Okay, But Who REALLY Owns the Internet?

Who bears responsibility when famous people slap their names on other people’s work? In a tweet time-stamped late last Friday, late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon invited singer and internet personality Addison Rae to perform what he called “8 TikTok Dances.” Social media erupted in outrage almost immediately, as the two-minute performance completely wrote out the choreographers, most of them Black, who actually invented the dances.

8 Tik Tok dances with @whoisaddison!! pic.twitter.com/slKkOOSECI

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) March 27, 2021

I understand the outrage prompted by this performance. Though not outright bigoted, it does bespeak the sublimated racism common in social media algorighms: Black content creators often see their material get more clicks when handled by White peers. But thinking about it, I realized, this isn’t unique. Many people still apparently believe Steve Jobs personally invented the iPhone, not the hundreds of anonymous engineers on his payroll.

Digital culture often makes everything unofficially public domain. It’s difficult to police ownership, because information flows freely with minimal oversight and few ways of preventing drift. I’ve found my poetry copied onto other people’s blogs and social media pages, not always with my name on it. And I use news photos to decorate blog posts, including this one. The casual anarchy of the internet rewards a limited amount of Wild-West behavior.

Thus digital ownership, to an extent, depends on the honor system. We trust people to care about others’ property, knowing not everyone will. (That’s why programmers invent workarounds like NFTs.) Some people behave recklessly with others’ property, even knowing that people require control of their content in order to control their finances. They need to own their product if they want to make a living.

In fairness, opposite the concentrated nature of ownership, we have the distributed nature of funding. Thanks to crowdfunding resources, one need only ask, to receive a side income; some people make a middle-class living through crowdfunding. This depends on several factors, certainly, as White people and cismen often find it easier to make a living online. But within that stipulation, content creators have a certain amount of creative autonomy.

Fallon’s behavior, though, shows how limited that model remains. His old media connections offer him power over others’ public exposure. Notice we’re fighting over a TV star’s irresponsibility, because TV still influences what people get to see. Influence peddlers like Fallon still constitute an information bottleneck: as reprehensible as it appears that he’s taken creators’ names off their products, I never would’ve encountered the products without them.

Old media empires like NBCUniversal, Warner, and especially Disney, retain remarkable authority. They outright own the dwindling number of products that comprise our shared cultural experience, and we permit them to gatekeep what merits our time. Powerful media executives, and their onscreen hand-puppets like Fallon, still filter what gets seen, and we give them profound sway over our tastes, and the tastemaking process.

This behavior didn’t originate with Fallon. Elon Musk has been repeatedly scolded for sharing others’ artwork without credit. But, again, most tech mavens don’t create the works to which they sign their names. Elon Musk, like Steve Jobs, did some technical design, decades ago, but both are (were) business executives claiming credit via the “Royal We” for work mostly done by others, who mostly don’t draw residual payments.

Powerful people screen what’s worth watching, listening to, or dancing with. But the powerless and diffuse actually create the products the powerful endorse. In a world suffused with content, we trust gatekeepers to screen our limited attention time. When Fallon says something is worth watching, we trust him, because we have to. And when he backs himself with a pretty woman, he merits that much more of our attention.

Poor Fallon possibly didn’t realize he was stealing. Perhaps he, or his writers’ room, assumed falsely that these dances originated organically, and spread via grassroots gossip. Several Twitter users successfully found the original choreographers, so ignorance isn’t a great excuse; he could’ve found the choreographers, he just didn’t. Either way, it proves he requires a greater dose of responsibility than he’s currently showing.

MIT professor Eric von Hippel demonstrates that strict copyright law narrows economic development, when applied to technology. End users should have freedom to adapt and improve their products. But he acknowledges this doesn’t apply to art. If artists can’t own their products, they can’t make a living, and therefore can’t dedicate premium mental energy to art. Sadly, White people have often used this limitation to short-sell Black artists.

Digital technology makes such uncredited “borrowings” more likely. Thankfully, tech makes catching them more likely, too.

Pop Messiah and the Breakfast Cereal Killers

Jensen Karp (right), with his wife, actress Danielle Fishel

I’d never heard of Jensen Karp before this week, when he allegedly found shrimp tails, dental floss, and rat poop in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast cereal. Karp’s Twitter posts about the debacle became an instant sensation, garnering thousands of retweets in mere hours. Despite his decades-long career as a child actor, comedian, and TV writer, it took breakfast cereal to turn Karp into an overnight sensation.

Then his ex-girlfriends began making their voices heard.

I understand the appeal behind Karp’s story. In a classic David and Goliath story, an individual hero stands fast against the industrial monster, General Mills. We humans seek heroes to confront our problems, because we recognize how pervasive our challenges are. But the rush to embrace Jensen Karp gave me instant willies, especially when he refused to participate in any effort to rectify the problem. That was my first problem.

Karp’s story appeared “ordinary” despite his large audience, drawn from his media presence. Decades deep in entertainment, he knows how to sell a story to the public, evidenced by his generous use of visuals. Karp offers a simple morality play of corporate negligence, or worse, while pitching himself as a hero against the mighty monster of General Mills. We buy it because we know corporations fundamentally aren't on our side.

David-and-Goliath mythology looms large in Western morality. We believe that the small, the ordinary, and the workaday, somehow deserve saving, a belief which transcends any religion. Yet we seek extraordinary individuals to perform that saving. Rather than collaborating with other individuals, a notoriously high-risk enterprise, we instead yearn for a superhuman hero who will do the defending for us.

Both political parties claim to speak for commoners and ordinary people, while shrugging at actual abuse. From Republicans turning water cannons on protestors, to Democrats abandoning campaign promises like disgraced lovers, conventional solutions just don’t work. We watch the powerful work in tandem with the rich to impede necessary changes, while the world literally burns and floods around us. And mere notional reforms only bandage a dying system.

Humanity has an innate desire to stand up against the powerful. But actually doing so carries great personal risk: the first person to threaten the powerful, usually gets struck down. Instead, we await an exceptional individual to do the threatening for us. After that person dies to save us, like Jesus or Fred Hampton, we’ll rally around that person’s martyrdom to provide moral unity and direction.

This messianic desire made sense in prior times. The idea of Christological salvation matters, because only with a rallying cry, could the weak and the defenseless band together against the powerful. The early church provided a place where the oppressed could air their grievances and be taken seriously. Sadly, of course, as the church became powerful in its own right, it switched sides and defended the rich and mighty.

If we’re honest, we don’t want to improve the world in the abstract, we want to live in the improved world. But challenging the powers which shackle us carries a price few people are willing to pay. We need someone willing to die for us. Our messianic hope tempts us to accept that Jensen Karp might threaten the corporations. But he can’t. He isn’t willing to die. His product is entirely himself.

Jensen Karp isn’t a messiah. His behavior, before and since, demonstrates that he’s in it for himself. He wants the rewards of notoriety. As reports of narcissistic behavior and sexual harassment emerge, it appears that Karp has always been his own product. He has always maintained a camera-friendly version of himself, perhaps because of his media upbringing. He has spent his life in the media eye, and knows how to keep it focused on himself.

Karp’s history of seeking attention comes at others’ expense. This isn’t the proletariat punching up. Karp used his media connections to manipulate a digital marketplace which loves a simple moralistic story. His attempts to hijack our moral umbrage redound entirely onto himself and his career. Karp has a product to sell, which is himself, and he’s sold it aggressively, because he knows the short horizon for media attention anymore.

I cannot fault anyone for embracing this story. It plays well: a massive multinational corporation did something negligent, and answered the everyman’s challenge with haughty disdain. It fits Western, Christian-adjacent morality neatly. Too neatly, as it turns out. Hopefully, Jensen Karp offers us a chance to learn how to spot, and avoid, future secular messiahs.

Sex and Politics Turn Everyone Into Liars

Anthony Comstock

Perhaps no American has had a larger effect on public consciousness than Anthony Comstock; yet outside Poli-Sci circles, few remember him. A relative hero of the Civil War and an active community volunteer, he used his insider political connections to lobby for what became known as the Comstock Laws. These laws banned distribution of pornography, sex toys, or contraceptives through the US Mail.

Comstock crossed my mind, following last week’s Atlanta massage parlor murders. The Atlanta shooter, like Comstock, believed his sexual behaviors lay beyond his control: as journalist Eric Schlosser writes, Comstock blamed his lifelong compulsive masturbating on some older boys surprising him with pornography in his childhood. Both men treated their sexual impulses as a monstrous invasion, caused by other people.

Thinking about it, I realized: they’re not entirely wrong.

Sex has a unique capacity for undermining people’s dominant sociopolitical theories. Conservatives, who believe we’re all self-controlled individuals, are unnerved by sexuality’s pre-conscious manifestations, reducing us to animal drives. Progressives, who believe social context explains, or anyway colors, most human behavior, feel ill-at-ease with sexuality’s intensely individual nature. Sex, alone, contravenes many people’s curated sense of their own identity.

Anthony Comstock used his insider status to manipulate legislation to reflect his values. The Comstock Laws, passed between 1873 and 1909, forbade distribution of “obscenity,” but didn’t define obscenity. Therefore Anthony Comstock, deputized by the Postmaster General, used his discretion to functionally outlaw anything which offended him personally. This wound up including feminist pamphlets, anatomy textbooks, and slightly racy love letters.

The Atlanta shooter lacked Comstock’s connections. Therefore he used a firearm to seek and destroy what offended him: non-White women working in physically intimate trades. (Reportedly, the massage parlors he targeted were only massage parlors.) His desire matched Comstock’s, though: stop anything which triggered his pre-conscious libido. He believed he couldn’t control himself, so he used force to control others instead.

Jacques Ellul

Christian Anarchist writer Jacques Ellul wrote, early in his career, that many people try to write their values into law, not to make society good, but to make themselves good. If law and society have values written into them, people don’t have to choose between right and wrong. Bad choices simply don’t exist, because they’re illegal. They don’t want to control everyone else’s morality; they want everyone else to control theirs.

How’s that working, Mr. Ness?

That pretty concisely explains both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter. They share a conservative ideology that all human behavior is individualistic, and bad behavior arises from bad character. Yet they acknowledge their libidos are pre-conscious, separate from their rational, moral beings. This creates an irreconcilable contradiction within themselves. Rather than address their inner spirituality, they preferred to destroy temptation at its perceived source.

Human sexuality is complex. It’s often conditioned by outside forces, as evidenced by today’s barrage of libidinous images in advertising, entertainment, and porn. But it’s experienced entirely internally. This contradiction makes it difficult to slot into any one-size-fits-all social or political theory. Witness the Leftist internet scolds last week, the kind who believe in institutional racism and injustice, rushing to blame the Atlanta shooter individually.

Essentially, ready-made answers collapse when sexuality enters the discussion. Giving into one’s libido produces the kind of dissolute, self-indulgent human wreck that both the Left and Right hastily reject. Resisting libido requires purging sexuality from either oneself or the world, forms of violence that equally offend secular powers. Spiritual practices which sometimes bring libido under control, are difficult, frumpy, and unremunerative for the capitalist class.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t encourage acquiescing. Today’s society teems with sexual imagery and libidinous stimulation, even in cheeseburger ads, because they encourage a preconscious system that reduces human beings to mere automatons. People who sell sex, at least on an industrial capitalist scale, don’t have your best interests in mind; by encouraging you to think with your gonads, they reduce you to your lowest self, because it pays well.

Both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter recognized this. But rather than addressing how sexuality influenced them, and coming to grips with the spiritual struggle which our animal appetites create in everyone, they sought to create, by force, a utopian society where they’d never have to face themselves. They wanted to destroy their own libidos, but turned their inherent violence onto others, with disastrous effect.

Institutions, laws, and guns cannot protect our virtue. Only peace, patience, and self-control—what Christians call the Fruits of the Spirit—can do that. Achieving those is long, difficult, and, ahem, unsexy.

DC Statehood is a Distraction from the Real Problem

Look, I get it: while Washington, DC, remains outside any legally defined “state,” its three-quarters of a million residents, over half of them Black, remain unrepresented in the Federal Government. That’s egregiously unjust. DC has more residents than Wyoming or Vermont, and only marginally fewer than Alaska or North Dakota, yet it required the Twenty-Third Amendment to even let them vote for President. That seriously sucks.

Worse, the specific arguments getting airtime now against DC statehood are frequently racist, and consistently political. Few national-grade pundits willingly admit they don’t want Black Washingtonians voting, but they’ll openly state that DC, which overwhelmingly votes Democratic, might create a permanent Blue majority in America’s Legislative Branch. They’d rather disenfranchise Black Washingtonians than devise a platform that Washingtonians would vote for.

Yet despite this, despite the naked partisan hackery and dog-whistle racism, I can’t support DC statehood. Both the Constitution, which provides for a Federal District outside any state’s jurisdiction, and the Residence Act of 1790, which drew the District of Columbia’s borders, assumed the goodness of putting the capital outside any individual state. This wasn’t frivolous; London’s status as Britain’s capital has always been sketchy, and functionally disenfranchised the provinces.

Putting the capital inside any state would create a feedback loop of imbalanced power. The first fear is that the federal government would favor the state that houses it. Less obviously, the state could exercise undue influence over the federal government by tactically withholding necessary services and infrastructure maintenance. To offset the political threats the state and capital hold over one another, they could easily establish an unhealthy reciprocal relationship.

“But Kevin,” statehood advocates have said, “statehood would only involve the city. The federal buildings and government offices would remain separate.” Okay, but legislators, judges, and their staffers don’t live in federal buildings. Unless we wanted federal employees to reside in government dormitories, they’d still have to commute to and from the city daily. They’d still be, functionally, resident in one state, defeating the purpose of an outside capital.

Don’t misunderstand me: the current situation is pretty awful. We’re withholding representation from over 700,000 US citizens in DC. Similarly, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and our Pacific Territories are rife with citizens denied the lawful vote on procedural grounds written by dead White guys in powdered wigs and knee breeches. The Founding Fathers weren’t omniscient; they failed to anticipate how the US has grown and evolved since 1789.

Moreover, the situation continues evolving. As recently as the 1990s, America’s legislators lived full-time in DC while Congress was in session. That means they rubbed elbows in their off hours; Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and President Reagan famously met for non-political drinks on weekends. But since Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” legislators have flown home on weekends. DC has become someplace they visit, not someplace they live.

This raises a question: in today’s hypertechnological environment, does the federal government even need a capital anymore? Or just one? South Africa has separate capitals for its branches of government. What if the Presidency and executive bureaucracy remained in DC, but the Supreme Court met in, say, Salem, Oregon? And Congress could establish a rota of meeting locations, perhaps in state capitals. Physical proximity isn’t necessary for good government anymore.

Our current federal system is outdated. It was written to govern a cash-poor agrarian society where most technology involved mules pulling something: carts, mill wheels, water screws. Our state lines were drawn in the 18th and 19th centuries. Texas (statehood in 1845) and California (1850) are literally older than some European nations, including Germany and Italy (both unified in 1871). Los Angeles County has more residents than 41 entire states.

Yes, DC residents deserve representation. So do residents of Los Angeles, New York City, and Dallas. Several states, especially California and Texas, but also New York, Florida, and Ohio, could profitably use their constitutionally mandated authority to separate into several smaller states, which would be cheaper and easier to govern. In other words, DC statehood is a temporary Band-Aid on a federal system that needs fundamental, systemic overhaul.

I’ll never deny that the current system hurts DC residents. Like the other problems I’ve listed, it reflects a federal government born of compromise, based on outdated assumptions, and essentially unchanged in 232 years. I suspect Democrats hope, and Republicans fear, that DC statehood will provide key votes to expedite overdue repairs. I fear that, like another stimulus check, it’ll steer energy away from real reforms.

A Prophet Is Heard In Chicago

Diane Latiker with Bethany Mauger, Kids Off the Block: the Inspiring True Story of One Woman's Quest to Protect Chicago's Most Vulnerable Youth

Diane Latiker, ex-construction worker, ex-hairdresser, didn’t go to college to study community organizing or teen outreach. She didn’t have burnished credentials or experience working with at-risk teens. She simply felt a calling, one day, to invite some teenagers into her house from the crime-stricken streets of Roseland, Chicago. When they started telling their life stories, she listened. That’s when she felt her life beginning to change.

Latiker’s memoir of her program for Chicago’s most precarious tenagers reads like a combination of inspirational devotion and political thriller. What started as an informal gathering of kids playing tag and doing their homework, soon became something more. Her house became a gathering place for kids who never knew safety or stability at home. Soon, the kids she gathered, some from violent backgrounds, started talking like they had a future.

In a neighborhood almost synonymous with gangs, Latiker, called “Miss Diane” by her kids, provided a guaranteed peaceful space to simply be young. More than schools, intervention, or closely designed curricula, peace proved to be what her kids needed. Freed from the fear of poverty and violence, Miss Diane’s kids started doing homework, writing songs, and playing three-on-three basketball. Some even started talking about college.

This transition faced impediments. Latiker’s husband and kids resisted first. Having dozens of neighborhood kids, some known gang members, passing through their house at all hours created tension with her family. They couldn’t see what she saw, that these kids were, underneath their learned street swagger, still kids. Her marriage, and her relationship with her kids and grandkids, went through an extreme rocky patch.

Then Latiker encountered problems when she went looking for financial help for her kids’ growing needs. Philanthropists and churches offered moral support, but when they discovered she didn’t require kids to renounce gang membership to receive her mentorship, they turned squeamish. Nobody would support her unless she cut gang-bangers loose. That is, they demanded she stop helping those kids who most needed help, before they’d support her.

Miss Diane remained faithful to her vision, though. And “faithful” is definitely the word: her narrative is explicitly Christian. She believes God called her to support these children, and God’s plan guides her successes. She doesn’t offer a portable checklist of tools community organizers can use to resist gang violence; Kids Off the Block is her unique Christian vocation, and when she heeds God’s call, things go well. Thick or thin, events happen on God’s schedule.

Diane Latiker

Though Latiker describes Kids Off the Block as a “program,” it initially lacked structure. She simply offered ten kids a surrogate home, free from judgement and shame. Kids started inviting their similarly at-risk friends, though. Soon, the Latiker household became the neighborhood’s home. Her husband, an auto mechanic and amateur builder, turned the spare bedroom into a recording studio. Together, they turned a vacant lot into a basketball court.

Guided by trust in Christian providence, Latiker’s movement gained momentum. Kids found the love their parents were unable to provide, and that gangs promised but never delivered. Kids began thinking long-term, saving money, getting jobs. And outsiders took notice. First local venues, like the Chicago Tribune, began showing Latiker’s movement respect. Soon, she found herself featured, in glowing terms, on CNN and BET, venues that mean something in Roseland.

Nevertheless, Latiker reminds us, not everything ended well. This isn’t a moral parable, it’s a memoir. She admits forcing herself to accept that she couldn’t save kids who didn’t want saving. And as the mostly Black kids passing through her door started behaving like a community, she describes drawing hostile attention from the neighboring Hispanic neighborhood. She struggles to accept her losses alongside her victories.

Throughout, Latiker reminds readers of her two Christian principles: listen to God’s calling, even when it sounds odd, and don’t judge others. Non-judgement, to Latiker, doesn’t mean not telling others they’re doing wrong. She describes frequently scolding her proteges, and occasionally calling the police when kids can’t leave gang affiliations at the door. Rather, non-judgement means meeting kids where they are, even when it makes our adult sensibilities uncomfortable.

Latiker’s memoir isn’t a progress from triumph to triumph. Though she sees improvement among her kids, and eyes lighting up and seeing the future for the first time, she can’t make others’ hurts and traumas go away. In an environment defined by generational poverty and street violence, Latiker simply followed Christ’s injunction to open her door to “the least of these.” I hope, someday, to live up to her example.

The Atlanta Shooter Almost Had a Point... Almost

One of the targeted Atlanta massage parlors (via Newsweek)

As a rule, I don’t use mass shooters’ names. Many of them want fame and notoriety, and I refuse to participate in giving it to them. Therefore, you’ll never see me share the accused Atlanta massage parlor murderer’s name or photograph. Some people deserve to return to the undergrowth from which they emerged.

If you don’t already know, earlier this week, a 21-year-old White male shot up three Atlanta, Georgia, massage parlors, killing eight people, seven of them women, six Asian-American. Police caught him dead to rights and, according to press releases, he confessed unreservedly. He blamed women generally, and Asian-American women particularly, for somehow causing his unresolved sexual compulsions. He thought his problems would go away if they all died.

Authorities remain undecided whether to classify the shootings as a hate crime. They’re apparently arguing about whether race or sex more proximately motivated the violence, as if that matters. I’d assert that he also targeted sex workers, a field occupied overwhelmingly by poor women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. Therefore it’s way too soon to take economics off the table.

In one of reality’s less subtle twists, the day after the Atlanta shooting spree, the broader American South experienced a mammoth outbreak of storms, tornadoes, and other destructive weather. The worst damage occurred in Mississippi and Alabama, which, locals will assert, is not Georgia. For our purposes, though, the distinction matters little. Very close to where a petulant child lashed out violently against women even poorer than him, nature did likewise.

We can debate how seriously to consider the Atlanta shooter’s self-reported narrative. Like every youth becoming an adult, he realized factors of race, sex, and economics existed outside his control, and he was powerless against massive forces. Most people don’t throw the tactically armed equivalent of a tantrum, of course. But the pressures life exerted upon him are intimately familiar to anybody who’s ever had a job and a libido.

Although I loathe and excoriate his behavior, the storms prove his motivations aren’t entirely wrong. Recent extreme weather outbreaks, many focused on areas with conservative social mores, demonstrate for millions that they have remarkably little control over their circumstances. You can do everything right, follow every rule your parents taught you, and still lose everything. We’re all, on some level, powerless.

Traditional “work ethic” values teach that we have control. In schools, churches, and workplaces, young Americans hear the mantra that hard work and obsessive honesty create prosperity and security. It has the pervasiveness that hymns and prayers once had, and that isn’t coincidental. Capitalism, and its earthly messiah, “success,” have become America’s shared religion. It defines our politics, our morals, and our shared language.

Yet as a god, Capitalism (separate from “the market”) proves disappointing. While America is the richest nation in history, in the aggregate, that prosperity isn’t justly distributed. Young White men, the supposed beneficiaries of American abundance, don’t see it happening in their lives. Youth whose parents and grandparents could afford to start families in their twenties, now frequently can’t afford a starter apartment in their thirties.

This week’s Mississippi weather devastation is a metaphor for the American economy. The individuals who saw their homes destroyed probably didn’t “deserve” such treatment. Yet the heating of our carbon-fueled economy is literally heating the Earth and, like a fever patient, the overheated body is turning against itself. Hard work and individual responsibility can’t stop this trend. It’s literally beyond individual control.

Young men, like the Atlanta shooter, see this happening. But instead of banding together to challenge the wealthy, abusive minority, they respond individually. And as individuals do, they don’t challenge anyone who could actually fight back; they direct their dick-swinging vacuity against those even poorer and more defenseless than themselves. Kicking the poor is a response born from existential loneliness.

This kid came so close. The truth was right there: he understood his powerlessness against a massive force, and the need to stage a resistance. But because he’d internalized a secular eschatology of individualism, he instead performed an action from which no good, anywhere, ever, will emerge. He knew half the truth, and it couldn’t set him free.

More tragedies like this will probably occur. As young Americans see their promised mobility slipping further away, and natural disasters and “acts of God” becoming more frequent, they’ll fail to unify against those who actually oppress them. They understand the need to act against the encroaching wall of powerlessness. But they’ll inevitably pick the defenseless, low-risk enemy.

Black Christianity in a Divided America: a Primer

Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise In Hope

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, people of faith landed on both sides of the controversy. Some people believed Christianity requires the faithful to uphold the law and resist uprisings and anarchy; others believed Christianity requires us to challenge powerful people in high places for their injustice. But what does the Black Christian tradition, a distinct texture of American Christianity, say on the issue?

Reverend Dr. Esau McCaulley, an Episcopal priest and educator born in Mississippi, grew up on the mixed influences of hip-hop and gospel music. He knows what it means to serve others with a heart for Christ, and also what it means to get stopped by police for being “suspicious” for his skin color. As a professor of New Testament theology at Wheaton College, he has made a life of answering questions. Now he turns that background to contemporary issues.

From the beginning, Rev. McCaulley anticipates the most common mainstream (that is, White) objections to antiestablishment Christianity. Doesn’t the Apostle Paul call on Christians to pray for leaders? Of course, but praying for leaders doesn’t mean we can’t also hold them accountable for their injustices. Doesn’t Paul say God put all governments in place? Yes, but Paul also says God raised Pharaoh up specifically to knock him down, for God’s glory.

McCaulley admits coming into formal theology during a time when Christian leadership had split along an all-or-nothing axis. His professors, mostly White, thought either that the entire Bible must be read literally and applied verbatim, or amended or discarded according to their majoritarian ethical whims. McCaulley contrasts this with his mother, whose Bible reading gave her great comfort. How, he wondered, to contrast these two seemingly contradictory impulses?

The answer, he believes, comes from reading the Bible from the position of the underclass for whom it was originally written. What solace did Jews, occupied by Roman military who served as both police force and foreign conquerors, take from Christ’s and Paul’s message? To them, Rev. McCaulley believes, the whole Bible, including the parts which make White people cringe, gave a sense of purpose that human power structures couldn’t undermine.

Throughout, Rev. McCaulley’s theological interest is in Christians’ relationship with power, not their relationship with narrowly defined morality. How do we relate to earthly powers which would arrogate to themselves the authority which belongs exclusively to God? How do we responsibly apply the power which God has entrusted to us? Sexual purity, the favored moral concern of noisy media-friendly Evangelicals, doesn’t concern McCaulley.

Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley

As a professor at Wheaton College, McCaulley’s explanations sometimes tend toward both technical precision and intellectual conservatism. Wheaton, a Calvinist institution, leans toward the conventional in its theology, and though founded by Abolitionists, has avoided taking political positions in living memory. McCaulley studiously avoids endorsing parties or protests, at least explicitly. Biblical accuracy matters more to him here than political activism.

This concise, plain-English book aims for an audience that is Biblically literate, but perhaps not versed in the cultural implications of Black experience. Rev. McCaulley uses Biblical citations generously, walking readers through his reasoning step-by-step. He assumes readers are familiar with Biblical themes and language, but not necessarily familiar with Black Christian culture and Black theology. He explains everything painstakingly.

In this quality, Rev. McCaulley choses a particular audience. Because he assumes his audience reads their Bible, but has no prior familiarity with Black Christianity, his content operates at a fairly intermediate level. I’ve been attending an AME church (when I can) since 2017, and have already read Howard Thurman and James H. Cone. Therefore, though I find nothing wrong with McCaulley’s exegesis, I feel I’m not part of his intended audience.

Don’t mistake me, this isn’t a condemnation. Remember what Dr. King said about “the most segregated hour in America.” The lack of communication between Black and White Christians, or anyway White Chrstians’ unwillingness to listen, remains a major impediment to Christian witness on American racial issues. It’s only accidentally that I discovered Black theology. Sadly, that same accident drove me to this book; I might not have read it five years ago.

I recommend this book primarily for adult Bible study in mainline American churches. Because many White Christians have limited opportunities to discuss faith and Scripture with Black Christians, this book may provide the guidance for more open-minded Bible reading that many churches have sought recently. Many well-meaning Christians need an opportunity to see faith through others’ eyes. This may provide the chance their churches have been looking for.

For the Love of Roseanne Cash and William Shakespeare

Remember this classic from one year ago?

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

Roseanne Cash

I wasn’t the only one to retweet this well-meaning but deeply misguided message. It got rapid traction, as artistic souls sought to remain optimistic diving into a quarantine we thought might last weeks. Almost immediately, Cash got pushback from netroots scolds accusing her of shaming anybody who couldn’t knuckle down. In that beloved interwebs tradition, a single tweet spiraled into massive contention.

One year later, who proved right? I ask, knowing that, in the last twelve months, my attention span has dwindled so much that I have difficulty sticking with one-hour TV dramas, much less reading and writing. These tasks, once easy for me, have become laborious; even writing and editing this blog essay has felt gruelling. Superficially, I feel inclined to blame myself for having accomplished little this year.

Thinking about it, though, I realize Roseanne Cash and I have made a fundamental attribution error. Shakespeare didn’t write King Lear during lockdown because everything was locked down; he wrote it because he was William Shakespeare. That may seem oblique, so follow me.

Cash, and by extension I, assume we all could be Shakespeare. We assumedly could shake off the circumstances in which we exist, immune to pressures like family and economy. But Shakespeare didn’t write in a vacuum. King Lear probably debuted in 1606; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre became the official royal company, the King’s Men, in 1603. While writing King Lear, Shakespeare was part of the royal household.

Centuries of literature teachers tacitly presumed Shakespeare wrote for the sheer moral pleasure of writing. We’ve learned to assume that Shakespeare didn’t write for money, that he didn’t have rent or groceries, that he lived in a glassed-in world of pure art. Roseanne Cash, daughter of a country music legend, maybe assumes everyone has that same freedom, and could hypothetically just be free by thinking it. Maybe she doesn’t realize not everyone can.

These presumptions are, partially, economic. I don’t want to get quasi-Marxist, but Roseanne Cash has never lacked a safety net. She’s certainly had pressures: she has children, and house payments, and her own career. But I question whether she’s ever needed to see art, and the time required to create art, as a commodity. That is, has she ever needed to see art, and time, as scarce resources we purchase by trading away other opportunities?

William Shakespeare

Don’t mistake me, I don’t resent Cash the liberty to take pleasure in her work. Our go-go economic structure denies many people that liberty. We should aspire to, not resent, Cash’s ability to take pleasure in her work. Too many hard-working citizens today lack liberty to worry about nothing, go to museums and concerts, and enjoy their families. The world should have more, not fewer, Roseanne Cashes in it.

My point is, art arises from its context. Shakespeare wrote to get paid, because Tudor-Stuart theatre was a lucrative business. Groundlings didn’t do theatre as high art; Shakespeare made his living as a producer, and wrote so his company would have content. King Lear was a growth industry, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of its day. That matters, because our bodies and brains adapt to the stimuli we give them.

Working in the factory, I initially struggled. Assembly line work involves strenuous multi-part operations which only seem straightforward. But over months and years, tasks formerly difficult and painful became second nature; my brain adapted to assembly-line stimuli. Teachers make teaching look easy because they’ve spent years teaching. Same with carpenters, comedians, and chefs. Their brains and bodies have adapted to the stimuli.

The defining stimulus of quarantine-era America is hard work for vague, distant reward. Those like me, privileged to avoid furloughs, adapt to returning home knowing we’re stuck inside. No concerts, theatre, museums, or art. Others don’t even receive the reprieve of work, trapped with the unchanging stimuli of households, screen time, and ennui. Because we lack expectation of reward other than not dying, our brains lose significant creative ability.

Shakespeare wrote King Lear during lockdown, and Roseanne Cash probably wrote some damned fine songs, because their circumstances rewarded such productivity. Most of us don’t have that. We’re doing okay to keep our utilities paid and kids alive. And we’ve adapted to that, in ways capitalist enthusiasm can’t account for. For months, I reprimanded myself for this, because ingrained capitalist morality insisted I had to.

Therefore the question I have to ask myself is: what stimuli am I allowing into quarantine? And how can I improve them?

Dr. Potato le Pew's Cancel Culture Extravaganza

A cross-marketed Potato Head family, based on the Toy Story franchise

“Cancel Culture” is the new “Politically Correct”: an insignificant, half-joking leftist meme which fuddy-duddies have blown way out of proportion. Under ideal circumstances, I would consider both buzzwords frustrating annoyances by petty people who want to generate controversy where none exists. I haven’t written about it previously, because I consider it a gadfly issue: annoying, but harmless. But things changed this week.

When members of the House of Representatives used their allotted floor time, a resource so finite that it’s allocated in the Constitution, to inveigh against recent changes in Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. During a time of national crisis unmatched since World War II, with pending bills regarding COVID relief and the January 6th insurgency, elected Republicans preferred to waste taxpayer-funded time bellyaching about reading primers and plastic toys.

Smarter writers have already bled ink explaining these accusations have no foundation. I care more about which objects have become emblems of hard-right outrage. These wastrels consume our limited time and attention on books written for preschool children struggling with rudimentary phonics, and a toy potato labeled “Age 2+.” They’ve literally redirected the national discourse to complain about products targeted at kids just learning how to understand words and faces.

Two explanations readily avail themselves. First, maybe top-level Republicans are operating at a level of rudimentary object-impermanence that makes Dr. Seuss illustrations and Mr. Potato Head face-recognition exercises necessary—or maybe they assume their voting base operates at that level. I’d rather not entertain this argument, because it feels like name-calling, and will only poison the well. But it needs acknowledged.

A second, more likely explanation arose this week, when Fox News and its acolytes spotted another supposed victim of “Cancel Culture”: Looney Tunes. With the revelation that lecherous skunk Pepé le Pew was written out of the Space Jam sequel, right-wingers latched onto another supposedly hatcheted figure of their past. This comes eight months after the brouhaha over a mooted Looney Tunes relaunch that disarms Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam.

Do people understand that Pepé le Pew is the villain of his story?

Watching elected officials soil themselves over anthropomorphic potatoes, pre-K primers, and Looney Tunes, I put it together: these numbskulls are trying to protect their childhoods. They see things they loved as grade-schoolers, possibly the last time their lives felt stable and unwavering, and they panic. Because their lives seem volatile enough, without their treasured memories being attacked as “problematic.” They believe they’re defending their own past selves.

Back in 1980, Professor Thomas Goodnight identified the overarching presumptions of Left and Right in American politics. Where “liberals” (an often misused term) perceive change as inevitable, and want to manage it, conservatives see all change as decline. I've written about this before. Conservatives believe, incorrectly, that the changes they see happening are new, and want to halt them, before they destabilize the homogenous world they think they grew up in.

I have trouble accepting the argument that Pepé le Pew normalizes sexual assault, or that Elmer Fudd normalizes guns. These characters’ entire role is premised on them being too stupid to understand themselves and their circumstances. Pepé receives repeated, glaring indications that his intended wants no part of him, and apparently never sees them. And I don’t recall Elmer Fudd’s blunderbuss ever hurting anyone but himself.

Notwithstanding my disbelief regarding the logic, we face a problem: this isn’t censorship. No official body made a preemptive decision to make Republicans’ childhood toys go away. Three private corporations made self-interested decisions on how to utilize their own properties, in ways to maximize their profits. Isn’t that what we’ve been told capitalism is? Would they really hijack private property to protect their… their… whatever they’re trying to protect?

Yes, apparently, they would.

Thinking about it, I realized, despite their Cold War-influenced rhetoric, capitalism isn’t a First Principle for conservatives. Fundamentally, they like capitalism, not for itself, but because it’s what they know. Capitalism comes second to their first love, continuity. Ultimately, their fear of racial justice, economic reform, and “Cancel Culture” boils down to distrust of change. They don’t want justice, they want continuity. And they’ll sacrifice everything else to get it.

Sudden, market-driven change has grown-ass men clutching their blankies and calling for their mamas. Because change terrifies them, or at least, they assume change terrifies their voters. I can’t entirely blame them; change always produces unanticipated consequences, and nobody knows where they’ll end up on the other side. But we’re watching what happens when people resist change:

They can’t save the already broken system. The system will just break them.

Piers Morgan, and Why Nothing Ever Gets Better

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's now-famous interview with Oprah

Watching Piers Morgan walking offset on Tuesday, walking out the Good Morning Britain door, and apparently keeping on walking, was deeply satisfying. British TV audiences, or Anglophile foreigners like me, have watched him use his national platform to spout bilge for decades. Co-host Alex Beresford named and shamed Morgan’s history of attacking Meghan Markle, which apparently irked Morgan so thoroughly, he quit the most secure media job in Britain.

Morgan, a master of coded language, has frequently used his highly-rated breakfast news program to pooh-pooh Meghan Markle in ways that aren’t necessarily racist, in isolation. Honestly, watching him from across the Big Pond, I suspect Morgan doesn’t think of himself as racist, despite dedicating thirty minutes on Monday to airing his personal grievances. He’s just mastered navigating Britain’s top-tier media landscape, and doesn’t want anyone changing the map.

We’ve recently witnessed cheap spectacles like Morgan’s walkout frequently. The backlash against America’s Black Lives Matter movement pushed carpetbagger Marjorie Taylor Greene and high-school dropout Lauren Boebert into Congress this year. It took sixty complainants to make law enforcement take the Bill Cosby accusations seriously. And any woman who’s ever tried filing a stalking or sexual assault complaint knows she’ll find herself in the hot seat long before the man.

Why don’t we believe people? We seemingly believe that, if we take women’s and minorities’ accusations seriously, they would lie flagrantly. They’d supposedly falsify information and demonize White, cisgendered men for no reason but cheap thrills and short-term gain. The fact that this keeps not happening doesn’t dissuade anyone. Powerful people keep believing that humans are innate liars and undeserving of trust, especially the chronically powerless.

This manifests primarily in how society regards the “lesser,” the outsider. That is, we generally believe White people over Black people, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and men over women. Given the choice, we’ll bury the outsider group’s narrative until someone of sufficient power comes along and speaks up. Only when someone exceptional says something, the actress who married royalty perhaps, do we give these claims any credence.

Power defends power. Surely nobody reading this will disagree. Piers Morgan has defended execrable human beings like Donald Trump, and the sweat-free moral Shop-Vac that is Prince Andrew, because the existing system treats him pretty well. Maybe he isn’t bigoted; he just doesn’t want to fix the broken system, because its brokenness redounds to his benefit. If things got better, he might need to pound sand with us plebeians.

Piers Morgan quits

That isn’t a great excuse, but still…

People who work hard, follow the rules, and reap the rewards, have a disincentive to fix broken systems. Because doing so acknowledges they’ve benefited at others’ expense. To participate in more than token reforms means admitting they’ve profited from structural injustice, which might, arguably, make them bad people. Nobody likes to admit they’ve done wrong; we react to such challenges similarly to being punched in the nose.

Because I did okay, didn’t I? I followed the rules and won. So anyone else could, hypothetically, do the same. If I’m a good person, and the system did well by me, then good people should profit from the system. But if the system is wrong, it follows that I’m maybe not a good person. That’s a conclusion I can’t stomach, so I have to defend the system.

Religion and philosophy warn us this isn’t necessarily so. The knee-jerk emotional response, modeled in generations of fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters, tells us character equals merit, which equals ultimate success. But we know that isn’t so. Good people of exemplary character can do everything right and still lose. This doesn’t make anyone “bad people.” But it also means we have to extricate ourselves from the system, even if we’ve profited from it.

That’s why Piers Morgan needed to throw a tantrum, because he knows the system reflects on him. He knows he must either separate himself, or get the lingering stench of rot all over himself. He remains tainted while he stays put, because the system which rewards him is entirely broken. That isn’t his fault, it’s just a manifestation of living in a broken world. It becomes his fault, though, when he remains there, knowing it’s corrupted.

Harry and Meghan exposed a corrupted system; Alex Beresford called Piers Morgan out for participating. Morgan defended himself by leaving, not just the situation, but ITV altogether. Given the opportunity to repent and improve the system, he chose to quit. That happens to everyone who profits from systemic corruption, eventually. As abolitionist William Wilbeforce said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

God, Drugs, and Loneliness

Hungarian-Canadian addiction specialist Gabor Maté, describing one of his patients, wrote one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever read. Referring to an HIV-infected sex worker under his care, he quoted her saying: “The first time I did heroin… it felt like a warm, soft hug.” This sentence has haunted me for years after reading Dr. Maté’s book. Imagine feeling so alone, so bereft of contact with something satisfying, that you find solace by driving a spike in your vein.

Dr. Maté writes about addicts suffering the lingering traumas of childhood abuse, while researcher Bruce Alexander, another expatriate living in Canada, describes addicts facing the consequences of loneliness. Both share one underlying realization, that people consume drugs because they lack something. Their souls feel so desolate, they’re desperate for some connection. For diverse reasons, they believe they’ll only get it by stuffing their bodies with foreign substances.

As humans, we’re acutely conscious of our innate solitude. Even surrounded by people, we feel alone, bounded by our material finitude. Wild animals and plants don’t need to ask what role they ought to pursue, what choices they should make; they fit into their ecosystem and pursue their instincts. Humans can’t do that. We make choices daily, and often spend years reckoning with consequences for our bad or poorly-considered decisions.

Yet we want something more. We’re aware the world exists, and we’re somehow part of it, but we don’t know what that means in any particular way. In times past, humans found meaning through two chief means: religion and war. Both give us roles and responsibilities, defined by something greater than ourselves, something into which we can immerse our beings. We can stop being finite, and become part of something vast, something meaningful.

Religion offers people deeper unity. The mystical impulse promises us the ability to know God innately, or become one with the Brahma, or understand and embrace our place in society. Religions offer humans the ability to not be alone. Despite the well-intentioned promises of secular scholars who claim all religions are paths to salvation (which is an innately Christian concept), all religions aren’t identical. They do, however, offer a matching promise:

Dr. Gabor Maté

You don’t have to be alone.

Except that, in a religiously plural age, we no longer experience religion as oneness. Answers aren’t clear-cut. We have to make decisions, knowing the high likelihood that our decisions are wrong, which possibly explains why religious people seem constantly at war with one another. To embrace religion today doesn’t assuage our loneliness, as our ancestors experienced; if anything, it makes us more acutely conscious of natural human solitude.

So we turn outside ourselves seeking unity. People define their identities through volunteer activities or political parties, through immersive hobbies or evangelizing secular values. We seek unity with something greater which, without religion, must be something within the world. That something is always outside ourselves, it can never be us. To seek meaning internally inevitably reminds us how alienated and alone we necessarily are.

Some people feel this pain, this isolation, so acutely that they just want the pain to go away. For them, the issue lacks nuance or complexity; the pain is so overwhelming that it has to stop. Whether through substances or the ecstasy of religious transport, they need the pain to stop now. Faith or drugs numb them to trauma and suffering long enough to feel normal, but not long enough to actually heal.

Not all religious people behave thus, of course, just as not all recreational drug users are addicts. People’s unique circumstances reflect the way they seek the union of souls. If they didn’t, we’d never feel lonely. We’d be finite and alone, sure, but we’d be finite and alone in the same way, and nobody would suffer distinctly. To be human is, on some core level, to remain constantly lonely.

The human desire to bandage our loneliness manifests in ways that people behave. We seek company, even to our own detriment; we embrace people we don’t necessarily like. How many “friends” do we have, whom we need to consume alcohol or drugs to stand being around? We numb ourselves to others because we need them, their company, their continuity. Sometimes we numb ourselves with substances, other times with liturgy.

Such maudlin meanderings seem superficially hopeless. Nobody likes to think that loneliness is tied to human nature. Yet thinking about it, I gain great comfort: everyone else is as estranged and isolated as me. I’m not alone in my loneliness. And that’s profoundly consoling.

Some Thoughts on Isaac Asimov and Robot Police

The NYPD's first robo-dog, built by Boston Dynamics, on patrol last week

Isaac Asimov’s 1950 novel I, Robot is most famous today for introducing the world to his influential Three Laws of Robotics. Less famously, it introduced Asimov’s early justification for robotics: he believed technology was a manifestation of science. And science, unlike humans, is wholly rational. The more of society we could entrust to robots, which Asimov saw as more rational forms of humanity, the better he believed society would be.

I couldn’t help remembering Asimov’s principles last week when a video began circulating on social media. The NYPD, a bureaucratic agency not known for restraint and forbearance, had purchased a robo-dog to patrol New York streets. The video portrays this as cute and upbeat. It’s surely mere coincidence that the NYPD has deployed its robo-dog in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, the boroughs most populated by Black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations.

Dr. Asimov believed technology was morally neutral, excluding human prejudices. Relying on technological algorithms would exclude human weakness from running common society. Freed from the burdens of morally fraught decision-making, humans could relax, letting robots automate everything. Anyway, he believed that in 1950. Throughout his career, his writings increasingly dealt with moral conundrums created by his purportedly neutral laws, which he constantly rewrote and tweaked.

As often happens with myth, from the Laws of Moses to Star Wars, early contributions obscure later revisions. Asimov’s early robot stories, written in the afterglow of post-WWII optimism, often get remembered more fondly (if vaguely) than his more nuanced later stories. I know I often forget his later stories. Boston Dynamics has learned from this; their early mythology foregrounds robots dancing to Motown, hoping we’ll forget they’re primarily a defense contractor.

Machines, Asimov ultimately concluded, can never be morally neutral. They reflect the desires and prejudices of those who built them. With Boston Dynamics, we might add those who pay to build them. Their limits always reflect their programmers’ ideal. The robo-dog, a prototype for Asimov’s robot detective Olivaw, was programmed to enforce NYPD goals, which, we now know, often privilege order over justice. The robo-dog will do likewise.

Isaac Asimov

Artificial intelligence algorithms, written by an industry that’s remarkably White, famously have difficulty recognizing Black faces. This has already created problems with deploying facial recognition software. Algorithms inevitably reflect the biases of those who wrote them. Technology enthusiasts might counter that we could write learning heuristics so robot police could overcome their limitations. But the machine will only ever learn within that heuristic. What if the heuristic is also wrong?

Put another way, what makes humans capable of changing our minds? What makes it possible for us to determine that long-held beliefs in politics, religion, national identity, and other deep-seated domains, are wrong, and abandon them? Philosophers and theologians argue this extensively, with no definitive answers. We fall on what philosophers call epistemology, the study of origins of knowledge.

Though epistemologists agree humans know things, we cannot agree how. Recent developments in the discipline suggest our knowledge is always positional, that is, we know from our origins, which is why people who move to other countries, or rise or fall on the economic ladder, have difficult periods of transition. Knowledge, and the metaphysical ideas which arise from knowledge, is conditioned by race, religion, language, economics, and the kitchen sink.

We also wander perilously close to religion. Reading the Hebrew Tanakh, I’ve struck something uncomfortably familiar: Moses wrote a law to govern a poor mountain-dwelling nation during the Late Bronze Age. Then kings and priests began enforcing that law inflexibly, dare I say robotically, without consideration of circumstance. The prophets then inveigh against mindless obedience. The Law of Moses demands compliance; the prophets demand mercy and justice.

Sound familiar?

The NYPD robo-dog’s algorithms reflect the NYPD’s enforcement priorities, which we’ve seen automatically presume Black and Brown people are incipient criminals. Because it enforces its algorithms without ill feeling, courts could construe this enforcement as morally neutral. But clearly it isn’t. Just because the algorithm programmer isn’t present, doesn’t make that person less culpable for malicious enforcement of pre-programmed laws.

Though atheist himself, Dr. Asimov’s later novels turn toward a theological concept, eschatology. Laws written as geometric algorithms never compass the complexity of human interaction. His virtually immortal robots struggled with this limit, never reaching a satisfactory answer. This reflected a conflict within Asimov himself, because he considered science trustworthy, but ultimately realized it wasn’t sufficient. Morals, with all their ambiguity, persist.

That’s something the robo-dog, programmed to enforce the law mechanically, can never adequately handle.

The National Anthem and the Search for Someone to Blame

Sailor Sabol, trying to sing the Star-Spangled Banner

It’s difficult to identify just one problem with this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in Orlando, Florida. The caricatured statue of former President Trump, half Golden Calf, half Bob’s Big Boy, comes immediately to mind. So does the stage that looks clearly like a Waffen-SS lapel pin. Yet I’ve found myself made uncomfortable by the attention which has gathered around vocalist Sailor Sabol.

You perhaps don’t know Sabol’s name. The teenage mezzo-soprano, apparently an undergraduate at the University of Central Florida, sang the national anthem to launch CPAC 2021. Within hours, recordings of Sabol turned up throughout social media, most decrying her awkward, off-key singing. Her vocal difficulties were compounded by her a cappella performance, making it impossible to find the right note once she’d lost it.

Unfortunately, judging by many comments her performance received on FaceTube and InstaTwit, this wasn’t just a case of an unprepared youth singing something beyond her range. The name-calling and abuse I’ve seen directed at Sailor Sabol has ranged from simply calling her amateurish and cockeyed, to accusing her of moral failings. I argued with one commenter who insisted she must’ve slept with someone to get the coveted opening-night slot.

I’m reminded of Rebecca Black who, a decade ago, became the nexus of Internet hatred because she sang a silly pop song. People blamed her, individually, for the decline of American Top-40 pop. The abuse Black received was even worse than that heaped upon Sabol, and included threats of murder or sexual violence. At the time, I blamed this on people hiding behind YouTube’s cloak of anonymity, and I still partly believe this.

But something worse happened with Sabol. She became the emblem, not only of artists without firm cultural background and rigorous training, but of American conservatism’s moral failure. Commenters, most using pseudonyms, said she proved the cost of defunding arts education in public schools, or that she was personally disrespectful and unpatriotic, or that she sounded the death knell of American democracy. All for a girl barely out of high school.

I’ve noticed this desire to blame individuals before. Faced with the manifold moral failings of the former administration, a massive dogpile of media pundits chose to harp on how the former President had trouble drinking water. The problems America, as Earth’s predominant socioeconomic power, faces currently, are so vast that it’s difficult to wrap our heads around them. So we look for an easy shorthand to make the problem comprehensible.

The other lingering image from this weekend: half Golden Calf, half Bob's Big Boy

The problem, though, is that these shorthands say as much about us as about who we blame. Jeering the former President for needing two hands for a water glass, serves to normalize ableism, a major problem in America today. And holding one teenager responsible for the moral septic tank that is CPAC, reveals that the organized Left has no better answer than base name-calling, like kids on a playground.

Watching recent politics, I notice an ironic gap between what the sides believe, and what they do. Conservatives believe in individualism, and see all groups, including nations, demographic subsets, and even families, as comprised entirely of individuals. Therefore, when millions of people do something—undocumented immigrants crossing the border, say—these are millions of individuals making the same bad moral decision. Which, paradoxically, makes it easier to blame the group.

Leftists, however, see human decisions as conditioned by systemic circumstances which individuals can’t control. We’re beholden to pressures of race, economics, sexuality, gender, nationality, and the kitchen sink. We aren’t necessarily helpless, but we’re limited. Therefore Leftists look for someone to fix the system, or someone to hold responsible for its brokenness. Which, paradoxically, means leftists heap praise and blame on individuals.

The very fact that Leftists often don’t bother to vote, except in Presidential years, speaks volumes. They want one superhero to fix everything—or, if everything turns to shit, one supervillain to blame. Entire systems, plagued with habits that cause the same mistakes to repeat, get boiled down to one individual. The President, or Betsy DeVos, or William Barr. Or a teenager trying to sing the national anthem.

The Star-Spangled Banner is notoriously difficult to sing. Better vocalists than Sailor Sabol have butchered it far worse. But the condemnation descending on her now isn’t about her pitchy, discordant performance. Leftists want some individual to blame for CPAC and its tarnishing influence on politics. But the group is too big and vague to blame. So they turn their wrath on one struggling girl. And reveal their own moral undercarriage.

Myth and Counter-Myth on Battlestar Galactica

Anyone who calls themselves the Messiah, pretty clearly isn’t the Messiah. This statement seems so obvious that it almost doesn’t bear repeating; satires like The Life of Brian have made this truism a joke. But considering the history of self-proclaimed Messiahs and their ultimate defeats, from Simon Bar-Kochba and Sabbatai Zevi, to Sun Myung Moon and David Koresh, anyone who calls themselves the Messiah should be considered immediately suspect.

Gaius Baltar gets the rank of Messiah foisted upon him. Baltar’s role on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is neither heroic nor villainous, a distinct break from the strict black-and-white morality of the original 1978 series. Where Count Baltar was a quisling and a villain, Gaius Baltar demonstrates divided loyalties, profound survivors’ guilt, and an overwhelming sense of purposelessness. He falls ass-backward into the role of Messiah.

More important than how he became Messiah, however, is what message he purveyed. Speaking to his crowd of mostly-female acolytes, like a more sexually voracious Mary and Martha, Baltar preaches a very extemporaneous, and often contradictory Gospel. God (singular) wants peace, but also for adherents to defend themselves. Resist the authorities, but not with violence, except when violence prevails. I found the contradictions familiar from Sunday School.

I also found the motivation familiar from reading religious theory. Throughout the first three seasons, the story highlighted a singular, state-focused religion. Despite the nominally democratic government, power received its imprimatur from the priesthood, and the priesthood received protection from the state. Sectarian divisions existed, but were easily ignored. In the Twelve Colonies, righteousness and lawfulness were essentially equal… for three seasons.

Series co-creator Ronald D. Moore states, in DVD commentary, that the rebooted vision wasn’t originally about religion, but became so after a throwaway comment in the pilot miniseries. The pilot contained stray references to religion; President Roslin was sworn into office by a priest, for instance, and Caprica Six name-dropped God. The miniseries used these items as set-dressing, though. Only in the ultimate open-ended series did religious themes become dominant.

James Callis as Dr. Gaius Baltar

Twelve Colonies religion was polytheistic but showed no sign of mystery cults, unlike the ancient Greek religion(s) upon which they were modeled. Perhaps such divisions existed before the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, and were simply never mentioned. By the mass exodus depicted, their religion had one motive: preservation of the state as the expression of human survival. Guard the state, so it can guard us against anarchy and extinction.

After a cadre of mostly bereaved women anointed Baltar their Messiah, his message became strictly counter-authoritarian. It ratified that God had sanctified the desperate and despised who now lived in Galactica’s below-decks (“Blessed are you poor,” Luke 6:20). Though Baltar’s Gospel, like the Christian Gospel which loosely inspired it, looks contradictory to anyone seeking a moral checklist, it’s actually remarkably consistent: God supports those downtrodden by worldly authorities.

Religious historian Bruce Lincoln, in Discourse and the Construction of Society, postulates the process of organizing society. Powers of Earth, and their counter-authorities, create narratives that explain why people should, or shouldn’t, support the status quo. These narratives, Lincoln calls “myths.” Consider the mythological, almost religious nature of stories we tell about society: Betsy Ross giving figurative birth to an American flag, or the martyrs at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The official state religion aboard Galactica supports authority. Our gods have literally appointed President Roslin to guide us into the Promised Land. Their myths of a lost, Edenic homeland, justify power structures in society. Holy scriptures contain the narrative that justifies state authority, and state authority stratifies the narrative of religious belief. Like the Books of Moses, the Laws of God are literally synonymous with the Laws of the Land.

The series positions Baltar as Jesus, but I prefer comparing him to Hebrew prophets. Like Jesus, the prophets didn’t consider themselves breakaway, but their message often directly contradicts Moses. The prophets seldom condemned private sin, a favorite issue of state-sponsored priests; rather, they inveighed against kings and the organized priesthood, who used their nominally God-given authority to oppress the people. Jesus was simply the culmination of the prophetic tradition.

When Baltar challenges Roslin’s state religion, he offers what Bruce Lincoln might call a counter-myth. His narrative, he claims, better explains a just society dedicated to the Promised Land. Those who follow him believe his postulated society better serves the despised masses.  His counter-narrative remains unresolved in the final battle, maybe because the counter-myth doesn’t exist to solve anything, really. The fight is just worth fighting.

On a similar, but not identical, theme:
God, Man, and Battlestar Galactica