More on Mormons and Muslims
Interestingly, no sooner had I posted the entry on Glen Beck’s absurd analogies than I find this item on the Google news site:
Glenn Beck does not have a reputation for admitting mistakes, but after his recent comments on the radio comparing Reform Judaism to Islamic Extremism, he apologized on his Feb. 24 program, tail tucked firmly between his legs…."I've always told you to do your own homework," he says. "And, in this case, I didn't do enough homework." He also says it was "one of the worst analogies of all time" and agreed with those who'd labeled his comments as "ignorant."
Not everyone is appeased though. Mediaite also has a response from Jewish Funds for Justice, the organization Beck was speaking of when he made his initial comments. "Glenn Beck's apology for comparing Reform Judaism to "Radicalized Islam" is welcome but incomplete," reads the statement. "Glenn Beck's characterization of Reform Judaism is in keeping with his longstanding hostility toward people who see their faith linked to pursuing the common good."
I’d actually take it one step further. Beck and the sea of misanthropes he titillates daily don’t just demonstrate hostility toward those who recognize the necessary link between faith and the common good. In reality, they hold the very notion of the common good in contempt generally.
Beck’s polemical circus is one of many predictable progeny of the 1980s Reagan/Rand school of politics and economics in which self-interest at the expense of anything and anyone who happens to get in the way became the only acceptable goal of American public policy. While the guardians of the plutocracy offer a rather pathetic dogma about how pursuit of individual good somehow serves the common good, the evidence of the last three decades is stacked in contradiction of such a self-serving delusion.
The reality is that the common good has been looted and pillaged by three decades of self-interest. The bottom 90% of Americans now own only 22% of its material wealth. Nearly 2/3 of that wealth is owned by the top 1%. The general welfare has been dismantled and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Thus, the blessings of liberty have come to be in doubt for ourselves and particularly our prosterity. Our nation-state is now trembling before the onslaught of this hostility toward the common good, its very ongoing existence increasingly in doubt.
It would be a step in the direction of actual truth telling (remembering that confession is, after all, good for the soul) if Beck simply professed his true religion here and the role it plays in his demonizing rhetoric. Ostensibly Mormon, what is clear when one hears Beck speak is that his actual faith is in free market fundamentalism, a belief system which has generally proven oblivious to any kind of critique from real life – particularly a vision of social justice offered by people of faith.
Little wonder that those who would have the audacity to speak in the name of their religion to criticize unabashed greed, the rape and pillaging of the planet and the deleterious effects this has on its weakest members have been targeted by Glen Beck, the self-appointed guardian of mammon. Glen knows only too well, there is no enemy of evil quite like truth telling.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mormons or Muslims – which supremacy do we choose?
On my trip with my father to see relatives in Pensacola at the end of the Christmas Break he made a comment that I found completely bizarre. He said that he believed that in my lifetime the Muslims would have successfully taken over the world. “Everyone will be Muslim,” he said, “and we’ll have Sharia law.”
I have to admit I was absolutely dumbfounded by that remark. When I prodded my Dad on why he thought this, he would simply reply, “I just do.” I said to him that in my ongoing study of religion I found nothing to suggest this. Indeed, in the places in the world where the free market fundamentalism of globalization is not squeezing the life out of people, allegiance to organized religion generally – though not to spirituality - is declining. It’s the battlegrounds of the Third World where the fundamentalisms of Islam and Christianity are the weapons of organized resistance to the religion of free market fundamentalism with all of its exploitative, death-dealing aspects. This did not seem to register with him.
This past week I discovered why. Apparently Glen Beck on the Fox Entertainment Network my father insists upon consuming non-stop now that my mother is no longer around to scold him (“I don’t know why your father has to watch all that stuff…”) is the source of this idea. Of course, this is the same Beck who is unable or unwilling to conceptually distinguish social justice Christian movements from socialism or Reform Judaism from “radical Islam.” Beck preaches that Islam is bent on worldwide “supremacism” and that the Mahdi, the messianic figure of Islam, is, in fact, the Antichrist feared by conservative Christians who interpret the Apocalypse (Revelations) of John at the end of the New Testament as somehow referring to the present day.
There are a lot of things Glen Beck can claim about himself. Historian and theologian are clearly not among them. But one thing Beck readily claims is his own Mormon religion. And that brings this fear-mongering about Islam into a fairly sharp contrast for me.
On the one hand, I have a modicum of compassion for the Mormons. They have a bloody history of persecution by narrow-minded Christians in America enroute to their eventual spiritual home in Utah. No one deserves that kind of treatment - indeed, no one deserves to be sentenced to Utah, in my opinion - particularly not in the name of a Jesus whose spiritual path challenged the xenophobic tribalism of the religion and culture of his day, a path that would eventually cost him his life.
But it seems the Mormons learned well from their persecutors. They have a legendary history of racism and sexism. Their most recent misanthropic adventure has been their involvement in the Proposition 8 campaign in California. Estimates of Mormon contributions to the Yes on 8 campaign are as high as 77% of its total budget, nearly $18 million. The campaign featured some of the most deceptive advertising in US political history prompting the normally conservative LA Times to twice editorialize against the campaign in its primary editorial space. Calling the ads the work of “[c]lever magicians [who] practice the art of misdirection…” the editorial observed that “That truth would never sell in tolerant, live-and-let-live California, and so it has been hidden behind a series of misleading half-truths.”
One thing we can say for the Mormons, they are equal opportunity misanthropes. And were they willing to keep their misanthropy – along with their strange religion of missing tribes of Jews landing in the Americas, the commandments to engage in polygamy and the golden tablets buried in hills which supposedly spell all this out – to themselves, no one would really care. But the reality is, the Mormons are one of the great proselytizing religions of the world. Who has not seen those pairs of fresh scrubbed Mormon boys in white shirts and ties on their bicycles, Book of Mormon in hand?
My own dealing with Mormons have been far less wholesome. When Hurricane Charley put three tons of oak tree through the middle of our home in 2004, the Mormon family across the street came and got Andy out of the house before the tree fell and helped to remove the debris from the house and yard thereafter. As it turned out, the husband was a contractor. And so out of gratitude for his help, we decided to contract his services to rebuild our home.
Two years later, the house was still unfinished. The roof was completely missing and the interior still in need of renovation. I’ll never forget the night our Mormon contractor came to our rental house to tell us he wouldn’t be completing the job. Seems Katrina had destroyed the Mississippi coast and he could make more money there than by finishing our project. And so he left us, house unlivable, roof missing, two years of time and money down the drain. And as he drove out of our driveway, I’ll never forget the bumper sticker on his truck: Scouting Teaches Values. What kind of values were being taught by the example of this scout leader?
I’ve also had limited encounters with Muslims. My little brother of the Big Brothers/Little Brothers program became a Muslim. After a brief period of trouble with the juvenile system he has since gotten his college degree and is gainfully employed. His wife teaches in a Muslim school here in town and he has two beautiful daughters. This from a kid coming out of an impoverished single parent home who has two brothers who wound up in prison. He has come a long way in his life and I continue to love him and I greatly respect him. And I sense that it is precisely the tenets of Islam that provides him the needed structure he found missing for so much of his life.
I’ve also had a handful of Muslim students at the university. While they have not all been stellar students, what distinguishes them from their classmates is their respectfulness toward their instructor. I observe that most of them are hard working, some of them supporting families with full-time jobs while also attending school full time. For the most part they have been very fine students.
I have also had two imams come to speak to my classes. Both of them were very thoughtful and patient, fielding questions born largely out of media-driven ignorance about their religions. On the whole, my experience with Muslims has been as positive as my experience with Mormons has been negative.
This is hardly to say that any of these individuals necessarily represent their faith traditions. I have had Mormon friends and students who were good people. And I am more than aware of the pathologies of reactionary Islam among groups such as the Taliban. I also know there are good, compassionate Mormons, a few of whom actually have open minds. Indeed, according to the Gallup Poll, a full 8% describe themselves as – gasp – liberal! Clearly it is no more fair to judge Islam by its best examples than it is to judge Mormonism – or any other faith tradition – by their worst.
So back to the fresh scrubbed boys on the bicycles. Is it possible that when Glen Beck engages in fear-mongering about an Islamist world that he might just possibly be engaging in a little projection? Is it not the goal of Mormonism to convert the world to their faith? Isn’t that the very purpose for the boys on bikes? Indeed, do these self-proclaimed “saints” not endeavor to baptize dead people in order to sanitize them for the Mormon afterlife? Is not their goal the supremacy of Mormonism in both this world and the next?
Which brings up a conundrum for me: Which would be worse, a Muslim or a Mormon supremacist world? At some level, it seems a toss-up. All conservative religions hold pretty much the same potential pathologies based in fear. The primary difference between Glen Beck and Osama bin Laden is one of degree, not substance. Of course, the better course is that no religion should ever have control over any society even as those societies insure their right to practice their own faith as they see fit.
I hope my Dad doesn’t lose too much sleep over this. The Muslims are not coming to take over Tennessee or any other American state. The Baptists have long since beat them to it. Just ask John Scopes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Obliviousness, Compulsion, Lost Opportunity
It was a beautiful morning in Central Florida. An unexpected bank of fog had moved in from the nearby Atlantic shrouding treetops and houses. Even the nearby expressway whose bridge cuts through the middle of Lake Underhill, laden with rush hour traffic, was only in partial view, the lights of the cars and the sounds of the motorists hurrying to work the only evidence of that major highway. It was as if this heart of our city had been painted with a soft touch paintbrush.
From the treetops and the telephone lines, a host of birds sang their morning praises to G-d: “The heavens are telling the glory of G-d, and all Creation is singing the song. Come dance in the forest come play in the fields. And sing to the glory of the Lord.” (Marty Haugen, Canticle of the Sun, 1980). And temperatures in the low 60s made it a very comfortable morning to be outside with that Creation singing its praises. It was a beautiful start of a new day. It was a morning made for a walk.
But the woman who briefly acknowledged me as she crossed Lake Underhill Drive to the walking path around the lake never saw that beauty. As quickly as her “Good morning” was off her lips she was back to her texting, weaving blindly down the sidewalk, occasionally looking up to avoid other pedestrians.
It was fortunate she looked up just when she did as she was just able to avoid another pedestrian coming the opposite direction, just as oblivious to the unfolding beauty around her as the texter. With her ears plugged with an IPod, she had no idea that the birds were singing. And she did not hear my “Good morning” as I passed.
What was striking about the texting woman was the complusiveness of her behavior. I watched bemused as she would try to put her cell away for a few seconds before quickly pulling it back up to type in yet another round of grammatically and syntactically impoverished gibberish, anxious to be noticed by someone else, desperate to be affirmed even if in only the most rudimentary fashion. As she did so, the experience of an unusually beautiful morning passed her by unnoticed.
Of course, neither woman has an obligation to put down their technological toys and engage the real world. Neither has a duty to be present, conscious and undistracted. Neither is required to actually spend time with themselves alone though the aversion to do so might prompt them to ask what it is about their own company they find so unbearable. There is no law criminalizing shallowness or self-focus.
But what quality of life is endured in a world of constant distraction? What value of experience in a world where the soft touch of fog, the singing of the birds and the comfort of the cool morning breeze cannot even be acknowledged, much less fully experienced? And what does engagement in such compulsive behavior in the face of the losses such human beings must endure suggest about the quality of their lives?
Again and again, it appears to me that the degree to which human beings distract themselves seems coincident with the degree to which the crisis our Earth experiences from the harm our carelessness, selfishness and arrogance have inflicted upon it deepens. The greater the crisis, the greater the distraction. And again and again, it occurs to me that this is a pattern of behavior we have less and less luxury to indulge.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Post-script: On the Retirement of John the Oppressor
Homophobia – the elephant in the room
When the story in the Sentinel ran, I held my breath fearing an onslaught of comments that would bash anyone who dared to actually criticize this self-styled heroic bishop of Central Florida. To my relief, only one comment was offered from a writer identifying himself as JohnOS who said, “I good (sic) to see an article about a person who maintains the traditional views on sexuality without using the pejorative of homophobe to describe him.”
In all fairness, JohnOS reflects perhaps the dominant view about the use of the descriptor “homophobe” within most institutional religious bodies today. JohnOS describes it as a “perjorative” while many church leaders call it “a discussion stopper.” But, as the Wizard of Oz said to Dorothy and company, “Not so fast, not so fast!”
An overused epithet
I would readily agree that the usage of the term homophobe in its various incarnations is often too loose and too frequent to be terribly meaningful. There is a difference between a mindless acquiescence to heteronormative understandings of the world and an irrational aversion to anything remotely non-heterosexual.
For instance, it’s fairly common if not predictable to hear people argue that marriage is a relationship between members of the opposite sex given that for much of its history that has been its primary if not exclusive practice. Clearly that has been due in part to discrimination against those who wanted to marry members of their own sex but were not permitted by law and social convention to do so, particularly in recent years. But for much of human history, those questions have simply not been asked. The resulting heteronormative understanding is thus a rather unconscious default to a “common sense” that simply has never been required to think about any alternatives.
But what folks like JohnOS are trying to argue is not an innocent default to common sense. The reality is that there are good reasons why people of the same sex should not be discriminated against in any manner including their very human desires to marry the person they love. Those reasons have been widely discussed, supported with evidence and argued in public forums. And there is a ton of reasons which gravitate against a starting place which sees heterosexuality as normative for everyone in the light of massive research demonstrating the problems with such understandings.
While it is common that human beings often seek sources which confirm their biases and foregone conclusions, one would have to have been living in the depths of Plato’s Cave for the past two decades not to be aware of the problems with a view of heterosexuality as normative for everyone. And nowhere have those problems been hashed out with regularity more than in the venues of organized religion.
It’s when a steadfast denial encounters disaffirming evidence which makes holding onto one’s heteronormative view in good faith impossible that the descriptor homophobic begins to come into the picture. At that point, the benefit of the doubt can no longer go to the denier. An ongoing denial in the face of disconfirming evidence points towards something deeper than an opinion in which one has become invested; it points toward an irrational attachment to that position for any number of possible reasons most of which are largely beyond the holder's ability to articulate.
There is very little rational about asserting that other people choose their sexual orientations - inevitably asserted about those who see themselves in non-heterosexual terms by those who have no experience of the same - in the face of testimony from those persons that no such choice ever occurred. Indeed, there is no small amount of presumptiveness on the part of those who make such arguments in that everyone is either like them or ought to be.
There is also little rational about asserting that heterosexuality is the natural state for all living beings given the avalanche of evidence to the contrary. That includes the social science documenting a consistent self-reporting non- heterosexual population among human animals as well as evidence from natural science documenting homosexual behavioral patterns in virtually every other species of animals.
This, in turn, brings heteronormative theological constructions into question. Given the reality of a sexually diverse animal kingdom combined with the religious belief that a Creator G-d is the author of that kingdom, there is little rational about asserting that heteronormativity is somehow the divine intent for the universe. At that point the social construction which would be legitimated with the divine imprimatur reveals itself.
Demanding a pass on one's prejudices
There is a hint in JohnOS’ comment and among many within organized religion that religious people should somehow get a pass on being called on their irrational views, their resulting discriminatory actions as well as the harm their attitudes and actions inflict on their fellow children of G-d. The argument seems to be that if one’s religion ordains homophobia, it somehow is cleansed of its misanthropic nature. In other words, if one’s religion asserts homophobia as one of its core values, it really isn’t homophobia.
Why would that be?
Of course, religions have historically baptized cultural values as a means of legitimating them from the beginning of time. A lot of crazy notions have maintained themselves throughout the years this way, notions like the superiority of Europeans vis-à-vis the inhabitants of the New World; notions of women as the source of original sin and thus of all resulting evil in the world; notions of Negroid peoples as somehow divinely ordained for slavery because they are seen as bearing the mark of Cain or the dark skin of Ham.
It is always a lot easier to practice destructive human prejudices like racism, misogyny and homophobia if one sees themselves in possession of “Hate One Group of Human Beings Free” card from a deity which affirms the elect and encourages them to demonize the damned outside their limited circle of righteousness. As writer Annie Lamott observes, "You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
There is also a hint in JohnOS’ comment of an argument I frequently hear from my undergrads when this issue arises: “Well, I’m a ______ (your religious/political persuasion here) and therefore I have to feel this way about ______(your religious/political position here).” Such a statement suggests the holder of this view has no choice but to hold it.
Of course, such is never true. Indeed, it is not even empirically accurate in this case as study after study indicates that people of good faith within religious traditions from evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism still find ways to support gay rights even as they remain devoted believers. “I had no choice” is rarely a credible argument and in this case, it’s simply a thinly veiled means of attempting to avoid accountability for the choices one has actually made or at least continues to acquiesce to.
If homophobia had no implications for others, it would not be an issue. JohnOS would never have felt the need to preemptively defend his bishop from such charges if it were no big deal. As Americans we fervently believe that everyone is entitled to their opinions even if they arise from misanthropy and xenophobia.
But the corollary that many uncritically add to this premise that we’re all entitled to our opinions is NOT like unto it: and thus every opinion is not entitled to respect. It is one thing to respect the dignity of a fellow human being by tolerating their speech and affirming their right to express themselves even if we fervently disagree with their perspective. It’s quite another to insist that every opinion must be equally respected regardless of content. And when irrational views about sexual orientation are coupled with actions which discriminate against and dehumanize others, they become fair game to be called what they are - homophobia. Indeed, a healthy body politic requires such truth telling in its most fundamental form.
No one wants to be called a bigot
The reality is that no one wants to see themselves as misanthropes. That’s particularly true of adherents of religious traditions that construct elaborate collective personae of righteousness designed to provide members with feelings of being chosen and affirmed by the deity. A common expression of such a collective persona can be found in the Episcopal hymnal in a hymn entitled “Child of the Light.” Its lyrics include the following: "I want to be like a child of the light, I want to be like Jesus….In him there is no darkness at all.” It’s my observation that such aspirations are not consistent with a healthy human self-understanding.
Carl Jung observed that the Persona is constructed of socially acceptable qualities – thus, among such observable qualities “there is no darkness at all.” But the shadow content, the aspects of ourselves that prove socially unacceptable, brutally repressed in the quest for righteousness, has to go somewhere. So it’s hardly surprising it gets projected onto those least able to defend themselves against such projections, designated scapegoats such as LBGQT people. And it’s hardly surprising that this scapegoating occurs more frequently among religious people who feel a burden to maintain personae obsessed with righteousness than with others.
Folks like JohnOS demand that others give them a sweet deal. They want to continue holding onto their dehumanizing views of gay and lesbian people in the face of evidence which reveals their views as irrational and the results of their views as destructive. They want to continue the discriminatory policies that flow from such views with impunity. And at the same time they demand that others never call them on it.
In short, JohnOS asks too much for people of critical reason and good faith.
Policies like those which marked John Howe’s bishopric must be called what they actually were if we would avoid compounding the sin of the effects of a destructive social prejudice with that of dishonesty. And what those policies must be called in the name of utter candor with ourselves and truth-telling with others is pretty obvious: homophobic, an irrational aversion to anything remotely non-heteronormative. And while those who hold such views do not have to like this designation- indeed they shouldn’t - they simply do not get a pass by playing the G-d card.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On the Retirement of John the Oppressor - II
Whiter, Grayer and Stagnant
The conservative myth about church and society often asserted as somehow self-evidently true is that if a tradition becomes too liberal it loses all its conservative members to more conservative denominations. In fact, that has rarely been true of the Episcopal Church where social mobility and social cachet have played much larger roles in drawing new members than anything theological. When one becomes the president of the local bank, it is often seen as a violation of the unwritten rules of social hierarchy to continue attending the local Baptist or Pentecostal Church. There are an awful lot of ex-Baptist bankers and judges sitting in Episcopal pews.
Moreover, Episcopalians have always celebrated being the “church of the refugee” in the words of sociologist Robert Bellah. He observed that many Episcopalians come from the churches of their childhood having outgrown the parent/child self-understandings, the tribal moralism and the rigid, dark theologies of their former churches. And the Episcopal Church has long prided itself on its role in providing refuge to such wounded souls.
The truth is that most of the bleeding which has occurred in more liberal traditions like ECUSA over the past three decades has actually occurred on the left end of the spectrum, not the right. Episcopalians simply don’t leave their churches to become Baptists. But the opposite has always been true. Sadly, when Episcopalians leave, most generally just leave organized religion altogether.
Refugees from the Church of the Refugees
That pattern was certainly true in the post-Howe Diocese of Central Florida. Some who fled the Cathedral in its new fundamentalist politically correct incarnation found parishes that were “not so bad.” A few parishes even sought to be magnanimous in their tolerance of gay people, an effort that probably says more about the need for affirmation of those who would see themselves as tolerant than anything about those they’d tolerate, a relationship built on condescension rather than the dignity of equals.
But the reality is that most who left the Diocese of Central Florida in the early days of the Howe regime – and many, many did - simply stopped attending church altogether. For those who had already left behind hurtful churches with adolescent theologies and authoritarian polities for refuge in the Episcopal Church, this sudden shift to a familiar but already rejected purity-based moralistic religion was seen as a betrayal. And for many it was simply the last straw with institutional religion.
In the 25 years that ensued, the Diocese of Central Florida earned itself a reputation in the national church as a backwater of regression, a place where the church in its earlier, adolescent stages of development had come back with a vengeance. Many Episcopalians who had come to Central Florida from other dioceses found themselves alienated when the tolerant, erudite tradition they had come to church expecting proved to be missing. In its place they found parishes whose worship had some of the appearances of being Anglican but whose ethos, politics and theology were anything but.
In all fairness, some remaining parishioners gladly welcomed the changes in a church in which they would previously have felt somewhat marginalized. Indeed, it is amusing to hear conservatives in Central Florida today speak of themselves in terms of martyrdom vis-à-vis their pariah status in the larger Episcopal Church. While they have gladly pursued actual oppression of gays and lesbians in their own diocese, they readily point to the fact that their views have not managed to win the hearts and minds – much less the respect - of the larger church (and thus provide them the means of controlling it) as somehow a sign of being marginalized. It’s a bit like hearing inveterate segregationists in the 1960s lamenting over their discrimination and oppression in a desegregated America which had come to recognize them for what they truly were – racists.
Whiter, Grayer and Stagnant
As I noted in the interview with the Sentinel, when one looks at the Episcopal Church in Central Florida over this 25 year period when the region’s population has more than doubled and greatly diversified, the diocese has stagnated and become whiter than the surrounding population and decidedly grayer. For the most part people of color and young people are missing. That bodes poorly for the future of a once respected tradition in Central Florida.
I do not see the Episcopal Church disappearing altogether in Central Florida or anywhere else across the country. There will always be some who come for the aesthetics – a celebrated musical tradition and a lyrical liturgy that draw anyone with a taste for public ritual done well. And, truth be told, conservatives feeling a need for theologies driven by fear and self-affirmation will continue to find refuge in shrinking and increasingly conservative churches which will affirm them as an island of the elect in a frightening sea of the damned.
But the long range future of organized religious bodies generally is overshadowed by a trend that Robert Putnam recently noted in his study of American religion, American Grace: How Religion Divides Us and Unites Us (Manchester U. Press, 2010). Putnam and co-author David Campbell have found that the “none of the above” response to queries about one’s religious institutional affiliation in America has jumped over the past decade to 17% overall but 25% among the 18-24 year old cohort. Putnam explains it this way: If all the church has to talk about is gay marriage and abortion, most young people want little to do with it. It’s pretty clear that this message never made it down to the diocesan offices here in Orlando.
It is the ghosts of Episcopal Churches past whom I encounter from time to time in the grocery store, at Petsmart or at the occasional event downtown that continue to grieve my soul. While I chalk up a lot of John Howe’s brittle theology and poorly reasoned political statements to a largely uncritical, poorly educated mind and a fearful existence clearly driven by inner demons I thank G-d I have not had to contend with, it is the hardness of heart by which John simply refused to look at the human carnage of his policies with which I have had the most trouble. As a preacher, he was mediocre on a good day, as a politician within the larger church he was a flop. As a manager, his hegemony over every aspect of his own diocese – particularly its propaganda organs – was legendary. But as a pastor to all the members of his flock - a duty he agreed to undertake in his ordination vows - John Howe was an abject failure. And it is that failure, and the resulting damage he caused to so many vulnerable, already damaged human beings, that I find difficult to forgive.
Still, I wish him well.....
It will be tempting for those who support John Howe to dismiss this posting as a mindless bashing animated by personal animosity. Increasingly I observe that few people today are able to distinguish critique from bashing given how few are skilled at and accustomed to critical thinking. But I’d like to be clear here that these comments are directed at an elected official in the conduct of his office, fair game from a constituent any day. Fair or not, bishops are held to slightly higher standards than their flock in the execution of their duties, particularly given the power their office affords them with its capacity to harm others. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, it’s not that I think John Howe is “a very bad man,” I simply observe that from the perspective of those he has harmed, he’s been a very poor bishop.
As for myself, I do not wish John Howe ill. My observation of him is that he has endured a very trying personal life and that his self-created fiasco in the latter years of his bishopric would have tried the patience of saints. Due partly to his efforts, however conflicted, the Diocese remains a part of the national church even as the remaining clergy who passed the Howe litmus test will no doubt insure the election of a successor even farther to the right than Howe.
Most of all, I can only imagine the demons that haunt a soul which exhibits such a high need for assertive righteousness and hostility toward those it determines to be enemies. Carl Jung observed that the brighter one’s persona is constructed, the darker its shadow content. The psychic cost of repressing the shadow in this case must be enormous. Little wonder it results in so much projection of shadow in its dealing with LBGQT people and those who would dare to afford them human dignity.
I do wish John Howe a pleasant retirement. As I once told him, “I was here before you came and I’ll be here after you’re gone.” While that is technically true, the reality is that the Episcopal Church has long since stopped being a regular part of my life, a somewhat painful reality for this priest but something I have accepted as a cost of living here in Central Florida. While I have in fact preached from pulpits and celebrated the eucharist from altars within John Howe’s diocese since my ordination, other than the occasional feast day and odd service such as the blessing of the animals, I’m simply not present in any of Howe’s churches most Sundays. That’s a reality that probably has little to do with John Howe and a lot to do with a religious tradition I have come to value in retrospect but painfully recognize I have largely outgrown in any kind of ongoing engagement.
Farewell, John the Oppressor. May you find the peace in your retirement that clearly eluded you during your reign as bishop of Central Florida. As the Buddhists have taught me to say, “I wish you well.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On the Retirement of John the Oppressor - I
He was a lot of things, hero was not among them.
Last week I was contacted by a writer for the local Chicago Tribune tabloid (née The Orlando Sentinel). He wanted to talk about the retirement of John Howe as bishop of the Diocese of Central Florida. The story ran this week with a paragraph devoted to our conversation. Not surprisingly, I was the only critic of the soon-to-be-ex-bishop actually quoted, a reality that probably speaks as much to this bishop’s legendary iron-clad control over his diocese as the fact that most other critics have long since fled this dysfunctional pocket of the Episcopal Church.
Frankly, John Howe was the last thing I wanted to talk about last week or any other week. Whatever personal issues may have existed between the bishop and myself have long since been resolved and largely forgotten. Indeed, in all honesty, I have little to say about the Episcopal Church generally these days. In choosing to return to Central Florida, I knew I’d be giving up any active role in the church given the homophobic policies and fundamentalist tendencies of this diocese. So, I have made my peace with that reality over the past 13 years and moved on, choosing to simply ignore the church, finding spiritual sustenance and pastoral leadership roles outside its ecclesial bounds.
But this interview brought back a lot of bitter memories. The writer was clearly set on running a story that cast John Howe as the embattled heroic leader of an Episcopal Church in Central Florida where wild-eyed young Turks sought to steer the diocese into the column of the latest round of schismatic puritans. However, the truth is a lot more complex and a lot darker than that. John Howe is many things. But a hero is not among them. Indeed, there are good reasons I and many others call him John the Oppressor.
Bush v. Gore, Episcopal Style
Howe was elected in 1989 as the result of a cabal among Central Florida conservatives. In a classic stealth politics style that religious conservatives choose as a matter of course, they used their connections through the diocesan Cursillo program to plan their subversion of the diocesan convention called to replace Bishop Bill Folwell. The retiring bishop had disappointed conservatives during his decade long bishopric by changing his mind on the ordination of women and later on the blind eye he turned toward gay parishioners and clerics in his diocese, the Episcopal version of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. This was hardly an activist bishop and it probably stretches the term “liberal” beyond recognition to apply it to Bill Folwell's bishopric.
The priests Bishop Folwell had welcomed to Central Florida were mostly well educated, urbane souls typical of the Episcopal Church nationally. The conservatives had pledged not to let this perceived drift toward liberalism - which the rest of the Episcopal Church had long since embraced - continue no matter what it took. In the end it took a lot – indeed, no less than the diocese’s very soul.
Howe had enjoyed a limited career as a priest before the election, having spent a short time at an elite private girls’ school as its chaplain before coming to his only real parish experience at Truro Church, Virginia. There Howe assembled a team of charismatic soul mates which quickly managed to turn the veritable old Truro parish into a megachurch complete with twist and shout for Jesus worship and fundamentalist bible thumping, a major departure from the dignified catholic liturgy and measured sermons of Anglicanism. The combination of simplistic theology, orgiastic worship and the self-affirming attendance numbers and accompanying dollars of a growing church marked John Howe as a success in the eyes of his parishioners, one of whom included then-Episcopalian and future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It also made him an ideal candidate for the conservative cabal seeking to take over the Diocese of Central Florida.
There were six candidates for bishop at the convention in late Fall of 1989. In the days before the convention, it quickly became clear that Howe was not the favorite. A second more traditionally conservative candidate, this one a little closer to Earth orbit, was splitting the conservative vote. That was when the miracle occurred.
Two days before the election, John Howe withdrew from the election saying he had discerned this was not what G-d intended for him. Overnight, the prayer chain phone lines lit up with Cursillistas calling their compatriots all over the diocese. They were told that Howe would reenter the race and that if they didn’t want another liberal to win, they’d better all vote for Howe.
Lo and behold, Howe did reenter the race the Friday before the Saturday convention telling the convention that he’d prayed about it and G-d had told him He (sic) needed him to run after all. And the next day, after 13 ballots in which the laity swung increasingly in favor of Howe even as the clergy resisted, Howe managed to win by a single clergy vote on that final ballot, largely carried to victory by the vote of deacons trained in the local diaconal institute over the opposition of the graduate level seminary educated priests.
The ruse had won the day. The conservatives had pulled off their coup. Clearly the evil genius behind the Willie Horton and the Swiftboat Vets ads have nothing on Episcopal conservative strategists. And just as clearly, Central Florida Episcopalians are as easily deceived and manipulated as the American electorate in such elections with the same destructive result.
The fallout was enormous and immediate. Not surprisingly, this was the part of the story the local newspaper omitted. The diocese earned black eye after black eye with juvenile stunts like first inviting and then disinviting Newark Bishop Spong from speaking at the Cathedral, a public relations nightmare soon repeated in the retraction of an invitation to the Orlando Gay Chorus to sing on World AIDS Sunday. In a painful showdown at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in downtown Orlando, a once diverse and welcoming parish split down the middle over the bishop’s politics in a fiery public meeting in which one member, now a circuit judge, whose son is gay described gay parishioners as “the niggers of the 90s” given their treatment by Howe and his henchmen. Once again, Howe’s supporters won.
The resulting hemorrhaging quickly began. Almost overnight an exodus of clergy and parishioners alarmed by the radical right turn of the diocese began leaving the diocese. Some, like the cathedral’s dean who dared to defy Howe on the gay chorus, were ultimately fired. Others simply moved to friendlier climes. Some simply retired. And the clergy who would replace them would be required to meet John Howe’s conservative litmus test to enter the diocese, this based on a very brittle black and white understanding of scripture and a theology with absolutely no clue about historical or cultural context.
Hoist on his own petard
Ironically, in the end Howe managed to be hoist on his own petard. His litmus test had worked all too well. Many of the clergy who came to Central Florida proved to be even farther out on the right than John Howe and by the 1990s were agitating for schism out of an Episcopal Church in which their homophobic, militarist and fundamentalist understandings no longer had a place. In all fairness to Howe, while his rhetoric almost always indicated support for such a position, its ambiguity allowed enough wiggle room that when push came to shove, the diocese remained a part of the national church. As always, disingenuity is almost inevitably the stock in trade of religious conservative politics.
Outraged reactionaries within the diocese responded with cries of betrayal, having relied on Howe’s mixed signals to go out on a limb that Howe thereafter sawed off. The result was a mutiny that would prompt a handful of parishes led by true believer clergy to withdraw from the diocese and the Episcopal Church itself, decamping from their tasteful parish edifices down the street to the shells of abandoned big box department stores. There they would open shop as self-proclaimed faithful remnants of a parody of the rich Anglican tradition now reduced to fundamentalist theology with a thin veneer of Anglican liturgy – essentially Baptists in dresses. And the John Howe whose litmus test they had passed to become clergy in Central Florida would become the devil incarnate in their eyes.
This is the basis upon which the Sentinel story and its sources proclaimed John Howe a noble savior. At best, this is a partial picture of the Howe regime. At worst it is a deliberately deceptive construction of the whole story, a pattern of dissembling which has been modeled by this bishopric and its supporters from its inception. Of course, true believers – of any stripe – rarely need much factual basis to hold to understandings that often defy both fact and logic. So it’s not terribly surprising the tenor of the article cast the retiring bishop as a hero even as he laid the very grounds upon which the mutiny would occur.
But it was among the parishioners that the advent of Howe’s oppressive bishopric would be most deeply felt. Prior to the election the diocese had a reputation for being a fairly tolerant place. The Cathedral had its homeless ministry and celebrated Palm Sunday and Pentecost with the Roman Catholic cathedral across the street. Gay clergy and lay leaders held roles of leadership in many parishes across the diocese and many parishioners felt they had a non-judgmental refuge from the fundamentalist Protestant and conservative Catholic backgrounds many had fled. The diocese’s Institute of Christian Studies featured a critical-historical approach to scripture and the integration of social science and faith development much like that of any accredited seminary and made its classes available to anyone who wanted to take them.
In other words, the Diocese of Central Florida looked an awful lot like the rest of the Episcopal Church whose members have historically tended to be well educated, theologically and socially tolerant, broadly inclusive with a history of involvement in social justice movements, a composite that once drew many parishioners and future clergy like myself. But that would all change with the election of John Howe.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Remembering Ronnie Raygun
Were Ronald Reagan alive today, he’d be celebrating his 100th birthday. Mercifully – for all parties involved – Ronnie has gone home to his reward, as they say in the South. Poor Ronnie checked out a few years before he actually died, the poster boy for Alzheimer’s Disease, a fate I wish on no one. But his legacy has proven to have a much longer life and to be even less accountable to reason or historical fact than even the Teflon President could have predicted.
I find it bizarre that folks today would speak of Reagan in such lionized terms. There were many things that Ronald Reagan was. A role model was not among them. Ronnie was a B actor who learned how to charm a made-for-television electorate with meaningless phrases like “It’s morning in America” and “Cadillac driving welfare queens.” And America readily drank the kool-aid.
I was a second year law student in 1980. I had gone to law school for all the wrong reasons – to be part of the movement for justice, to make sure the voices of the silenced were heard, to use the legal system as the means to make America a “more perfect union” for all, not just for the privileged. In retrospect, I was probably too naïve and idealistic to be in law school, though I was hardly by myself. Visions of a Warren Court creating justice out of whole cloth still danced like sugar plums in the heads of many Baby Boomer would be lawyers in 1980.
As the election drew near, I became increasingly distraught at the notion that a candidate with as simplistic an understanding of reality as Reagan articulated could possibly be elected by the American populace. Jimmy Carter, the reigning incumbent, was bland, a bit stiff and brutally honest about America’s shortcomings – as Southern Baptists tend to be – but he was honest and intelligent and seemingly concerned about doing the right thing even when it proved unpopular. Reagan spoke in platitudes about liberty and offered jingoistic assertions about “our Panama Canal” as if the US had ever really had any rightful claims to it. And the electorate ate it up.
In the process, Reagan captured America’s imagination with two rather mindless catch lines that have ultimately come to define two generations. First, he said “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” And the second was like unto it: “Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?” his campaign ads queried.
I doubt Reagan could scarcely have imagined how seriously many Americans would take either of those incredibly simplistic statements. The first came to define an approach to government that has steadily devolved from mistrust to outright hostility to demonization. Public servants are regularly – and mindlessly - vilified in today’s political culture. Public institutions and those who work in them from schools to health agencies to veterans’ services are daily attacked with the fervor of a rabid dog and often with the same level of rationality. And the deregulation of virtually every aspect of our society, particularly the economy, has led to the rise of a free market fundamentalism that has seen America steadily transform its economic colonies around the world into a global corporate feudal state and itself into an America whose residents understand themselves in terms of being consumers rather than citizens.
The second throw away line, “Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?” has become the mantra of the rise of one of the most narcissistic cultures in the world’s history. Reagan gave Americans permission – if not a mandate – to be self-focused.
An entire generation of children raised under Reaganomics (much of which has been repudiated by its architect, David Stockton) arrive at our colleges each year laboring under the misapprehension that “It’s all about me” and that higher education is somehow only about learning a limited set of job skills to enable them to go make money. Our culture is marked by an increasing superficiality fostered by constant technological communication that avoids contact with human presence and even the human voice. We may “talk all the time” as our consumer advertisers tell us we must but most of the time, no one is really home. Our highways are clogged with drivers oblivious to “the other guy” Americans were once advised to “watch out for” during the 1970s, distracted by their cell phones and texting – an addiction which is proving more deadly than driving while intoxicated. And study after study shows our people becoming decreasingly empathetic, unable to even consider, much less look out for, anyone else. And nowhere is this more true than in the Gen Y Millenials who will soon inherit the managment of our society. So much for the general welfare Mr. Madison and company worked so hard to promote.
In a bizarre vindication of the poster child for egocentrism, misanthrope Ayn Rand, the self-focus of stage two moral reasoning, the reasoning of pre-adolescents, has spread from Madison Avenue’s advertizing hegemony to ultimately dominate American thought. “What’s in it for me?” has gone from campaign slogan to the defining self-understanding of an entire people once known for their generosity and self-sacrifice.
Ronald Reagan did not bring a revolution. He heralded the devolution of a once vibrant American culture.
In 1980, the degree of decline of social responsibility and the concomitant rise of selfishness that Reagan ushered in seemed impossible. But the tenor of Reagan’s rhetoric and the warmth with which so many Americans mindlessly embraced it in 1980 set off alarms for this second year law student. I knew the Supreme Court would be stacked with conservative ideologues. I knew that if America could buy a candidate as shallow as Ronald Reagan, anything was possible – a nightmare most recently realized with the selection of George the Unready to the presidency by a Supreme Court stacked with Reagan ideologues.
But I had little idea in 1980 how devastating his policies would prove for the very people I had chosen to serve. It would not take me long to find out.
My first gig out of law school was with the Florida Rural Legal Services. The farmworkers of the Glades growing district existed in a state of near slavery in 1982. Many were there from outside the US on work permits which allowed the owners access not only to their labor, but to their homes - and their bodies - whenever they so chose. Many undocumented workers labored in sugar cane fields, machete in hand, right up to the moment they were injured at which point the owner denied ever knowing them, much less employing them, so as to avoid paying worker’s comp. During my four months in Belle Glade, Reagan’s Republican Congress passed a bill prohibiting Legal Services from representing migrants born outside the US and slashed the budget of the Legal Services to a level that made it impossible to effectively represent the clients it was still allowed to serve. It’s a lot easier to exploit people when you can prevent them from fighting back.
Five years later I would again represent poor clients, this time as a public defender. One of the assignments for our division was the mental health hearings. Under Florida’s Baker Act, those who were facing involuntary commitment to Florida’s archaic state hospital were entitled to representation at their hearings. What became very clear almost immediately is that most local options for treatment had gone away early in the Reagan years, one of the many cuts made to the social safety net with a meat axe, such cuts rationalized as necessary to support the largest peace time build up of any nation's armed forces in the world’s history. With the closing of local treatment centers and the cutbacks to state hospitals, most of those former patients were dumped onto America’s streets, with the resulting rise of a previously unknown homeless population. Mentally ill veterans with pasteboard signs at expressway exits had become a fixture of the post-Reagan morning in America.
The most savage of Reagan policies took shape in Central America. Under the self-serving and rationalizing rubric of freedom fighters seeking to defeat communism (translation: keeping Central America safe for American corporate exploitation), Reagan’s America trained Central American military and police in the School of the Americas to carry out what were essentially terrorist activities. They included a wide range of atrocities designed to coerce the public into obedience to draconian policies through fear. Tactics like disappearances and necklacing, the burning of a tire tied around the neck of a human being, was particularly aimed at those who would speak out for the urban poor - campesinos, labor leaders, intellectuals and a number of churchmen and women.
Reagan’s henchmen illegally funneled weapons and funding to paramilitary forces all up and down the isthmus of Central America. And they trained their local vassals in creative methods of ridding themselves of those who would invoke notions of justice and the name of G-d in the struggle for basic human dignity. While members of the Reagan administration, if not the president himself, clearly committed impeachable, unconstitutional offenses in this process, it would fall to Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties to actually move the Republican Congress to act. As the bumper stickers proclaimed, “No one died when Clinton lied.”
The results of Reagan's policies were devastating: entire villages massacred in places with names like El Mozote, El Salvador; Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala and Esteli, Nicaragua. I know because I’ve been to those countries and I’ve heard the stories the survivors tell of seeing their loved ones killed in front of them, of claiming dismembered bodies, of mourning disappeared loved ones never seen again. I’ve seen the rusted out fuselages of downed American helicopters from which rained down bullets, bombs and napalm that burned entire regions of the countryside down to the very stone.
I’ve also seen the glass jars containing the brains of Jesuit priests who dared to speak out against the terror in El Salvador. The priests, their housekeeper and her young pregnant daughter were taken out by paramilitary thugs trained in the School of the Americas by American teachers using American tax moneys, shot at point blank range. Finally, their brains were beaten out of their skulls with rifle butts, a warning to those who would use their brains to challenge the local regime and their American overlords.
But the barometer of the depravity of the Reagan regime’s character was revealed in its handling of the AIDS epidemic. As thousands of Americans and millions round the world died agonizing deaths amidst a moral panic by Ronnie’s religious supporters (what could possibly be Moral about a self-proclaimed Majority who demonize people dying of a horrible disease?), the Reagan White House remained silent, unwilling to even speak the name of the disease until at last one of Reagan’s own long time friends, Rock Hudson, had succumbed to this pestilence.
Reagan supporters will likely overlook all of the things I have mentioned above if not deny they ever occurred. Indeed, denial of reality was part and parcel of Reagan's Teflon Presidency. And they will credit Reagan with things like the fall of the Soviet system that he had but a tangential role in their occurrence. But Ronnie made many Americans feel good, about themselves and about America and in the end; that is what they will remember. The question, as I always pose to my students, is simply this: Cui bono? Good for whom? And at whose expense? In Reagan’s case, the answer to those questions produce some fairly dark answers for those who are willing to look at the actual history.
There is no doubt that I will never forget Ronald Reagan. But it will not be in the Hallmark card fashion of “Morning in America” that I recall him. It will not be in a presidential library with piped in militaristic music and red white and blue slogans confused for patriotism.
I will remember Ronald Reagan for what he was - an agent of death and destruction, an agent of indifference and self-focus, the friend who failed to show up in the hour of need, the American president who taught us to hate our own government and to indulge our tendencies toward selfishness. I believe many years from now, his election will be seen as a critical turning point that marked the beginning of a long period of decline and perhaps even failure of the American experiment. And I believe many will look back on that turning point and wonder what in the hell ever got into a vibrant nation and a once fine people.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is why I ride the bus
Over the years, I’ve periodically ridden the local city bus to the university in lieu of driving my car through the gauntlet of texting and talking drivers, arriving at my destination to play the “Stalk the Possibly Leaving Driver” game in the parking lot once at the university. There’s no small amount of extortion in an employer charging his employee to park at the work site without which no work could be accomplished. For that privilege I pay $180 a year for the chance to hunt for a possibly existing parking place and possibly make it to my first class on time. Today was one of the days that I rode the bus and it reminded me of why I ride.
Some months I do better about riding the bus than others. The monthly bus pass is $50 and provides up to $46 worth of bus service if I ride every day I have to teach (MWF). That’s $4/day for a roundtrip ride from the local shopping center (I leave my car in the parking lot outside either Babies-R-Us or the Staples store). But I also avoid the $3.50 worth of tolls and the $4.50 worth of gasoline alone (not counting maintenance). In other words, I make about $4/day when I take the bus.
Today I read the end of the book I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now, Alone Together, a psychoanalyst’s study of humanity’s increasingly alienating interaction with technology. Upon finishing that I read a chapter in the trashy sci-fi thriller I bought for $4 at Barnes and Noble one afternoon, a book about a post-apocalyptic America wiped out by a solar flare (I think – it’s that obscure) called The Wave. Some mornings I grade papers but I always do the crossword and read my trashy sci-fi novel in the afternoons.
I’d like to claim some noble high ground about going green as my motivation for riding the bus and that’s certainly part of it. One less vehicle on the road burning that much less gas (the buses are going to run whether I ride or not) and polluting that much less air. That and the fact my 2000 Honda Civic with just under 100,000 miles on it may actually last me until I retire in five years (from my cursor to G-d’s ears). But that’s not the only reason I ride.
I ride in part to avoid the distracted drivers texting and talking while conducting two tons of steel – largely unmanned vehicles of mass destruction - hurtling down the highway at the rate of faster than a mile a minute. I’m tired of the distracted, dangerous drivers. And I figure that I stand a better chance in a big city bus than in my little Honda named Elsie should a multitasking (translation: doing a lot of things in a mediocre at best manner) driver run into me.
In all honesty, I also ride in part to avoid the local police both the deceptive cops shamefully hiding in the bushes with only their badges and uniforms separating them from the criminals their stealthy behavior emulates as well as the university police once I arrive on campus. Since their outrageous public shakedown of my philosophy department colleague, I just can’t trust them with my safety, my constitutional rights or my person. The absolute non-response by the university to that abuse signals to all of us that there are few limits for almost any behavior – honorable, legal or otherwise - the campus cops want to indulge. My answer is to simply avoid them as much as possible.
But today’s ride reminded me of at least one reason that I ride the bus that has nothing to do with inconsiderate texters, rogue cops or money. The bus provides me with a connection to real human beings worth spending time with. And they are very different from those I ordinarily bump up against.
On this morning’s ride out to the university, the physics majors were playing with their Rubik’s cube as usual. Racing against each other using short cuts which they have long since learned lead to a completed, color coded cube within seconds, they talk about the writing assignments they hate (my G-d, she wants us to reflect!) and the home lives that afford them all of their scholarship moneys but none of the luxuries of the Club Med honors dorms on campus. The black maids sit silently awaiting their shifts with the sniffing white matrons of Winter Park whose hands would immediately petrify and fall into chards should they actually ever be forced to do the work they readily pile up for their domestics. The snoring veteran misses his stop at the VA Clinic even as wheel chairs bearing American flags, bumper stickers and disabled vets noisily pile onto the bus amid beeping back up warnings and clicking seat belts on the bus floor. The angry young Latino man who works at one of the many fast food outlets near campus piles on, ears plugged with rap so loud everyone else can hear it even as we concertedly ignore it – and his angry glares.
It’s never dull riding the bus. Indeed, it’s a mobile lab of humanity, an anthropologist’s dream, a humanity instructor’s raw material. But this afternoon, two events occur that remind me why I seek out a humanity that is decidedly different from the well educated colleagues of my department and the middle to upper middle class white kids with inordinate (and totally inexplicable) senses of entitlement that often populate my classes. And on the bus, that search is rarely disappointed.
As we neared Valencia Community College this afternoon, I was roused from my sci-fi self-indulgence by repeated statements of “What do you need?” I looked up to see a bewildered Hispanic man coming down the aisle, hand out, rapidly speaking broken English to say that the rates had changed and he did not have exact change. The three black working class men immediately in front of me who had piled onto the bus from their jobs at university area hotels immediately dug into their pockets, one of them beating the other two to the punch and the Hispanic man racing back down the aisle to add his last 50 cents to the fare, the men immediately returning to their loud conversation about sports, work and Latin American women.
As I got off the bus this evening and made my way to my car, I managed to trip over an uneven section of pavement in a poorly lighted handicapped ramp, no less. Suddenly I went sprawling, book bag flying, and my glasses flying off my face to the sod rapidly coming toward my face. Before I could even move, a voice rang out across the parking lot: “Are you OK, honey?” I looked around to see an elderly black woman sitting on the metal bench awaiting a bus in the station a hundred feet away. “I’m OK. Thanks,” I replied. “All right, sugar,” she said and immediately went back to her cell phone conversation.
Working class people have a way of respecting the humanity of each other that we professional middle class folks often seem to have forgotten. The notion that “It’s all about me” that I had dealt with all day with honors students coming to my office to tell me how “trivializing” it was to actually have their writing graded (Imagine! The nerve! ) was forgotten as I rose from my sprawled position on the ground, gathering my books and making my way to my car, my elderly black guardian angel’s concern reminding me that someone actually cares. “What do you need?” rang in my ears as I thought of the short notice demands by email I had dealt with all day for letters of recommendation and the belabored explanations of why mediocre papers had not received As.
It’s a different world on the bus. And I thank G-d for it. Mind you, I don’t romanticize it for a second. Working class people can be every bit as selfish, destructive and angry as those among whom I daily make my living. Indeed, one of the reasons I observed a moratorium on the bus for a year arose from a fight on my bus between three high school kids expelled from the school bus for fighting, a fight I rose quickly to escape at the bus stop without realizing I had managed to leave my wallet behind.
But it’s rarely “all about me” with these folks. They readily share their lives and often their hard earned pittances with complete strangers. They seem to have realized that unless everyone cares, everyone perishes. No one rescues poor people and they have long since been disabused of any illusions that they are entitled to anything. Perhaps that’s a lesson we could all stand to learn. And perhaps that’s the real reason I ride the bus.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No Small Amount of Irony
ITEM ONE: Dueling Fundamentalisms
Isn’t it ironic that the very people who so vehemently oppose Islamic fundamentalism and seek to punish anyone who has ever had any connection to any madrassas teaching Islamic fundamentalism - no matter how remote or indirect that connection - are the very same people who are happy to defund public schools in America to fund the Christian versions of those same madrassas - fundamentalist Christian private schools? Same thought process, different content, but the same results – poorly educated but heavily indoctrinated students who would readily impose repressive, anti-democratic regimes upon the population, and use any means to accomplish such ends, all in the name of their angry, bloodthirsty god.
The difference between these fundamentalisms is ultimately only one of degree, not content. And the hypocrisy revealed by American fundamentalists actively seeking to root out their Islamic counterparts while engaging in essentially the same activities suggests a recognition that both parties ultimately seek the same goal – a repressive control of a world they find fearful – and thus by definition see the other as competition if not the devil incarnate.
Fundamentalisms stop a working mind. And fundamentalisms strangle a loving heart. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whose deity is invoked in that process.
ITEM TWO: Africa, Colonialism, Respectability
Africans in places like Uganda often vehemently and vociferously oppose what they see as any remote evidence of western colonialism, insisting upon their right to self-determination and demanding that the world respect their efforts at self-governance. Given the history of western colonialism and the succeeding global corporate neo-colonialism, their concerns are, at some level, well founded. And at a very basic level, they are entitled to have their efforts at self-determination respected, just like any other nation-state and people.
But isn’t it ironic that in their efforts to assert that self-determination, their leaders – both religious and political – seem obsessed with the issue of homosexuality and compelled to make unsupportable statements regarding that subject. To hear Ugandans tell it, homosexuality is completely foreign to the African experience, a pathological import from the colonizing west. Never mind that homosexual behaviors have been observable in all human cultures from virtually the beginning of humanity’s history - which was, after all, in Africa - to the present.
Clearly these African voices stretch credulity beyond the breaking point. With even a cursory examination, they reveal themselves as self-serving religious distinctions (never underestimate the perceived needs of religious people to distinguish themselves as the elect from everyone else, by definition the damned, using socially constructed purity codes). They also are poorly concealed means of making political hay (if one cannot or is unwilling to deal with the very real problems of Africa from the atrocities of war to the starvation of its refugees, any distraction will do).
But isn’t it ironic that at the very moment Ugandans are making such unsupportable claims they are entertaining homophobic fundamentalist representatives of the “Family,” fundamentalist politicians and lobbyists from C Street in Washington who come to Africa with their money and their proposed bills to make homosexuality a capital crime?
And isn’t it sheer coincidence that within weeks of such visits, these very bills are proposed in the Ugandan Congress while moral panic stories run on the front page of Ugandan newspapers urging their countrymen to kill homosexuals? And isn’t it even further coincidence that in the name of that bloodthirsty tribal deity that Ugandans would dutifully break into the house of their countryman, David Cato, a leader in Uganda’s apparently western imported LBGT movement, and beat him in the head with hammers until he died?
What is apparent here to anyone with even a half an eye for irony – not to mention truthfulness - is that Africa’s willingness to accept western imports is, on a good day, selective and self-serving. The willingness to host western Protestant fundamentalists and to accept the funding these ambassadors of misanthropy bear is a choice. While homosexuality is ultimately a way of being human that either exists in a given human being or it doesn’t, homophobia is a socially constructed understanding that – unlike one’s sexual orientation – is always a choice.
People who choose to engage in such deadly forms of fundamentalism and the malevolent homophobia which almost inevitably flows from them do not have the right to demand respectability for these misanthropic choices. And they are disbarred from making such demands under the rubric of cultural imperialism in any semblance of good faith. Social prejudices are never respectable regardless of who their misanthropy targets. Indeed, no small amount of psychic energy must be required to maintain this obvious irony – that while homosexuality is not and cannot be a product of western colonialism, an aggressive homophobia based in western Christian fundamentalism by definition always is.
Sexual orientation – whatever that might be to whomever is considering the question - is never really a choice even as attitudes and behaviors in response to one’s orientation often are. But social prejudices are always a matter of choice. And their lack of respectability is never exonerated by attempts to legitimate them whether by supernatural agency (I have no choice – the gods command it), appeals to nature (this is against the laws of nature as we have constructed them) or tradition (people have always thought like this, it must be right). Indeed, in the light of candor – not to mention good faith - such attempts must always be seen for what they are - little more than an attempt to avoid responsibility for one’s choices, adding disingenuity to misanthropy.
Of course, the ability to recognize irony is the mark of a fairly mature mind. Why is it not surprising that the black and white dualisms of fundamentalist ideology (reflecting the lowest level of Perry’s cognitive stages) resolutely refuse to recognize it? And why is it that the adherents of fundamentalism resent having their thinking being seen for what it is – rigid, simplistic, unnuanced and ultimately primitive? There is no small irony in the fact that Africans demanding respect from their western counterparts engage in the very behaviors and attitudes which those same western counterparts do not find respectable in their own culture.
One last thought. Why would it necessarily make someone an elitist who is simply willing to recognize the obvious here and report the elephant in the room? The willingness to confront colonialism requires candor and honesty with self. Why would the assessment of misanthropy in all of its pathological forms and deadly results require anything less? Finally, why should those who refuse to engage in such critical reflection be seen with anything less than disdain, NOT because they are African but simply because they are disingenuous? No small amount of irony, no?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
