Words Can Hurt A Lot: Of Beauty Queens, Hate Speech Wrapped in Religion and Death
In one of the many lists which provide me news and an opportunity to discuss it, the story about the most recent beauty pageant contestant from California spouting homophobia dressed up as religion is the current topic. It has generated much heat but little light, ironically the same effect most beauty contests have.
I’m not sure why anyone would see contestants in a beauty contest as sources for social or political wisdom but in a celebrity culture, saying outrageous things like G-d thinks gays should die (per the current contestant who says she’s Miss Beverly Hills though the city she supposedly represents says otherwise) can get you the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol guaranteed all of us.
In the course of 200 posts generated by this article, most of them little more than the trade of ad hominems, a middle aged woman from Riverside, CA, made the following comment: “Is anyone dead? Words are after all nothing but hot air, and yet a right to express regardlessly. (sic)“ This was my response to her:
Many are dead. They have died over the centuries from thinking as vapid and poorly informed as this woman’s. They have died in bonfires throughout the middle ages condemned as witches because they were different from those who presumed that their way of being in the world was normal, moral and the only possible way to be human. They die in Wyoming prairies after severe beatings and left to die in the cold alone. They die in California school rooms where classmates pull guns so graciously provided by our irresponsible culture from their book bags and shoot middle school boys dead. They die in bathrooms in Japan at the hands of fellow service men whose boots and fists are the last thing their victim remembers.
Words can hurt, especially when they perpetuate ignorance based stereotypes and purport to be homicidal commands from blood thirsty tyrant gods. Words can hurt when they form the basis of disinformation campaigns that spur otherwise good intentioned human beings to commit evil in the form of passing discriminatory laws. Words can hurt when gossip campaigns result in lost jobs, false accusations of pedophilia, rejection from the communion rail.
Americans have a right to express their views (even as inarticulately as the one to which I am responding) but this is not about rights. It’s about responsibility. It’s about recognizing that one’s misanthropic attitudes can impact the targets of that fear and loathing in seriously destructive ways. The question is not whether this woman has the right to say things which evidence ignorance and social prejudices but what accountability she is willing to bear in the exercise of that right.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Power of a Little Affirmation
A couple of nights ago, I was in bed reading as I usually do before sleeping (I know, it’s probably not a good idea but old habits die hard). I had picked up a book entitled When Faith Meets Reason, Religion Scholars Reflect on Their Spiritual Journeys at the Jesus Seminar on the Road conference the previous weekend in Sarasota. It is a fascinating book where the scholars of the Westar Institute, the home of the Jesus Seminar (and now seminars on Paul and the early church) lay out the contents of their spiritual lives. The combination of spirit and scholarship is very appealing to someone who has spent much of his life in higher education as well as devoting a good chunk of his life to the institutional church.
I began with an essay by a professor of religion and philosophy at Otterbein College in Ohio, Paul Alan Laughlin. I had enjoyed his presentation at an earlier fall meeting of the Westar Institute where he had discussed the work of Don Beck and Clare Graves work on Spiral Dynamics along with Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality. All of those systems build in part upon Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, a theoretical system I use regularly in my classes and which strongly informs my understanding of the world.
Laughlin’s chapter was entitled “A Mystical Christian Credo” and took the form of an “idiosyncratic affirmation of faith,” the rare case where the seeming oxymoron of a mystic providing a systematic discussion of his spiritual understandings makes great sense. I found myself resonating with virtually all nine of his articles of faith. But it was his Article 9, Spiritual Stages and Dynamic Development, that most interested me given my interest in and use of Kohlberg.
In the midst of his explanation of the history of dynamic systems which included James Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development, Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory and Erik Erickson’s system of life stages, Laughlin mentioned Kohlberg. Here is what he said: [Fowler’s theoretical model] “draws heavily on the work of Harvard’s Lawrence Kohlberg, whose model of moral development was the subject of an excellent paper presented at the Fall 2005 Westar meeting.”
At that point I almost stopped breathing. The paper Laughlin was referring to was my own. I had presented it to the Fall 2005 Westar meeting. But my memory of that day was not that the scholars found it “excellent,” but rather quite the opposite.
My paper had laid out Kohlberg’s model as well as some of the research by people like James Rest which has produced about five decades worth of data validating Kohlberg’s model. I noted some of the critiques of Kohlberg from conservatives like James Bailey, former economics professor at UCF, and Carol Gilligan, whose work In a Different Voice sought to respond to Kohlberg’s initial research from a feminist perspective.
For the record, neither critique is particularly compelling. Conservatives tend to focus on conserving conventional structures so it’s not surprising so few of them ever escape conventional stages 3 and 4 to reason at post-conventional levels. That doesn’t make the model biased against conservatives, it simply reflects the way moral reasoning works.
Gilligan’s critique that Kohlberg’s initial conclusions which drew a disparity between males and females, suggesting the former were more likely to engage in post-conventional reasoning, became the basis of Kohlberg’s revision of his theory. Moreover, testing results from Rest’s Defining Issues Test (DIT) since it was first formulated have shown that women and men are about the same in their propensities to reason at principled (post-conventional) levels. If anything, women are slightly more principled in their reasoning. Gilligan’s primary contribution to the field comes from her excellent discussion of how different socialization patterns of girls v. boys plays a role in the development of moral reasoning. But ultimately, her three stage system which she offers in place of Kohlberg’s is little more than an adaptation of Kohlberg’s model.
In the paper I presented at Westar, my argument was that the moral reasoning identifiable in the statements the Seminar found most likely to have been made by the Historical Jesus were in fact post-conventional (stage 5/6) statements. They tended to reflect a concern for humanity that crossed tribal sectarian (stage 3) and nationalistic (stage 4) lines. By definition those statements drew conventional reasoning into question (Love your enemies? Seriously?) as well as the authorities charged with enforcing those values (Temple cult, Roman imperial agents). And, not surprisingly, the response of those authorities was to get rid of the irritant and eliminate the challenge.
But it’s precisely because these statements were post-conventional and thus distinct from the conventional religious and ethical reasoning of the day that Jesus was remembered. The Seminar had used a number of criteria in attempting to ferret out the words of Jesus. Among them was the criterion of distinctive discourse: “Jesus’ sayings and parables cut against the social and religious grain.” “Jesus sayings and parables surprise and shock: they characteristically call for a reversal of roles or frustrate ordinary, everyday expectations.”
Among the sayings receiving high levels of authenticity in the Seminar’s deliberations were those which called for turning the other cheek, the beatitude’s congratulations to the poor (and accompanying denunciation of the wealthy), the admonition to love one’s enemies and the parable of the Good Samaritan. Clearly all of those sayings “cut against the social and religious grain” if not calling for “a reversal of roles.” In short, Jesus’ principled teachings pointed toward a higher ethic than conventional understandings.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, as writer and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce observed. Post-conventional, principled prophets essentially hold up a mirror to the world and dare us to see both who we are and who we could be. The prophet embodies human potential. And we usually reward him or her for that insight by killing them, putting them out of our misery. If we want to understand why Jesus was killed, we don’t need to construct a vengeful deity needing human sacrifice. We only have to look in the prophet’s mirror to see how a glimpse of our own unrealized potential and its indictment of our laziness, fear and unwillingness to delay gratification (which M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled called entropy, our actual original sin) could prompt us to respond with violence toward the one who would dare to awaken us from our slumber.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the reception of a paper which laid out this pattern at the Seminar was less than enthusiastic. The session was mainly attended by associate fellows, those of us who were not biblical scholars but who had expertise of our own. Many were pastors with theological doctorates. A few of the Westar Fellows, biblical scholars who formed the Jesus, Paul and early church seminars, were also present.
As I laid out my theory, it became clear that the biblical scholars present were skeptical, to say the least. One suggested that Jesus’ death could simply have been a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Another questioned Kohlberg’s system ending his comments with the challenge, “Am I just supposed to take your word for this?”
What eventually became clear to me was that the scholars had not actually read my paper. One of them confirmed that after the session was over. “When I saw the title I didn’t even bother to read it,” he said. Another said he had been around when Kohlberg’s model first was published and had to endure classmates (who clearly did not understand the model) assessing each other as “just a stage three.” One of the Fellows took me aside and said he had read my paper, thought I’d raised some very good points and then concluded with a troubling statement: “I’m not sure what happened today. I’ve never seen the Seminar treat anyone so rudely,” apologizing for what he saw as their abusive behavior.
I realize that the world of academia is for many a contact sport. I know that a good bit of ego is invested in intellectual property which must be guarded with one’s life. I admit to some level of guilt on both counts. On the other hand, I’m not adverse to being questioned on my understandings or even to consider changing them when I am convinced those understandings were mistaken. I anticipate resistance to my ideas at conferences and accept that as simply the nature of the beast.
But I also recognize bullshit when I see it. I don’t have much patience for my students coming to class unprepared, which is one of the reasons I create many assignments due at class time to insure they at least have done a modicum of reading and consideration of the material. They’re undergraduates and at some level I expect a bit of immaturity from kids right out of high schools. But I do expect more from self-identified scholars. The idea that one would come to a session where an academic paper is presented unprepared and then presume to tell the presenter that they are wrong is pretty presumptuous. And to publicly dismiss them as unworthy of one’s consideration goes beyond rude.
My presentation came on the final day of the five day conference, a day which concludes with a banquet complete with speeches, entertainment and some of northern California’s best wines. But I could not bring myself to attend the banquet that night. I sat by the stream next to my hotel, trying to make sense of the day’s events, my own glass of wine in hand, watching the sun go down. It was a very long evening. And it was the beginning of the cooling of my long time love affair with Westar.
That’s why Laughlin’s description of my paper in his essay prompted me to leap from bed and read that portion of his essay aloud to my partner. I found myself elated, overjoyed that one of the Fellows had admitted to reading my paper and taking it seriously on its own terms. That he found it “excellent” was incredibly affirming – and in no small manner a vindication given the otherwise rough treatment I had endured at the conference.
It’s surprising what a little affirmation can do for a human being, particularly those of us who do not readily recognize our own value (which is also why dehumanizing events like the trashing of a paper at a conference can be so devastating). Increasingly I find myself standing at the cusp of a new era in my life in which I am clear that whatever writing I am going to do needs to be done in the next few years of my life. I sometimes feel as if I have demons in my head that increasingly insist upon being exorcised, cast onto paper, committed to words and distributed to others to do as they will with them. Sometimes that occurs in the middle of the night when the chatter in my head can be endured no more and I find myself sitting at my computer pecking away at 4 a.m. More and more I am struck by the sense that my life is turning once again and that this new phase is demanding its due.
A little affirmation goes a long way in such a context. And so I am grateful to this anonymous endorsement from Paul Alan Laughlin in his essay. It is a badly needed shot in the arm at a critical moment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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 couple of nights ago, I was in bed reading as I usually do before sleeping (I know, it’s probably not a good idea but old habits die hard). I had picked up a book entitled When Faith Meets Reason, Religion Scholars Reflect on Their Spiritual Journeys at the Jesus Seminar on the Road conference the previous weekend in Sarasota. It is a fascinating book where the scholars of the Westar Institute, the home of the Jesus Seminar (and now seminars on Paul and the early church) lay out the contents of their spiritual lives. The combination of spirit and scholarship is very appealing to someone who has spent much of his life in higher education as well as devoting a good chunk of his life to the institutional church.
I began with an essay by a professor of religion and philosophy at Otterbein College in Ohio, Paul Alan Laughlin. I had enjoyed his presentation at an earlier fall meeting of the Westar Institute where he had discussed the work of Don Beck and Clare Graves work on Spiral Dynamics along with Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality. All of those systems build in part upon Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, a theoretical system I use regularly in my classes and which strongly informs my understanding of the world.
Laughlin’s chapter was entitled “A Mystical Christian Credo” and took the form of an “idiosyncratic affirmation of faith,” the rare case where the seeming oxymoron of a mystic providing a systematic discussion of his spiritual understandings makes great sense. I found myself resonating with virtually all nine of his articles of faith. But it was his Article 9, Spiritual Stages and Dynamic Development, that most interested me given my interest in and use of Kohlberg.
In the midst of his explanation of the history of dynamic systems which included James Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development, Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory and Erik Erickson’s system of life stages, Laughlin mentioned Kohlberg. Here is what he said: [Fowler’s theoretical model] “draws heavily on the work of Harvard’s Lawrence Kohlberg, whose model of moral development was the subject of an excellent paper presented at the Fall 2005 Westar meeting.”
At that point I almost stopped breathing. The paper Laughlin was referring to was my own. I had presented it to the Fall 2005 Westar meeting. But my memory of that day was not that the scholars found it “excellent,” but rather quite the opposite.
My paper had laid out Kohlberg’s model as well as some of the research by people like James Rest which has produced about five decades worth of data validating Kohlberg’s model. I noted some of the critiques of Kohlberg from conservatives like James Bailey, former economics professor at UCF, and Carol Gilligan, whose work In a Different Voice sought to respond to Kohlberg’s initial research from a feminist perspective.
For the record, neither critique is particularly compelling. Conservatives tend to focus on conserving conventional structures so it’s not surprising so few of them ever escape conventional stages 3 and 4 to reason at post-conventional levels. That doesn’t make the model biased against conservatives, it simply reflects the way moral reasoning works.
Gilligan’s critique that Kohlberg’s initial conclusions which drew a disparity between males and females, suggesting the former were more likely to engage in post-conventional reasoning, became the basis of Kohlberg’s revision of his theory. Moreover, testing results from Rest’s Defining Issues Test (DIT) since it was first formulated have shown that women and men are about the same in their propensities to reason at principled (post-conventional) levels. If anything, women are slightly more principled in their reasoning. Gilligan’s primary contribution to the field comes from her excellent discussion of how different socialization patterns of girls v. boys plays a role in the development of moral reasoning. But ultimately, her three stage system which she offers in place of Kohlberg’s is little more than an adaptation of Kohlberg’s model.
In the paper I presented at Westar, my argument was that the moral reasoning identifiable in the statements the Seminar found most likely to have been made by the Historical Jesus were in fact post-conventional (stage 5/6) statements. They tended to reflect a concern for humanity that crossed tribal sectarian (stage 3) and nationalistic (stage 4) lines. By definition those statements drew conventional reasoning into question (Love your enemies? Seriously?) as well as the authorities charged with enforcing those values (Temple cult, Roman imperial agents). And, not surprisingly, the response of those authorities was to get rid of the irritant and eliminate the challenge.
But it’s precisely because these statements were post-conventional and thus distinct from the conventional religious and ethical reasoning of the day that Jesus was remembered. The Seminar had used a number of criteria in attempting to ferret out the words of Jesus. Among them was the criterion of distinctive discourse: “Jesus’ sayings and parables cut against the social and religious grain.” “Jesus sayings and parables surprise and shock: they characteristically call for a reversal of roles or frustrate ordinary, everyday expectations.”
Among the sayings receiving high levels of authenticity in the Seminar’s deliberations were those which called for turning the other cheek, the beatitude’s congratulations to the poor (and accompanying denunciation of the wealthy), the admonition to love one’s enemies and the parable of the Good Samaritan. Clearly all of those sayings “cut against the social and religious grain” if not calling for “a reversal of roles.” In short, Jesus’ principled teachings pointed toward a higher ethic than conventional understandings.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, as writer and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce observed. Post-conventional, principled prophets essentially hold up a mirror to the world and dare us to see both who we are and who we could be. The prophet embodies human potential. And we usually reward him or her for that insight by killing them, putting them out of our misery. If we want to understand why Jesus was killed, we don’t need to construct a vengeful deity needing human sacrifice. We only have to look in the prophet’s mirror to see how a glimpse of our own unrealized potential and its indictment of our laziness, fear and unwillingness to delay gratification (which M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled called entropy, our actual original sin) could prompt us to respond with violence toward the one who would dare to awaken us from our slumber.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the reception of a paper which laid out this pattern at the Seminar was less than enthusiastic. The session was mainly attended by associate fellows, those of us who were not biblical scholars but who had expertise of our own. Many were pastors with theological doctorates. A few of the Westar Fellows, biblical scholars who formed the Jesus, Paul and early church seminars, were also present.
As I laid out my theory, it became clear that the biblical scholars present were skeptical, to say the least. One suggested that Jesus’ death could simply have been a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Another questioned Kohlberg’s system ending his comments with the challenge, “Am I just supposed to take your word for this?”
What eventually became clear to me was that the scholars had not actually read my paper. One of them confirmed that after the session was over. “When I saw the title I didn’t even bother to read it,” he said. Another said he had been around when Kohlberg’s model first was published and had to endure classmates (who clearly did not understand the model) assessing each other as “just a stage three.” One of the Fellows took me aside and said he had read my paper, thought I’d raised some very good points and then concluded with a troubling statement: “I’m not sure what happened today. I’ve never seen the Seminar treat anyone so rudely,” apologizing for what he saw as their abusive behavior.
I realize that the world of academia is for many a contact sport. I know that a good bit of ego is invested in intellectual property which must be guarded with one’s life. I admit to some level of guilt on both counts. On the other hand, I’m not adverse to being questioned on my understandings or even to consider changing them when I am convinced those understandings were mistaken. I anticipate resistance to my ideas at conferences and accept that as simply the nature of the beast.
But I also recognize bullshit when I see it. I don’t have much patience for my students coming to class unprepared, which is one of the reasons I create many assignments due at class time to insure they at least have done a modicum of reading and consideration of the material. They’re undergraduates and at some level I expect a bit of immaturity from kids right out of high schools. But I do expect more from self-identified scholars. The idea that one would come to a session where an academic paper is presented unprepared and then presume to tell the presenter that they are wrong is pretty presumptuous. And to publicly dismiss them as unworthy of one’s consideration goes beyond rude.
My presentation came on the final day of the five day conference, a day which concludes with a banquet complete with speeches, entertainment and some of northern California’s best wines. But I could not bring myself to attend the banquet that night. I sat by the stream next to my hotel, trying to make sense of the day’s events, my own glass of wine in hand, watching the sun go down. It was a very long evening. And it was the beginning of the cooling of my long time love affair with Westar.
That’s why Laughlin’s description of my paper in his essay prompted me to leap from bed and read that portion of his essay aloud to my partner. I found myself elated, overjoyed that one of the Fellows had admitted to reading my paper and taking it seriously on its own terms. That he found it “excellent” was incredibly affirming – and in no small manner a vindication given the otherwise rough treatment I had endured at the conference.
It’s surprising what a little affirmation can do for a human being, particularly those of us who do not readily recognize our own value (which is also why dehumanizing events like the trashing of a paper at a conference can be so devastating). Increasingly I find myself standing at the cusp of a new era in my life in which I am clear that whatever writing I am going to do needs to be done in the next few years of my life. I sometimes feel as if I have demons in my head that increasingly insist upon being exorcised, cast onto paper, committed to words and distributed to others to do as they will with them. Sometimes that occurs in the middle of the night when the chatter in my head can be endured no more and I find myself sitting at my computer pecking away at 4 a.m. More and more I am struck by the sense that my life is turning once again and that this new phase is demanding its due.
A little affirmation goes a long way in such a context. And so I am grateful to this anonymous endorsement from Paul Alan Laughlin in his essay. It is a badly needed shot in the arm at a critical moment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Eva Gabor comes to the White House?
The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts published a column this past weekend in which he implores Sarah Palin to run for President. Ordinarily I find Pitts provocative and well worth reading. This column left me with a pain in the pit of my stomach. Entitled “Dear Sarah: Say it is so, run for president,” Pitts argues that a Palin candidacy “ would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.”
Pitts concludes his column by saying:
[T]his is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That's why I'd welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race. If the latter, wonderful, God bless America. If the former, well, some of us can finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and plan accordingly. Either way, we need to know, and your candidacy would tell us.
You can read the whole column here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/1478213.html
I’ve heard this argument made by a number of people. I think most of them have a higher assessment of the American people today than I have.
I thought things could not get worse after Ronald Reagan. America elected a rather superficial ideologue actor who could readily remember and repeat the lines of some fairly decent speech writers but his policies were a disaster at home and abroad (having spent a good bit of time in Central America to survey the damage). It took the next two presidents to repair the damage.
Then came George Bush. I never thought a man with inordinate ambition, maximum unearned privilege, very little talent and little but contempt for anyone outside his immediate circle of family could ever reside in the White House. I never thought the American people could vote for someone so lacking in substance, particularly not for president. But they did. King George the Unready managed to make me pine for the good ole days of Ronald Reagan before his path of destruction was through. I pity Mr. Obama his job of cleaning up the disaster left behind.
I do not think Americans are a particularly stupid lot, which is why the possibility of having Sarah Palin reflect us as a people as our national leader is so troubling. But I do think we are an intellectually lazy bunch. As a people we tend to be ambivalent about education at best and our educational spending and testing driven curricula reflects that. We tend to avoid deep and critical thinking as a rule and the passive “entertainment” we insist we must have at all times reflects that.
That has come to include our news services which have become dominated by a focus on entertainment personalities and the talking head ideologues predominately of the right and far right variety with a few barely left of center folks to allow the networks to pretend there is a modicum of balance. The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush could only have occurred in an age of media driven entertainment where substance is not valued and critical thought regarding issues is avoided. If anything, the public’s demand for a superficial culture which does not interrupt our spoiled child sense of entitlement has only intensified with the rise of serious problems from recession to global climate change we’d rather not face.
It’s precisely this context into which Sarah Palin as potential presidential candidate steps. And pardon me if I don’t find that possibility terribly exciting. I am not confident about what the American people’s decision about who we want to be as a country will be, a confidence which seems to underlie Mr. Pitts’ challenge here. Moreover, I cannot be as blithe about the possibility that America will choose an incompetent leader at a time when we most need the kind of intellectual, informed and capable leadership we currently have in Mr. Obama. I’m not sure I share his sense of urgency that “we need to know” so we can “finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and plan accordingly.”
What’s to plan after the demise of your nation?
This past weekend Jarmo Tarki, a biblical scholar from the Jesus Seminar, was talking about this very subject and said, “The thought of Sarah Palin having the codes for the nuclear bombs is very troubling.” In past years I would have laughed at the outrageous suggestion that someone as poorly qualified and as ideologically addled as Ms. Palin would have ever had a chance at becoming President. Imagine Eva Gabor on Green Acres as President. With the Boomer Generation Ms. Gabor entertained now in positions of power, our Xer children turned off and cynical and our Y children tuned out and distracted, that suggestion becomes distinctly plausible. As Jarmo said, I find that very troubling.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts published a column this past weekend in which he implores Sarah Palin to run for President. Ordinarily I find Pitts provocative and well worth reading. This column left me with a pain in the pit of my stomach. Entitled “Dear Sarah: Say it is so, run for president,” Pitts argues that a Palin candidacy “ would force upon this country a desperately needed moment of truth. It would require us to finally decide what kind of America we want to be.”
Pitts concludes his column by saying:
[T]his is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That's why I'd welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race. If the latter, wonderful, God bless America. If the former, well, some of us can finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and plan accordingly. Either way, we need to know, and your candidacy would tell us.
You can read the whole column here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/1478213.html
I’ve heard this argument made by a number of people. I think most of them have a higher assessment of the American people today than I have.
I thought things could not get worse after Ronald Reagan. America elected a rather superficial ideologue actor who could readily remember and repeat the lines of some fairly decent speech writers but his policies were a disaster at home and abroad (having spent a good bit of time in Central America to survey the damage). It took the next two presidents to repair the damage.
Then came George Bush. I never thought a man with inordinate ambition, maximum unearned privilege, very little talent and little but contempt for anyone outside his immediate circle of family could ever reside in the White House. I never thought the American people could vote for someone so lacking in substance, particularly not for president. But they did. King George the Unready managed to make me pine for the good ole days of Ronald Reagan before his path of destruction was through. I pity Mr. Obama his job of cleaning up the disaster left behind.
I do not think Americans are a particularly stupid lot, which is why the possibility of having Sarah Palin reflect us as a people as our national leader is so troubling. But I do think we are an intellectually lazy bunch. As a people we tend to be ambivalent about education at best and our educational spending and testing driven curricula reflects that. We tend to avoid deep and critical thinking as a rule and the passive “entertainment” we insist we must have at all times reflects that.
That has come to include our news services which have become dominated by a focus on entertainment personalities and the talking head ideologues predominately of the right and far right variety with a few barely left of center folks to allow the networks to pretend there is a modicum of balance. The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush could only have occurred in an age of media driven entertainment where substance is not valued and critical thought regarding issues is avoided. If anything, the public’s demand for a superficial culture which does not interrupt our spoiled child sense of entitlement has only intensified with the rise of serious problems from recession to global climate change we’d rather not face.
It’s precisely this context into which Sarah Palin as potential presidential candidate steps. And pardon me if I don’t find that possibility terribly exciting. I am not confident about what the American people’s decision about who we want to be as a country will be, a confidence which seems to underlie Mr. Pitts’ challenge here. Moreover, I cannot be as blithe about the possibility that America will choose an incompetent leader at a time when we most need the kind of intellectual, informed and capable leadership we currently have in Mr. Obama. I’m not sure I share his sense of urgency that “we need to know” so we can “finally quit hoping the nation will return to its senses and plan accordingly.”
What’s to plan after the demise of your nation?
This past weekend Jarmo Tarki, a biblical scholar from the Jesus Seminar, was talking about this very subject and said, “The thought of Sarah Palin having the codes for the nuclear bombs is very troubling.” In past years I would have laughed at the outrageous suggestion that someone as poorly qualified and as ideologically addled as Ms. Palin would have ever had a chance at becoming President. Imagine Eva Gabor on Green Acres as President. With the Boomer Generation Ms. Gabor entertained now in positions of power, our Xer children turned off and cynical and our Y children tuned out and distracted, that suggestion becomes distinctly plausible. As Jarmo said, I find that very troubling.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Monday, February 08, 2010
Much ado…about the Who?
I confess to watching my first Super Bowl all the way through in probably 15 years last night. It was a pretty decent game and my chosen team even won. How can you root against Nawlins, especially after Katrina? And how could anyone in their right mind root for any team from the world’s largest collection of overweight pasty white people with their accordions, mobile homes and fundamentalist religion, that collection called the state of Indiana?
Of course, much of the attraction in any Super Bowl is the ads. This year’s collection was fairly lame though the Betty White commercial was a real hoot. But no a cappella frogs, no dogs lurching into crotches, no horse farts igniting debutantes’ bouffants this year, just Timmy and his mom.
After all the cyber vitriol spilled over the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad, I have to say the actual ad itself was a real letdown. In fact, it went by so fast – kind of like Timmy did in the ad - that I honestly didn’t get the punchline. I did see the festered Focus on the Family website at the bottom of the screen. But no preaching. No overt exhortations, just a jock and his white middle class mom, not terribly unlike the vast majority of the ads for the night. Ho hum.
Of course, it does trouble me that CBS would accept an ad from Focus on the Family in the first place. They are an extremist organization in the culture wars using the label “Family” to disguise just about every right wing agenda known to Sarah Palin (recognizing her cortical capacity to know is limited). And this is the same network who would not allow an actual religious organization, the United Church of Christ, to air their ad which actually featured a (gasp!) openly lesbian couple coming to church. Too controversial, the execs said. Anti-abortion ads are somehow “Family” ads while the welcoming embrace of a Christian tradition is somehow problematic? What kind of family values are we talking about here? Addams Family?
But what did people really expect from a network who would sell their grandmother’s soul for another nickel? This was a calculated risk. Football players, for some reason known only to G-d (and She ain’t tellin’) somehow see themselves as pad and uniform clad evangelists today. Make a touchdown? Point your fingers to heaven and thank G-d for His (sic) blessing. Sack the quarterback (even better, knock him out of the game), thank the good Lord for his mercies.
Frankly, the idea of a jock representing the divine stretches my ability to suspend belief even momentarily about as much as the assertion that George Bush legitimately won the state of Florida in the 2000 election. It might be. But it ain’t likely.
I admit to a begrudging admiration of Tim Tebow. He led one of my alma maters to a very fine season, one tearstained game away from yet another national championship. He won the Heisman trophy as a sophomore, the first in his class to do so. He seems to have a bit more native intelligence than the average jock and he seems to be well liked by his teammates and coaches. He’s what I’d call “a good kid” in my residual redneck speak.
But I am troubled by the use of national television and ostensibly the concern for glare from the sun as the means to take references to Bible verses completely out of context and use them for evangelizing exhortations under the eyes of any jock. At best that cheapens the Bible which becomes a means to an end – a victory in football - and it also manifests the mindless tendency of evangelicals to take verses completely out of context, supplying their own in the process, and asserting the verses as if they somehow mean something to anyone else. Tebow’s practice is absolutely anathema to anyone who sees the Hebrew and Christian scripture as something to be taken seriously on its own terms, not as some magic formula for a jock seeking divine favor - not unlike their Santeria cousins with their potions, voodoo dolls and candles.
Frankly, if Christianity is really about being a jock, how many thoughtful, spiritual people would really want anything to do with it? For the record, I do believe G-d is with athletes as they play. But I believe G-d is also with the other team, the bands from both teams as they perform, the officials as they seek to call the game and prevent bodily injury and the groundskeepers and janitors who will clean up the knee deep garbage left by the predominately white middle class crowd who left the stadium happy, their football (and thus tribal ego) fix safe for another week. I just think the notion that G-d blesses the performance of any athlete, team or school is ridiculous and childish.
That being said, the performance of what’s left of The Who at the Super Bowl halftime was anything but ridiculous and childish. These boys are pushing 70. And yet they got out there in the middle of Miami’s [your corporate logo of the week here] Stadium and put on one hell of a show. They can’t hit the high notes anymore. Perhaps that’s due to the loss of two of the band members. But between the lights on the field, the energy of these aging Boomer era musicians and the singing and swaying lights held among the crowd, it was a great show.
What struck me as I watched the musicians of my own youth playing at America’s major corporately constructed feast day was what this said about the music that supposedly was created since their time. The last Super Bowl show I watched featured Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers, an early 70s Boomer band. The show before that was the infamous wardrobe failure of Janet Jackson (Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty) of the 1960s Jackson Family who clearly outperformed the poor musical misfit and boyband refugee Justin Timberlake who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if he had to.
What is it about music since the 1960s? Why do we keep coming back to now sexagenarian rockers to represent American music? Clearly we have had a flood of rap music (begin with “My brother threw a rock through the win-dow, to-day!"). And there is the clever technically enhanced dance music of artists from Rupaul to Lady Gaga. So why is it we resurrect a band from the Boomer graveyard to entertain us at halftime?
Easy. As my friend who graciously invited Andy and I over for vegetarian chili and Super Bowl on the big screen last night said, “They stopped making music then.” While that’s perhaps a self-serving, over-the-top statement, the reality is that none of the oxymoron called rap music, the assemblage of techno sounds called dance music or the mixture of the two called hip hop comes close to the music of The Who or their colleagues. The music of The Who asked listeners to think: “Who are you? I really want to know!” The anti-war music of The Who asked an important question: Why the hell are we in this mess killing people for a reason that seems obscure on a good day? The Who required singers who could sing, not slide off with technical manipulations of their voices. They played instruments, not computerized noises. And they sang, they didn’t simply shout out words in syncopated patterns.
Now, perhaps that makes me the grouchy old man that my father’s friend embodied when he called the Beatles “a bunch of niggers screaming” back in the early 1960s. It’d be easy to simply blow my critique off as simply a generational difference as some of my colleagues recently did at a party. But it’s also not honest. Anyone who would compare the quality of the music produced during the late 1960s to the techno sound produced today simply doesn’t have a very discriminating ear or very high standards for music. Somehow the narcissistic chorus of the recent top of the charts number which said “My life would suck without you” simply isn’t in the same league with the lyrics of The Who:
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
And here is where CBS was actually right. Whatever else they think, they do know talent when they see it. The show wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t abysmal or shallow. CBS execs might be philistines when it comes to commercial sponsors. But the leading television network knows true music and thus true entertainment when they see it.
One wonders who they’ll get next year.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I confess to watching my first Super Bowl all the way through in probably 15 years last night. It was a pretty decent game and my chosen team even won. How can you root against Nawlins, especially after Katrina? And how could anyone in their right mind root for any team from the world’s largest collection of overweight pasty white people with their accordions, mobile homes and fundamentalist religion, that collection called the state of Indiana?
Of course, much of the attraction in any Super Bowl is the ads. This year’s collection was fairly lame though the Betty White commercial was a real hoot. But no a cappella frogs, no dogs lurching into crotches, no horse farts igniting debutantes’ bouffants this year, just Timmy and his mom.
After all the cyber vitriol spilled over the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad, I have to say the actual ad itself was a real letdown. In fact, it went by so fast – kind of like Timmy did in the ad - that I honestly didn’t get the punchline. I did see the festered Focus on the Family website at the bottom of the screen. But no preaching. No overt exhortations, just a jock and his white middle class mom, not terribly unlike the vast majority of the ads for the night. Ho hum.
Of course, it does trouble me that CBS would accept an ad from Focus on the Family in the first place. They are an extremist organization in the culture wars using the label “Family” to disguise just about every right wing agenda known to Sarah Palin (recognizing her cortical capacity to know is limited). And this is the same network who would not allow an actual religious organization, the United Church of Christ, to air their ad which actually featured a (gasp!) openly lesbian couple coming to church. Too controversial, the execs said. Anti-abortion ads are somehow “Family” ads while the welcoming embrace of a Christian tradition is somehow problematic? What kind of family values are we talking about here? Addams Family?
But what did people really expect from a network who would sell their grandmother’s soul for another nickel? This was a calculated risk. Football players, for some reason known only to G-d (and She ain’t tellin’) somehow see themselves as pad and uniform clad evangelists today. Make a touchdown? Point your fingers to heaven and thank G-d for His (sic) blessing. Sack the quarterback (even better, knock him out of the game), thank the good Lord for his mercies.
Frankly, the idea of a jock representing the divine stretches my ability to suspend belief even momentarily about as much as the assertion that George Bush legitimately won the state of Florida in the 2000 election. It might be. But it ain’t likely.
I admit to a begrudging admiration of Tim Tebow. He led one of my alma maters to a very fine season, one tearstained game away from yet another national championship. He won the Heisman trophy as a sophomore, the first in his class to do so. He seems to have a bit more native intelligence than the average jock and he seems to be well liked by his teammates and coaches. He’s what I’d call “a good kid” in my residual redneck speak.
But I am troubled by the use of national television and ostensibly the concern for glare from the sun as the means to take references to Bible verses completely out of context and use them for evangelizing exhortations under the eyes of any jock. At best that cheapens the Bible which becomes a means to an end – a victory in football - and it also manifests the mindless tendency of evangelicals to take verses completely out of context, supplying their own in the process, and asserting the verses as if they somehow mean something to anyone else. Tebow’s practice is absolutely anathema to anyone who sees the Hebrew and Christian scripture as something to be taken seriously on its own terms, not as some magic formula for a jock seeking divine favor - not unlike their Santeria cousins with their potions, voodoo dolls and candles.
Frankly, if Christianity is really about being a jock, how many thoughtful, spiritual people would really want anything to do with it? For the record, I do believe G-d is with athletes as they play. But I believe G-d is also with the other team, the bands from both teams as they perform, the officials as they seek to call the game and prevent bodily injury and the groundskeepers and janitors who will clean up the knee deep garbage left by the predominately white middle class crowd who left the stadium happy, their football (and thus tribal ego) fix safe for another week. I just think the notion that G-d blesses the performance of any athlete, team or school is ridiculous and childish.
That being said, the performance of what’s left of The Who at the Super Bowl halftime was anything but ridiculous and childish. These boys are pushing 70. And yet they got out there in the middle of Miami’s [your corporate logo of the week here] Stadium and put on one hell of a show. They can’t hit the high notes anymore. Perhaps that’s due to the loss of two of the band members. But between the lights on the field, the energy of these aging Boomer era musicians and the singing and swaying lights held among the crowd, it was a great show.
What struck me as I watched the musicians of my own youth playing at America’s major corporately constructed feast day was what this said about the music that supposedly was created since their time. The last Super Bowl show I watched featured Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers, an early 70s Boomer band. The show before that was the infamous wardrobe failure of Janet Jackson (Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty) of the 1960s Jackson Family who clearly outperformed the poor musical misfit and boyband refugee Justin Timberlake who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if he had to.
What is it about music since the 1960s? Why do we keep coming back to now sexagenarian rockers to represent American music? Clearly we have had a flood of rap music (begin with “My brother threw a rock through the win-dow, to-day!"). And there is the clever technically enhanced dance music of artists from Rupaul to Lady Gaga. So why is it we resurrect a band from the Boomer graveyard to entertain us at halftime?
Easy. As my friend who graciously invited Andy and I over for vegetarian chili and Super Bowl on the big screen last night said, “They stopped making music then.” While that’s perhaps a self-serving, over-the-top statement, the reality is that none of the oxymoron called rap music, the assemblage of techno sounds called dance music or the mixture of the two called hip hop comes close to the music of The Who or their colleagues. The music of The Who asked listeners to think: “Who are you? I really want to know!” The anti-war music of The Who asked an important question: Why the hell are we in this mess killing people for a reason that seems obscure on a good day? The Who required singers who could sing, not slide off with technical manipulations of their voices. They played instruments, not computerized noises. And they sang, they didn’t simply shout out words in syncopated patterns.
Now, perhaps that makes me the grouchy old man that my father’s friend embodied when he called the Beatles “a bunch of niggers screaming” back in the early 1960s. It’d be easy to simply blow my critique off as simply a generational difference as some of my colleagues recently did at a party. But it’s also not honest. Anyone who would compare the quality of the music produced during the late 1960s to the techno sound produced today simply doesn’t have a very discriminating ear or very high standards for music. Somehow the narcissistic chorus of the recent top of the charts number which said “My life would suck without you” simply isn’t in the same league with the lyrics of The Who:
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
And here is where CBS was actually right. Whatever else they think, they do know talent when they see it. The show wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t abysmal or shallow. CBS execs might be philistines when it comes to commercial sponsors. But the leading television network knows true music and thus true entertainment when they see it.
One wonders who they’ll get next year.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Fleeting moments of involuntarily shared cell phone conversations
• From the young woman leaving the women’s room on the ground floor of the Psych Building, this report to the assembled multitudes:
“I’m just coming out of the bathroom.”
Given that the conversation clearly predated that moment, one can only guess what the young women and her cell phone partner discussed as she did her business.
Why was it any of us needed to know this?
• From the young woman leaving Classroom Building I, sharing her life with everyone between the bus circle and the mall:
“There were some tricky questions on that test. You really had to think about them.”
As opposed to the mindless muliple choice questions requiring data regurgitation on demand like Pavlov’s dog?
*This* is the future of America?
Jesus wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
• From the young woman leaving the women’s room on the ground floor of the Psych Building, this report to the assembled multitudes:
“I’m just coming out of the bathroom.”
Given that the conversation clearly predated that moment, one can only guess what the young women and her cell phone partner discussed as she did her business.
Why was it any of us needed to know this?
• From the young woman leaving Classroom Building I, sharing her life with everyone between the bus circle and the mall:
“There were some tricky questions on that test. You really had to think about them.”
As opposed to the mindless muliple choice questions requiring data regurgitation on demand like Pavlov’s dog?
*This* is the future of America?
Jesus wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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