For the first time in your life, you can dare to believe in yourself, believe you have value, believe you have a right - and maybe even a reason - to live. And when you find that key, when you've had that life-altering conversion experience, you cannot go back. And you cannot let go.
The result is an intense, white hot love born of desperation. It's not just an everyday, ordinary "falling in love." What's at stake here is your very being. In a life where there is nothing else, to lose that love is to lose everything. And so the young men explode into each other's arms, not knowing what to call what they felt, not knowing how to deal with this volatile commodity they experience in each other's presence, but knowing that while they couldn't let go, the very fact of their love for each other meant their lives were in danger.
That's the third theme that Proulx develops so well. These are men who are vulnerable, threatened by a world that not only does not value them, it is unlikely to countenance what they value most. And so it is not surprising that this story will not have a happy ending.
As I put down Proulx's book Saturday, wiping my cheeks and rubbing my reddened eyes, I knew why this story had caught me. I have known only too well the feelings of doubting my value as a human being, of wondering if I had a right - much less a reason - to live. My wrists bear the evidence of those doubts, scars self-inflicted by razor blades and knives over many years of self-loathing. I also know the mercurial feeling of having someone come into my life who suddenly caused me to feel I could be valuable and the simultaneous despair of knowing that love could never be borne to fruition.
But what my meditation with Brokeback Mountain helped me to recognize this past weekend was how vulnerable I had been so many times in my life and how frightened I had been in the face of that danger. I was taken back to my first two years teaching in Inverness, Florida, beginning in 1976 (about the same time this story was occurring). I was fresh out of college (though not yet out of the closet), idealistically determined to save a world not at all interested in being saved. Almost immediately I committed the Socratic sin of causing the children of the city to question conventional authority in the name of wisdom and the hemlock came quickly and surely.
I could rarely admit to myself then how frightened I really was. The late night phone calls with deathly silence on the other end, the verbal homophobic assaults by former students in the grocery stores, the mud splattered all over me at the local beach, the nights when the pick up trucks would stop in front of my house with shotguns pointed out the windows, the days I would come home to broken beer bottles and citrus fruit smashed in my driveway in attempts to injure my dogs on the screen porch, events long repressed and forgotten came flooding back. I had truly been frightened. And I will be eternally in my father's debt for recognizing the grave situation I faced but couldn't admit to and coming to my house with his truck, insisting I load my stuff and leave at the end of the second school year. I don't know what he had heard. But I do know he probably saved my life.
As Ennis del Mar said in the story, "If this thing gets hold of us in the wrong place it could kill us." I've been in that wrong place and know Ennis' observation - born of his own experience of a fatal gay bashing his father forced him to observe up close - to be true. Living in the valley of the shadow of death can be debilitating. It can mark you for life. Denial of the fear, necessary to continue functioning and often accomplished through the consumption of more than ample amounts of pain and fear numbing alcohol, cannot last forever. And so it's not surprising that Brokeback Mountain evoked weeping, weeping for innocence lost, weeping for remembrances of vulnerability and desperate loves. This film touches places deep in the soul. For that Ang Lee is to be thanked.
Unlike Jack Twist, I have survived. And unlike Ennis, I have begun to find a way to overcome my sense of being without value, a work still in progress here at midlife. In many ways, I have been fortunate, finding a beautiful, gentle partner who could love me when I could not love myself, who stayed with me through the desperation that drove me to self-destructive behaviors and who has helped me find a modicum of stability and serenity, albeit a stability still vulnerable in an erratically sometimes just, sometimes frighteningly homophobic world.
I would like to believe that Ang Lee's film will win the Oscars it is touted as meriting. I'd like to think that people will be able to see the universal themes lying in the depths of this love story, so poignant in the scene where Ennis, visiting Jack's parents after his untimely end, discovers his own blood spattered shirt still hanging in Jack's closet, Jack's own shirt tucked securely inside it. I want to believe Americans can prove less superficial than the predictable "gay cowboy" reductionism already used to describe the film suggests. Time will tell. And perhaps by December I will be ready to face my dragon, allow the ragged edges of my soul to be prodded once again and see the film. As Ennis del Mar said, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."
In the meantime, if you want to see the trailer that spawned this long, rambling introspection, I invite you to do so at:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/brokebackmountain.html
Warning: The best advice I got from those who discussed the trailer on the list was simply this: Bring plenty of tissue.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In years past, I have spent many a Saturday morning in local parks by the side of lakes, Book of Common Prayer and lections in hand, meditating on my Franciscan vocation and its implications for my life. I cherish the memories of those times when living under a Third Order Rule of Life was so important to me even as I struggle with what today I experience as the onus of that rule in my midlife.
This past Saturday, I awoke with the realization that the lake again called me. But this time my life was not demanding the Daily Office. Rather, it was calling me to examine a ragged edged hole in my soul that had arisen seemingly out of the blue in the advent of a new film due out in December. And so, amidst the unlikely combination of brazen male hustlers, yuppie joggers glistening with sweat and a couple getting married by the lakeshore, I found a hollow of a cypress tree on the banks of Lake Eola in our downtown park where I perched myself for a couple of hours of reading, meditating and weeping.
Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx from a collection in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. While I do not doubt this movie will end up being superficially billed as "the gay cowboy movie," it is much more than that. As a woman Episcopal priest from Wyoming said on an internet list on which the book was discussed, "It's a love story." It is, indeed, that. And as such, it should prove to be universally relevant to anyone who will actually go see the film. But it is also much, much more than a mere love story.
I am uncertain how I first became aware of the impending movie. I'm guessing someone mentioned it on one of the many internet lists on which I participate. A short google search later and I had located the trailer for the film, produced by the famous Ang Lee of Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger fame. On the very first viewing of the trailer, I dissolved into a mass of blithering, salty tears. Like a singed moth drawn to flame, I found myself watching the trailer over and over during the ensuing week with the same result each time. I felt a sense of dark sadness settling over me. It was that sadness, and the puzzlement as to what power this story seemed to hold over me that awoke me last Saturday morning and drove me into the park, my new copy of Close Range in one hand, my Starbucks grande in the other.
The characters in Lee's film are well chosen for the parts, as it turns out. Heath Ledger does a good job of portraying the detached, silent partner brutalized by his father and then orphaned at 14 when his parents went off the only curve on the highway to town. Jake Gyllenhaal's casting as the more optimistic, sensitive would-be rodeo star appears perfect, his sensitive face able to catch the pain and the ecstasy of this story magnificently. They are beautiful young men, no doubt far more beautiful than the men whose true story they bring to the screen. But their portrayals, courageous in a Hollywood still marked by homophobia and fear of the religious right, will also no doubt allow audiences to enter into the story itself with all of its subplots in a way that perhaps less attractive though more realistic casting might have provided.
So what is the power Brokeback Mountain holds over me? Why did I erupt into not just weeping but deep sobbing as I watched the trailer over the last week, now almost afraid to see the whole movie for fear of embarrassing myself in public? Someone on the list suggested I read the short story and perhaps it would help me see the "inner processes" for which Proulx is apparently famous. That prediction proved accurate.
In Proulx's story, several themes emerge. First, neither of the men feel they have much value in the world, not to others but, most of all, not to themselves. Ennis, the orphaned cowboy whose dreams of graduating high school died in ninth grade with the broke down truck that constituted the totality of his parents' legacy to him, seeks a sense of value from living into conventional expectations. He seeks out manual labor odd jobs, marries a woman he doesn't love, becoming a father of two girls. Jack, the product of a rigid patriarchal family complete with its demanding, stern "stud duck" patriarch, sought value in a short-lived and ill-fated rodeo career and a loveless marriage to a moderately wealthy heiress. Neither had found what they were looking for - until they found each other.
It's funny how radically your life can change when you suddenly encounter your very soul in the face - and heart - of another. For the first time in your life, you can dare to believe in yourself, believe you have value, believe you have a right - and maybe even a reason - to live. And when you find that key, when you've had that life-altering conversion experience, you cannot go back. And you cannot let go.
The result is an intense, white hot love born of desperation. It's not just an everyday, ordinary "falling in love." What's at stake here is your very being. In a life where there is nothing else, to lose that love is to lose everything. And so the young men explode into each other's arms, not knowing what to call what they felt, not knowing how to deal with this volatile commodity they experience in each other's presence, but knowing that while they couldn't let go, the very fact of their love for each other meant their lives were in danger.
That's the third theme that Proulx develops so well. These are men who are vulnerable, threatened by a world that not only does not value them, it is unlikely to countenance what they value most. And so it is not surprising that this story will not have a happy ending.
As I put down Proulx's book Saturday, wiping my cheeks and rubbing my reddened eyes, I knew why this story had caught me. I have known only too well the feelings of doubting my value as a human being, of wondering if I had a right - much less a reason - to live. My wrists bear the evidence of those doubts, scars self-inflicted by razor blades and knives over many years of self-loathing. I also know the mercurial feeling of having someone come into my life who suddenly caused me to feel I could be valuable and the simultaneous despair of knowing that love could never be borne to fruition.
But what my meditation with Brokeback Mountain helped me to recognize this past weekend was how vulnerable I had been so many times in my life and how frightened I had been in the face of that danger. I was taken back to my first two years teaching in Inverness, Florida, beginning in 1976 (about the same time this story was occurring). I was fresh out of college (though not yet out of the closet), idealistically determined to save a world not at all interested in being saved. Almost immediately I committed the Socratic sin of causing the children of the city to question conventional authority in the name of wisdom and the hemlock came quickly and surely.
I could rarely admit to myself then how frightened I really was. The late night phone calls with deathly silence on the other end, the verbal homophobic assaults by former students in the grocery stores, the mud splattered all over me at the local beach, the nights when the pick up trucks would stop in front of my house with shotguns pointed out the windows, the days I would come home to broken beer bottles and citrus fruit smashed in my driveway in attempts to injure my dogs on the screen porch, events long repressed and forgotten came flooding back. I had truly been frightened. And I will be eternally in my father's debt for recognizing the grave situation I faced but couldn't admit to and coming to my house with his truck, insisting I load my stuff and leave at the end of the second school year. I don't know what he had heard. But I do know he probably saved my life.
As Ennis del Mar said in the story, "If this thing gets hold of us in the wrong place it could kill us." I've been in that wrong place and know Ennis' observation - born of his own experience of a fatal gay bashing his father forced him to observe up close - to be true. Living in the valley of the shadow of death can be debilitating. It can mark you for life. Denial of the fear, necessary to continue functioning and often accomplished through the consumption of more than ample amounts of pain and fear numbing alcohol, cannot last forever. And so it's not surprising that Brokeback Mountain evoked weeping, weeping for innocence lost, weeping for remembrances of vulnerability and desperate loves. This film touches places deep in the soul. For that Ang Lee is to be thanked.
Unlike Jack Twist, I have survived. And unlike Ennis, I have begun to find a way to overcome my sense of being without value, a work still in progress here at midlife. In many ways, I have been fortunate, finding a beautiful, gentle partner who could love me when I could not love myself, who stayed with me through the desperation that drove me to self-destructive behaviors and who has helped me find a modicum of stability and serenity, albeit a stability still vulnerable in an erratically sometimes just, sometimes frighteningly homophobic world.
I would like to believe that Ang Lee's film will win the Oscars it is touted as meriting. I'd like to think that people will be able to see the universal themes lying in the depths of this love story, so poignant in the scene where Ennis, visiting Jack's parents after his untimely end, discovers his own blood spattered shirt still hanging in Jack's closet, Jack's own shirt tucked securely inside it. I want to believe Americans can prove less superficial than the predictable "gay cowboy" reductionism already used to describe the film suggests. Time will tell. And perhaps by December I will be ready to face my dragon, allow the ragged edges of my soul to be prodded once again and see the film. As Ennis del Mar said, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."
In the meantime, if you want to see the trailer that spawned this long, rambling introspection, I invite you to do so at:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/brokebackmountain.html
Warning: The best advice I got from those who discussed the trailer on the list was simply this: Bring plenty of tissue.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A Lament for a Drowning City
[Written as a post to an internet list on Tuesday, Aug. 28]
This has been an incredibly painful 48 hours for my partner and I. As we watch the television reports from the Gulf Coast, out of the corner of our eyes we can see our own blue-tarped, hurricane shattered home still awaiting rebuilding. At times I feel an incredible sense of empathy for and identification with those who have lost everything. At other times I feel a weird sort of survivor's guilt, knowing that what we survived is so much less in magnitude than that which the Gulf Coast just endured.
The one time I have found myself weeping uncontrollably was footage of the man in Mississippi who said the water caused his house to break in half and pulled his wife from his arms and swept her away. "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'll do,"he said, his dazed grandchildren in hand. It was one of the few times I've ever seen a television reporter weep along with the interviewee. And yet, what more appropriate a response? Even now there are tears streaming down my cheeks as I type this.
This is a very bad time for our country and our people. I don't think folks realize how serious this really is. We're talking months of a million people living as refugees and a rather doubtful possibility of their having homes to return to. (Water does terrible things to homes after a short time and this water is to the roof in most places). We're talking about poor, urban people of color being spread out into a state of WASPs ill-prepared to shelter them. We're talking about tension and rage when the shock wears off. We're talking about a national guard ill-prepared to meet the demands this situation has created because of their being squandered in the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. And we're talking about a staggered economy whose oil supply has just been hobbled.
Bear in mind that the Great Depression of 1928 might have been immediately set off by the stock market crash but it was largely precipitated by the crash of the real estate boom in Florida with two killer hurricanes in 1924 and 1926. Also bear in mind that hurricanes are nature's means of dispersing and distributing ocean heat. What happens when global warming makes the oceans warmer?
It is a very tense sleep I lapse into this night,full of visions of people on rooftops surrounded by coffee-colored floodwaters full of floating red ant colonies, snakes and alligators; of shattered casinos hundreds of feet from their ocean front moorings draped across what's left of major highways; and of that haunting mournful cry of that poor old man in Mississippi: "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'm going to do."
I believe Jesus weeps this night accompanied by all the saints and angels. The very heart of G_d is compassion and it bleeds this night for the Gulf Coast.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Written as a post to an internet list on Tuesday, Aug. 28]
This has been an incredibly painful 48 hours for my partner and I. As we watch the television reports from the Gulf Coast, out of the corner of our eyes we can see our own blue-tarped, hurricane shattered home still awaiting rebuilding. At times I feel an incredible sense of empathy for and identification with those who have lost everything. At other times I feel a weird sort of survivor's guilt, knowing that what we survived is so much less in magnitude than that which the Gulf Coast just endured.
The one time I have found myself weeping uncontrollably was footage of the man in Mississippi who said the water caused his house to break in half and pulled his wife from his arms and swept her away. "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'll do,"he said, his dazed grandchildren in hand. It was one of the few times I've ever seen a television reporter weep along with the interviewee. And yet, what more appropriate a response? Even now there are tears streaming down my cheeks as I type this.
This is a very bad time for our country and our people. I don't think folks realize how serious this really is. We're talking months of a million people living as refugees and a rather doubtful possibility of their having homes to return to. (Water does terrible things to homes after a short time and this water is to the roof in most places). We're talking about poor, urban people of color being spread out into a state of WASPs ill-prepared to shelter them. We're talking about tension and rage when the shock wears off. We're talking about a national guard ill-prepared to meet the demands this situation has created because of their being squandered in the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. And we're talking about a staggered economy whose oil supply has just been hobbled.
Bear in mind that the Great Depression of 1928 might have been immediately set off by the stock market crash but it was largely precipitated by the crash of the real estate boom in Florida with two killer hurricanes in 1924 and 1926. Also bear in mind that hurricanes are nature's means of dispersing and distributing ocean heat. What happens when global warming makes the oceans warmer?
It is a very tense sleep I lapse into this night,full of visions of people on rooftops surrounded by coffee-colored floodwaters full of floating red ant colonies, snakes and alligators; of shattered casinos hundreds of feet from their ocean front moorings draped across what's left of major highways; and of that haunting mournful cry of that poor old man in Mississippi: "I've lost everything. I don't know what I'm going to do."
I believe Jesus weeps this night accompanied by all the saints and angels. The very heart of G_d is compassion and it bleeds this night for the Gulf Coast.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, May 30, 2005
Of Butterflies, Sacraments and Thin Places
In the months that have passed since Hurricane Charlie devastated my home in Orlando last August, I have worked out my grief in the manner I have always dealt with major life crises: I went to the garden to touch the earth and be touched there by the divine. Besides my home, which was heavily damaged and is just now beginning to be reconstructed these long months later, the biggest loss was the 120 year old majestic oak tree which dominated our corner lot and had been the focal point of our once leafy neighborhood. It was that oak, whom we had named Laurel for the type of oak it was, which crashed through the roof of my house and across the fence into our neighbor's home as well.
The resilience of the subtropical garden I had grown over the seven years of living in our home was striking. Almost immediately the orchid trees crushed by falling trees
and the maple sawed off to allow the equipment into our yard to haul away the fallen trees began to send up shoots which now 10 months later are some 10-15 feet tall, well on their way to becoming trees once again. The lilies salvaged from beds savaged by limbs and saw dust have arisen and bloomed along with the orchid trees, a colorful act of defiance against the destructive forces of nature.
Ironically, while my home still stands damaged, blue tarped roof awaiting the builders who will remove and replace the crushed roof and walls and water damaged hardwood floors, the garden has made a miraculous recovery, once again lush enough that the house is difficult to see from the street. As I have moved around my garden, watering, fertilizing, pruning, talking to my plant children, calling them back to life, I realized more deeply than ever that this garden is a very special place.
In the very rich tradition of Celtic Christianity whose heritage my family shares, there is an understanding known as the "thin place." These were places where people felt most strongly connected with God’s presence. The early Celts believed it was in these places that the seen and unseen worlds were most closely connected and inhabitants of both worlds can momentarily touch the other. Increasingly, I see my garden as a thin place. And in the past 10 months, it has taught me a very poignant lesson about the sacramental manner in which human beings experience the divine.
Oddly enough, it is my Baptist raised-turned Methodist mother who taught me so much about sacramental theology. It was she who engrained in me the notion of the image of G_d, not in so many words, but rather in her ways of relating to people, her insistence that poverty did not disguise the humanity of people all around us in the rural community where we lived. It is Mom who taught me about the great joy of laughing. I think I hear G_d in her laughter. Sometimes I hear her laugh coming from my own lips.
My mother loves butterflies. Whenever I see one in my garden I always say "Hello, Mother!" And I smile. It's kind of like what Alice Walker said about passing the color purple and not paying one's respect: "It pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it..." Sacraments are about inward and spiritual graces encountered in outward and visible signs. My mother's laugh and the butterflies allow me to experience her presence even when she is not physically present. And I suspect that will become even stronger once she is gone.
It's not surprising that so many butterflies are in my garden. I have intentionally planted flowers which draw them - penta, lantana, milkweed, firebush, golden dew drop. And draw them they do! Hundreds of them. Birds, too. And squirrels. And maybe when the remaining, hurricane ravaged trees begin to grow back from the storm, the screech owls, bald eagle and raccoons will return to this green island in the midst of a city of nearly 2 million.
So many of my plants have come from places all over the world - the four o'clocks from Cuba, the maples from northern California, the daylilies from the mountains of North Carolina, the golden rain tree from Israel. And there are the plants given me by friends and family: the rose of Sharon from my beloved African-American nanny, Henrietta, the hibiscus from my Wiccan friend Luci, the jacaranda from the yard in San Jose of my friend, Deidre, now a Sister of Providence.
My garden is a sacrament of those not present yet whose memories and loving presence are visible in the green leaves and colorful blooms they bear and felt in my heart as I greet them. It is indeed a thin place where the presence of G-d is so palpable for me that the divine is as close as the wind blowing through the palms or in the song of the mockingbird in whose tune I still hear the voice of my now long gone six-toed orange tabby, Ratzinger.
Dorothy Frances Gurney once captured the notion of the thin place of the sacramental garden in her poem, "Garden Thoughts." A plaque with her poem will soon return to my garden once the repairmen have finished their work on my home. Gurney's poem reads:
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
Indeed.
On the science fiction channel, there is a strange advertisement of a beautiful young woman dressed in a flowing formal gown. She could well be my mother in her younger years. She was beautiful. I see why my Dad fell head over heels and remained with her these 56 years. Toward the end of the ad, a butterfly lands on the woman's hand and she turns to reach out to it as it flies away. As she does, her entire body dissolves into a flurry of butterflies scattering into the wind.
One day, my butterfly loving mother will do that, too. Probably sooner than I wish. But I will have the sacrament of the butterfly and her laughter the rest of my life. She will be there, along with G-d, amidst the trees, flowers and the butterflies. And for that I will be eternally grateful.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In the months that have passed since Hurricane Charlie devastated my home in Orlando last August, I have worked out my grief in the manner I have always dealt with major life crises: I went to the garden to touch the earth and be touched there by the divine. Besides my home, which was heavily damaged and is just now beginning to be reconstructed these long months later, the biggest loss was the 120 year old majestic oak tree which dominated our corner lot and had been the focal point of our once leafy neighborhood. It was that oak, whom we had named Laurel for the type of oak it was, which crashed through the roof of my house and across the fence into our neighbor's home as well.
The resilience of the subtropical garden I had grown over the seven years of living in our home was striking. Almost immediately the orchid trees crushed by falling trees
and the maple sawed off to allow the equipment into our yard to haul away the fallen trees began to send up shoots which now 10 months later are some 10-15 feet tall, well on their way to becoming trees once again. The lilies salvaged from beds savaged by limbs and saw dust have arisen and bloomed along with the orchid trees, a colorful act of defiance against the destructive forces of nature.
Ironically, while my home still stands damaged, blue tarped roof awaiting the builders who will remove and replace the crushed roof and walls and water damaged hardwood floors, the garden has made a miraculous recovery, once again lush enough that the house is difficult to see from the street. As I have moved around my garden, watering, fertilizing, pruning, talking to my plant children, calling them back to life, I realized more deeply than ever that this garden is a very special place.
In the very rich tradition of Celtic Christianity whose heritage my family shares, there is an understanding known as the "thin place." These were places where people felt most strongly connected with God’s presence. The early Celts believed it was in these places that the seen and unseen worlds were most closely connected and inhabitants of both worlds can momentarily touch the other. Increasingly, I see my garden as a thin place. And in the past 10 months, it has taught me a very poignant lesson about the sacramental manner in which human beings experience the divine.
Oddly enough, it is my Baptist raised-turned Methodist mother who taught me so much about sacramental theology. It was she who engrained in me the notion of the image of G_d, not in so many words, but rather in her ways of relating to people, her insistence that poverty did not disguise the humanity of people all around us in the rural community where we lived. It is Mom who taught me about the great joy of laughing. I think I hear G_d in her laughter. Sometimes I hear her laugh coming from my own lips.
My mother loves butterflies. Whenever I see one in my garden I always say "Hello, Mother!" And I smile. It's kind of like what Alice Walker said about passing the color purple and not paying one's respect: "It pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it..." Sacraments are about inward and spiritual graces encountered in outward and visible signs. My mother's laugh and the butterflies allow me to experience her presence even when she is not physically present. And I suspect that will become even stronger once she is gone.
It's not surprising that so many butterflies are in my garden. I have intentionally planted flowers which draw them - penta, lantana, milkweed, firebush, golden dew drop. And draw them they do! Hundreds of them. Birds, too. And squirrels. And maybe when the remaining, hurricane ravaged trees begin to grow back from the storm, the screech owls, bald eagle and raccoons will return to this green island in the midst of a city of nearly 2 million.
So many of my plants have come from places all over the world - the four o'clocks from Cuba, the maples from northern California, the daylilies from the mountains of North Carolina, the golden rain tree from Israel. And there are the plants given me by friends and family: the rose of Sharon from my beloved African-American nanny, Henrietta, the hibiscus from my Wiccan friend Luci, the jacaranda from the yard in San Jose of my friend, Deidre, now a Sister of Providence.
My garden is a sacrament of those not present yet whose memories and loving presence are visible in the green leaves and colorful blooms they bear and felt in my heart as I greet them. It is indeed a thin place where the presence of G-d is so palpable for me that the divine is as close as the wind blowing through the palms or in the song of the mockingbird in whose tune I still hear the voice of my now long gone six-toed orange tabby, Ratzinger.
Dorothy Frances Gurney once captured the notion of the thin place of the sacramental garden in her poem, "Garden Thoughts." A plaque with her poem will soon return to my garden once the repairmen have finished their work on my home. Gurney's poem reads:
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
Indeed.
On the science fiction channel, there is a strange advertisement of a beautiful young woman dressed in a flowing formal gown. She could well be my mother in her younger years. She was beautiful. I see why my Dad fell head over heels and remained with her these 56 years. Toward the end of the ad, a butterfly lands on the woman's hand and she turns to reach out to it as it flies away. As she does, her entire body dissolves into a flurry of butterflies scattering into the wind.
One day, my butterfly loving mother will do that, too. Probably sooner than I wish. But I will have the sacrament of the butterfly and her laughter the rest of my life. She will be there, along with G-d, amidst the trees, flowers and the butterflies. And for that I will be eternally grateful.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Friday, March 18, 2005
The Fourth Turning Gets Personal - Part II
But it is the second aspect of this case which disturbs me even more deeply than the mere prospect of fundamentalists with power. That is the increasing sense I have that when fundamentalists of any ideological stripe gain power, their tendency to exercise any kind of restraint in its use is limited if not non-existent. Hence the question my small, still voice was posing in the early light of dawn: When does prosecution become persecution?
In the instant case, a Baptist Republican prosecutor (King) is hired by a Republican governor (Bush) to investigate a Democratic mayor (Dyer) resulting in an indictment immediately upon which the Republican governor suspends the Democratic mayor thought to be a rising star in state politics. But there's more. The current US Senator from Florida, a Cuban-American Republican named Mel Martinez, had employed the same campaign worker to collect African-American absentee ballots in 2000. And the current Florida Secretary of State, Republican Glenda Hood, chosen by the Republican governor after serving two years as mayor of Orlando, had employed the same campaign worker to collect African-American absentee ballots in her mayoral race in 2000. Now, bombshell time - they cannot be indicted because the grand jury waited just long enough to return indictments to place those elections outside the statute of limitations for prosecution.
Of course, the blatant abuse of power to persecute those in the opposing party is nothing new. Democratic Vice President Andrew Johnson who ran with Lincoln in 1864 only to become President upon Lincoln's assassination was treated horrendously by the Radical Republican Congress hell-bent on punishing the South after the Civil War. His impeachment charges were trumped up and he ultimately prevailed by but one vote in the Senate, dying a broken man (as did the Kansas senator who was courageous enough to vote against the conviction who died in poverty and reprobation). Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying about a blow job by a White House aid in an investigation of a real estate swindle is a modern example of the abuse of power for partisan purposes. Clearly prosecution can be persecution.
Moreover, unrestrained use of power to persecute others is not relegated to government. The current struggles within the Anglican Communion to drive out any who do not hold to very narrow understandings of sexuality and very literal appropriations of scripture
simply mirror their counterparts in politics. It seems to me the cycle works like this:
1. Conservatives come to power riding a wave of generalized public anxiety and fear
often itself the result of demagoguery and fear mongering by conservatives
2. Conservatives seek to consolidate their power through exercise of hegemony,
controlling the press and thus public discourse, as well as through control of
bureaucratic policy implementers
3. Conservatives then seek to completely dominate society generally through the use of legal mechanisms, rendering any opposition inert and powerless through the now dominated justice system
4. Conservatives ultimately seek to eliminate all those who do not share their vision.
In years past, this cycle has played out in a number of ways, the most destructive of which is the rather classic Fascist authoritarianism of the Third Reich. Some of us wonder if this is not the trajectory on which the current US power holders are embarked, fascism being the natural successor to capitalist states which inevitably become less and less stable as the wealth, status and power of the nation-state becomes more disparately polarized. I shudder to consider the possibilities.
In Strauss and Howe's study The Fourth Turning, the mark of the end of third cycles is the fragmentation of the public into highly polarized groups locked in the death grip of continual conflict. Preceding third cycles included the post-Jackson antebellum period and the Roaring Twenties. Those cycles preceded two of the deadliest and most destructive eras of American history: the Civil War and the Great Depression/WWII era. I sense the disintegration of American national cohesion and the increasingly bold willingness of the right to use its fear-driven rise to power without restraint is the beginning of a Fourth Turning. I admit to being fearful about this coming time of crisis. But what makes me most fearful is the level of denial I see in most of my fellow citizens.
A poster to a list in which I participate recently forwarded a portion of an address by President Buchanan, the Southern born president who immediately preceded Lincoln and the Civil War. While the guns of Charleston were being positioned for the initial assault on Ft. Sumter, the president was railing against northern agitators seeking to abolish slavery saying that it was these radical dissidents who were the problem for the United States. Substitute those who are not patriotic for northern agitators and this statement could easily have been made by the current occupant of the White House. George Bush exhibits a similar superficiality in his rhetoric which often features very simplistic black and white conceptualizations. But what is particularly disturbing is that George Bush and the many superficial thinkers currently holding power in our land also show no concern for restraint on the exercise of power.
It is this paradigm of superficial reason combined with unrestrained power that begins at the top and manifests itself all the way down to the local level unchecked by any popular outcry. So while my friend's indictment is the closest this tyrannical abuse of power has come to touching my own life, I fear it will hardly be the last. And it is not just for myself that I fear. A country divided against itself cannot stand for long. A country whose powerful cannibalize its powerless is not long for the nation-states of the world. As Jefferson once remarked, " I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
But it is the second aspect of this case which disturbs me even more deeply than the mere prospect of fundamentalists with power. That is the increasing sense I have that when fundamentalists of any ideological stripe gain power, their tendency to exercise any kind of restraint in its use is limited if not non-existent. Hence the question my small, still voice was posing in the early light of dawn: When does prosecution become persecution?
In the instant case, a Baptist Republican prosecutor (King) is hired by a Republican governor (Bush) to investigate a Democratic mayor (Dyer) resulting in an indictment immediately upon which the Republican governor suspends the Democratic mayor thought to be a rising star in state politics. But there's more. The current US Senator from Florida, a Cuban-American Republican named Mel Martinez, had employed the same campaign worker to collect African-American absentee ballots in 2000. And the current Florida Secretary of State, Republican Glenda Hood, chosen by the Republican governor after serving two years as mayor of Orlando, had employed the same campaign worker to collect African-American absentee ballots in her mayoral race in 2000. Now, bombshell time - they cannot be indicted because the grand jury waited just long enough to return indictments to place those elections outside the statute of limitations for prosecution.
Of course, the blatant abuse of power to persecute those in the opposing party is nothing new. Democratic Vice President Andrew Johnson who ran with Lincoln in 1864 only to become President upon Lincoln's assassination was treated horrendously by the Radical Republican Congress hell-bent on punishing the South after the Civil War. His impeachment charges were trumped up and he ultimately prevailed by but one vote in the Senate, dying a broken man (as did the Kansas senator who was courageous enough to vote against the conviction who died in poverty and reprobation). Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying about a blow job by a White House aid in an investigation of a real estate swindle is a modern example of the abuse of power for partisan purposes. Clearly prosecution can be persecution.
Moreover, unrestrained use of power to persecute others is not relegated to government. The current struggles within the Anglican Communion to drive out any who do not hold to very narrow understandings of sexuality and very literal appropriations of scripture
simply mirror their counterparts in politics. It seems to me the cycle works like this:
1. Conservatives come to power riding a wave of generalized public anxiety and fear
often itself the result of demagoguery and fear mongering by conservatives
2. Conservatives seek to consolidate their power through exercise of hegemony,
controlling the press and thus public discourse, as well as through control of
bureaucratic policy implementers
3. Conservatives then seek to completely dominate society generally through the use of legal mechanisms, rendering any opposition inert and powerless through the now dominated justice system
4. Conservatives ultimately seek to eliminate all those who do not share their vision.
In years past, this cycle has played out in a number of ways, the most destructive of which is the rather classic Fascist authoritarianism of the Third Reich. Some of us wonder if this is not the trajectory on which the current US power holders are embarked, fascism being the natural successor to capitalist states which inevitably become less and less stable as the wealth, status and power of the nation-state becomes more disparately polarized. I shudder to consider the possibilities.
In Strauss and Howe's study The Fourth Turning, the mark of the end of third cycles is the fragmentation of the public into highly polarized groups locked in the death grip of continual conflict. Preceding third cycles included the post-Jackson antebellum period and the Roaring Twenties. Those cycles preceded two of the deadliest and most destructive eras of American history: the Civil War and the Great Depression/WWII era. I sense the disintegration of American national cohesion and the increasingly bold willingness of the right to use its fear-driven rise to power without restraint is the beginning of a Fourth Turning. I admit to being fearful about this coming time of crisis. But what makes me most fearful is the level of denial I see in most of my fellow citizens.
A poster to a list in which I participate recently forwarded a portion of an address by President Buchanan, the Southern born president who immediately preceded Lincoln and the Civil War. While the guns of Charleston were being positioned for the initial assault on Ft. Sumter, the president was railing against northern agitators seeking to abolish slavery saying that it was these radical dissidents who were the problem for the United States. Substitute those who are not patriotic for northern agitators and this statement could easily have been made by the current occupant of the White House. George Bush exhibits a similar superficiality in his rhetoric which often features very simplistic black and white conceptualizations. But what is particularly disturbing is that George Bush and the many superficial thinkers currently holding power in our land also show no concern for restraint on the exercise of power.
It is this paradigm of superficial reason combined with unrestrained power that begins at the top and manifests itself all the way down to the local level unchecked by any popular outcry. So while my friend's indictment is the closest this tyrannical abuse of power has come to touching my own life, I fear it will hardly be the last. And it is not just for myself that I fear. A country divided against itself cannot stand for long. A country whose powerful cannibalize its powerless is not long for the nation-states of the world. As Jefferson once remarked, " I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, March 17, 2005
The Fourth Turning Gets Personal - Part One
The little voice in my head woke me with a question: When does prosecution become persecution? That question has been rumbling around a lot in my head since the events of last Friday. It seems the grand jury called to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the Orlando mayoral election returned four indictments which included the current mayor whom I supported as well as a judge, a campaign worker whose activities form the crux of the state's case, and his campaign manager, a long-time dear friend.
The lawyer in me was not happy until I read the indictments and looked up the statute in question. It is vague at best, prohibiting any one person from collecting absentee ballots in an election, inspired by a scandal in Miami in which many actual ballots ended up in garbage dumps and a number of ballots bearing names of deceased people appeared at the polls to be counted. The primary focus of the legislation, as far as I can tell from a Florida Supreme Court case citing the statute in question, is ensuring voters' ballots are counted. The Court cited a long list of acts the statute sought to prohibit which includes "vote brokering." So far as I can tell, the actions of the local campaign worker in Orlando do not fall into any of those categories.
I'd like to say I would be surprised if these indictments (remembering that the requirements of returning an indictment in Florida are so low that grand juries could readily indict kitchen cabinets) resulted in a conviction. But given the circumstances of this case, I have to wonder. Essentially, the loser in the mayoral election, a Republican who lost to a Democrat without even a run-off, contacted the Republican governor about what he decided were fraudulent activities. Clearly the reasoning was that without such activities, a run-off would have been required. The local state attorney, a Democrat, refused to get involved because he knew some of the parties involved and feared having his impartiality questioned. So, the Republican governor appointed a Republican Baptist prosecutor from two counties north to handle the investigation. Using a highly literalist interpretation of the statute in question which prohibits anyone from being paid to handle absentee ballots, prosecutor King (who undoubtedly has his sights set on higher office after years of running the state's attorney office in Ocala) puts together a paid campaign worker who
works in the working poor African-American community to ensure that absentee ballots are cast and counted and comes up with a paid collector of absentees for purposes of fraudulently affecting the election's results and thus a voter fraud indictment.
Besides the incredibly painful personal experience of seeing my dear friend on local television cameras as she surrendered herself at the county jail for booking, there are two aspects of this situation which make me very nervous. The first is that while I am able to see the statute in question in its context - which I do not believe was intended to proscribe the particular acts in question in this case - I am not certain that contextualized reading of the law marks the average courtroom in America. Indeed, one of the legacies of legal positivism has been to read only the letter of the law, presume its validity and not inquire into context. Add to that the heavy prevalence of Sensates (who focus on the immediate, often presuming that there is no larger context - which iNtuitives demand to make sense of what they see - because they can't readily see it) in judgeships and the prospects are even dimmer. What results is a legal literalism that differs from its religious counterparts only in terms of content. The truncated cognitive process is the same.
This phenomenon is hardly confined to judicial decision making. The recent shabby treatment of Dan Rather on CBS is but one more example of the shallow thinking of the American public. Rather is clearly an egocentric man whose hubris was legendary at CBS, a rather classic fatal flaw among larger than life human figures. What is disturbing, however, is that his fall from grace at CBS occurred not because of the content of his story on George Bush's disgraceful and brief tenure in the National Guard but rather because the means by which those facts were conveyed were questionable. Lost in the discussion swirling about the fake memo were the facts it purported to relay and the witnesses who all swore them to be accurate. The form became the focus, not the substance. Of course, it's much easier to simply ignore troubling facts if one can kill the messenger up front. And who better to do so than a generation of passive recipients of superficial television and computer game entertainment which avoids critical analysis like the plague?
[To Be Continued]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The little voice in my head woke me with a question: When does prosecution become persecution? That question has been rumbling around a lot in my head since the events of last Friday. It seems the grand jury called to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the Orlando mayoral election returned four indictments which included the current mayor whom I supported as well as a judge, a campaign worker whose activities form the crux of the state's case, and his campaign manager, a long-time dear friend.
The lawyer in me was not happy until I read the indictments and looked up the statute in question. It is vague at best, prohibiting any one person from collecting absentee ballots in an election, inspired by a scandal in Miami in which many actual ballots ended up in garbage dumps and a number of ballots bearing names of deceased people appeared at the polls to be counted. The primary focus of the legislation, as far as I can tell from a Florida Supreme Court case citing the statute in question, is ensuring voters' ballots are counted. The Court cited a long list of acts the statute sought to prohibit which includes "vote brokering." So far as I can tell, the actions of the local campaign worker in Orlando do not fall into any of those categories.
I'd like to say I would be surprised if these indictments (remembering that the requirements of returning an indictment in Florida are so low that grand juries could readily indict kitchen cabinets) resulted in a conviction. But given the circumstances of this case, I have to wonder. Essentially, the loser in the mayoral election, a Republican who lost to a Democrat without even a run-off, contacted the Republican governor about what he decided were fraudulent activities. Clearly the reasoning was that without such activities, a run-off would have been required. The local state attorney, a Democrat, refused to get involved because he knew some of the parties involved and feared having his impartiality questioned. So, the Republican governor appointed a Republican Baptist prosecutor from two counties north to handle the investigation. Using a highly literalist interpretation of the statute in question which prohibits anyone from being paid to handle absentee ballots, prosecutor King (who undoubtedly has his sights set on higher office after years of running the state's attorney office in Ocala) puts together a paid campaign worker who
works in the working poor African-American community to ensure that absentee ballots are cast and counted and comes up with a paid collector of absentees for purposes of fraudulently affecting the election's results and thus a voter fraud indictment.
Besides the incredibly painful personal experience of seeing my dear friend on local television cameras as she surrendered herself at the county jail for booking, there are two aspects of this situation which make me very nervous. The first is that while I am able to see the statute in question in its context - which I do not believe was intended to proscribe the particular acts in question in this case - I am not certain that contextualized reading of the law marks the average courtroom in America. Indeed, one of the legacies of legal positivism has been to read only the letter of the law, presume its validity and not inquire into context. Add to that the heavy prevalence of Sensates (who focus on the immediate, often presuming that there is no larger context - which iNtuitives demand to make sense of what they see - because they can't readily see it) in judgeships and the prospects are even dimmer. What results is a legal literalism that differs from its religious counterparts only in terms of content. The truncated cognitive process is the same.
This phenomenon is hardly confined to judicial decision making. The recent shabby treatment of Dan Rather on CBS is but one more example of the shallow thinking of the American public. Rather is clearly an egocentric man whose hubris was legendary at CBS, a rather classic fatal flaw among larger than life human figures. What is disturbing, however, is that his fall from grace at CBS occurred not because of the content of his story on George Bush's disgraceful and brief tenure in the National Guard but rather because the means by which those facts were conveyed were questionable. Lost in the discussion swirling about the fake memo were the facts it purported to relay and the witnesses who all swore them to be accurate. The form became the focus, not the substance. Of course, it's much easier to simply ignore troubling facts if one can kill the messenger up front. And who better to do so than a generation of passive recipients of superficial television and computer game entertainment which avoids critical analysis like the plague?
[To Be Continued]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Liberty and Justice for All?
There are times that I realize things about myself that seemed obvious before but simply had not been put into any kind of conscious order. This past week I've been dealing with the realizations that I'm probably not much of a Southerner despite my familial pedigree (Floridians really don't count much as Southerners in the long run, something happens at the St. Mary's River I just can't explain but it definitely winnows out the Rebel from the Buffet Parrothead). The other realization is that, despite my protestations to the contrary, I really am a lawyer at heart (assuming such a combination is not by definition a contradiction in terms).
Mind you, this is quite a confession I am making. I tell people regularly that the happiest day of my life was the day I stopped practicing law, a line I stole from my fellow seminarian entering classmate, Phillip Jackson (there were three ex-lawyers in our entering class who represented 10% of the whole class, a percentage I saw as generally expectable among seminarians). In many ways, I was poorly suited to law, a native iNtuitive Feeler Perceiver (NFP) in a highly Thinking and Judging profession. I went into law school with the notion that I would be working for justice, learned my first year that the law was a jealous mistress, and spent the next nine years after admission to the bar figuring out that I was poorly placed in a profession that didn't care what was just or how human societies would be best served, just make sure you're at pre-trials on time with the requisite files.
At the wedding at which I officiated today, I got a chance to talk with the bride's father, a high powered lawyer originally from South Carolina who now practices corporate law with some of the best known firms in Orlando. I remembered almost immediately why I hated practicing law - the competition, the posturing, the "who do you know" one-upmanship. Even as the father of the bride began loosening up over his Scotches, the jugular mode was still in full force: "Where did you go to law school? UF? Oh." "Where did you serve in a parish? FSU Chapel? Oh." G-d save me from yuppie Southern lawyers.
But G-d *did* save me from the practice of law. The "calling" to be a priest (now, G-d, what was *that* all about?) allowed me a plausible out as I left behind the world of game playing professionals who constantly worried about who had the biggest dick and how we could observe that in the way one practiced. I was able to walk away from law after eight years, and few colleagues even questioned my judgment other than my father whose wished-for law career I embodied and the sincere, well-intentioned fellow assistant public defender who asked me "But, Harry, if you leave, who will care about the kids the way you do?"
I've never regretted leaving the practice of law. I know I'm a happier and healthier person for that decision and, frankly, I had to work against my natural inclinations the whole time I practiced. I tell my students that they need to be sure they want to put up with the pain that law school and legal practice entail and I readily lay out for them my observations. But if they still want to go, I write them letters of recommendation. So, I’m not prone to engage in a mindless cynicism which begins with Shakespeare's quotation taken totally out of context "First, we kill all the lawyers." Rather, I'm just glad to have realized when I did that I was poorly placed in the field of law and had the opportunity to escape with minimal economic damage.
That being said, I've found myself the past couple of weeks feeling a sense of absolute despair about America. While the Bush administration promises to provide one depressing saga after another in every arena from the planet's health to the probable dismantling of social security,
it's the appointments to legal positions that have managed to once more wrench my guts and make me wonder how this could happen in an America I once believed in.
Certainly John Ashcroft was an embarrassment. A fundamentalist who pressured his staff into daily prayer meetings and a demonstrated puritanical aversion to human nudity causing him to have Victory covered up because her bare breast might incite sexual feelings in whoever was watching the press events with the statue in the background, Ashcroft was at some level predictable. He satisfied the religious right whom the Bushies demagogue into voting against their financial interests. And he got the US government off Bill Gate's tail long enough to "settle" that case (read: hand it to Bill on a silver platter).
But the past two weeks have brought news of Alberto Gonzalez' confirmation as Attorney General and John Negroponte's confirmation as our first "intelligence czar." Gonzalez is the one who suggested that the Geneva Convention is "quaint" and wrote the legal memos which convinced the Bushies to conduct torture-driven interrogations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. Negroponte is the godfather of Central American terror imposed upon all the non-submissive Central American "protectorates" during the Reagan years. I've seen Negroponte's work in El Salvador and Panama. I know how to say "human suffering" in working poor Spanish. The word is "Negroponte."
What astounds me is that I find myself still clinging to perhaps romantic notions that the US government still could believe in "liberty and justice for all." What astounds me is that I apparently still can be shocked when the rights of the accused guaranteed by the Bill of Rights is denied political prisoners we have deemed "enemy combatants" or any other semantic way of saying "We don't plan to follow our own law."
Years ago I went to law school believing that I was there to fight for justice. And I did, for years after I should have figured out that I was really misplaced in the practice of law. What surprises me today is that I still have those ideals, albeit largely tarnished by the cynicism of post-Bush election realism. I find it surprising I am still able to be shocked by the confirmation of terrorists to positions of legal power. I'm still able to feel despair over the complete failure of justice in the face of legal power personified in people like Gonzalez and Negroponte.
I guess at some level I should be glad that I can still be shocked. My feelings of depression suggest that I am still able to be angry about injustice, even if it is largely directed inside these days. At the same time, I wonder aloud: where are we going as a people? I look at the history of the Third Reich and the creeping normalization of terror and fascism and worry mightily as my own country exhibits those signs.
Maybe I really did believe the things I said in my oath of office to the Florida and Southern District (federal) Courts of Florida: that I would defend the Constitution of the United States of America so help me G-d. Maybe I continue to believe in that fleeting possibility that "liberty and justice for all" will be the mark of the American legal system and not the anomaly. Maybe the notion that terror, prison abuse, lack of legal counsel and a fair trial are not the American way even as our nation finds Orwellian disingenuous labels to rationalize wrong doing.
I don't know what has caused my discomfort this night. But I do find myself feeling a sense of gratitude to those who instilled in me a value for American legal and constitutional ideals, for those who encouraged me to seek the living into of those ideals and for those who to this day stand with me as I enter once more the prophet mode, railing against the actual holding up against that performance the ideal I still believe should be the rule and not the exception. Will it make a difference? G-d only knows and this night, she ain't tellin'!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There are times that I realize things about myself that seemed obvious before but simply had not been put into any kind of conscious order. This past week I've been dealing with the realizations that I'm probably not much of a Southerner despite my familial pedigree (Floridians really don't count much as Southerners in the long run, something happens at the St. Mary's River I just can't explain but it definitely winnows out the Rebel from the Buffet Parrothead). The other realization is that, despite my protestations to the contrary, I really am a lawyer at heart (assuming such a combination is not by definition a contradiction in terms).
Mind you, this is quite a confession I am making. I tell people regularly that the happiest day of my life was the day I stopped practicing law, a line I stole from my fellow seminarian entering classmate, Phillip Jackson (there were three ex-lawyers in our entering class who represented 10% of the whole class, a percentage I saw as generally expectable among seminarians). In many ways, I was poorly suited to law, a native iNtuitive Feeler Perceiver (NFP) in a highly Thinking and Judging profession. I went into law school with the notion that I would be working for justice, learned my first year that the law was a jealous mistress, and spent the next nine years after admission to the bar figuring out that I was poorly placed in a profession that didn't care what was just or how human societies would be best served, just make sure you're at pre-trials on time with the requisite files.
At the wedding at which I officiated today, I got a chance to talk with the bride's father, a high powered lawyer originally from South Carolina who now practices corporate law with some of the best known firms in Orlando. I remembered almost immediately why I hated practicing law - the competition, the posturing, the "who do you know" one-upmanship. Even as the father of the bride began loosening up over his Scotches, the jugular mode was still in full force: "Where did you go to law school? UF? Oh." "Where did you serve in a parish? FSU Chapel? Oh." G-d save me from yuppie Southern lawyers.
But G-d *did* save me from the practice of law. The "calling" to be a priest (now, G-d, what was *that* all about?) allowed me a plausible out as I left behind the world of game playing professionals who constantly worried about who had the biggest dick and how we could observe that in the way one practiced. I was able to walk away from law after eight years, and few colleagues even questioned my judgment other than my father whose wished-for law career I embodied and the sincere, well-intentioned fellow assistant public defender who asked me "But, Harry, if you leave, who will care about the kids the way you do?"
I've never regretted leaving the practice of law. I know I'm a happier and healthier person for that decision and, frankly, I had to work against my natural inclinations the whole time I practiced. I tell my students that they need to be sure they want to put up with the pain that law school and legal practice entail and I readily lay out for them my observations. But if they still want to go, I write them letters of recommendation. So, I’m not prone to engage in a mindless cynicism which begins with Shakespeare's quotation taken totally out of context "First, we kill all the lawyers." Rather, I'm just glad to have realized when I did that I was poorly placed in the field of law and had the opportunity to escape with minimal economic damage.
That being said, I've found myself the past couple of weeks feeling a sense of absolute despair about America. While the Bush administration promises to provide one depressing saga after another in every arena from the planet's health to the probable dismantling of social security,
it's the appointments to legal positions that have managed to once more wrench my guts and make me wonder how this could happen in an America I once believed in.
Certainly John Ashcroft was an embarrassment. A fundamentalist who pressured his staff into daily prayer meetings and a demonstrated puritanical aversion to human nudity causing him to have Victory covered up because her bare breast might incite sexual feelings in whoever was watching the press events with the statue in the background, Ashcroft was at some level predictable. He satisfied the religious right whom the Bushies demagogue into voting against their financial interests. And he got the US government off Bill Gate's tail long enough to "settle" that case (read: hand it to Bill on a silver platter).
But the past two weeks have brought news of Alberto Gonzalez' confirmation as Attorney General and John Negroponte's confirmation as our first "intelligence czar." Gonzalez is the one who suggested that the Geneva Convention is "quaint" and wrote the legal memos which convinced the Bushies to conduct torture-driven interrogations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. Negroponte is the godfather of Central American terror imposed upon all the non-submissive Central American "protectorates" during the Reagan years. I've seen Negroponte's work in El Salvador and Panama. I know how to say "human suffering" in working poor Spanish. The word is "Negroponte."
What astounds me is that I find myself still clinging to perhaps romantic notions that the US government still could believe in "liberty and justice for all." What astounds me is that I apparently still can be shocked when the rights of the accused guaranteed by the Bill of Rights is denied political prisoners we have deemed "enemy combatants" or any other semantic way of saying "We don't plan to follow our own law."
Years ago I went to law school believing that I was there to fight for justice. And I did, for years after I should have figured out that I was really misplaced in the practice of law. What surprises me today is that I still have those ideals, albeit largely tarnished by the cynicism of post-Bush election realism. I find it surprising I am still able to be shocked by the confirmation of terrorists to positions of legal power. I'm still able to feel despair over the complete failure of justice in the face of legal power personified in people like Gonzalez and Negroponte.
I guess at some level I should be glad that I can still be shocked. My feelings of depression suggest that I am still able to be angry about injustice, even if it is largely directed inside these days. At the same time, I wonder aloud: where are we going as a people? I look at the history of the Third Reich and the creeping normalization of terror and fascism and worry mightily as my own country exhibits those signs.
Maybe I really did believe the things I said in my oath of office to the Florida and Southern District (federal) Courts of Florida: that I would defend the Constitution of the United States of America so help me G-d. Maybe I continue to believe in that fleeting possibility that "liberty and justice for all" will be the mark of the American legal system and not the anomaly. Maybe the notion that terror, prison abuse, lack of legal counsel and a fair trial are not the American way even as our nation finds Orwellian disingenuous labels to rationalize wrong doing.
I don't know what has caused my discomfort this night. But I do find myself feeling a sense of gratitude to those who instilled in me a value for American legal and constitutional ideals, for those who encouraged me to seek the living into of those ideals and for those who to this day stand with me as I enter once more the prophet mode, railing against the actual holding up against that performance the ideal I still believe should be the rule and not the exception. Will it make a difference? G-d only knows and this night, she ain't tellin'!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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