“Once Upon a Time” Could Be Right Now

Sarah J. Sover, Fairy Godmurder (Fractured Fae Book 1)

Gwendoline Evenshine worked hard to become a fairy godmother, and blew it; her very first charge was murdered on hallowed ground, in broad daylight. So she hardened her heart and rededicated her life to bringing down the killer, a serial monster nicknamed The Brain Scraper. This mysterious beast stalks the soot-streaked streets of fairyland, murdering magical beings for mysterious purposes. But the case has taken a dark turn, and Gwen suddenly finds herself the target.

Sarah Sover’s second novel isn’t groundbreaking, but don’t consider that a knock against it. Sover follows a beat-sheet beloved by popular cross-genre novelists like Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, a hybrid of traditional paperback fantasy and midcentury noir mystery. The product is a darkly playful overlap that, to Sover’s benefit, comes with a built-in audience. Veteran readers will recognize when the next plot twist or brutal betrayal is coming, without truly spoiling the surprise.

The story proceeds along two tracks. In the present, Gwen haunts the midnight streets of Korranthia, a fairy kingdom roughly corresponding with New England. Haunted by her greatest failure, Gwen paused her personal and professional life, dedicating everything to chasing that one phantom. She works as a police consultant, but only on the Brain Scraper case, using her fairy godmother skills to examine bodies for evidence that ordinary forensics can’t find. It hasn’t helped much.

In flashbacks, we get Gwen’s backstory. Fresh from the Academy, Gwen is assigned fairy godmother status over Princess Francesca (that’s “Frankie” to you), heir of Korranthia’s royal house. Frankie expects to inherit authority over the precarious balance between her fairy kingdom and the increasingly volatile United States. But she lives with a dark foreboding that she’ll never actually live to receive her inheritance. Despite her power and skill, Gwen is powerless to prevent Frankie’s doom.

This dualism gives readers a jarring view of Gwen at different life stages. The present Gwen is hard-bitten, desperate to avoid building relationships or having feelings. Because she dared to care about Princess Frankie, and her big-sisterly guidance ended horrifically. We know from Chapter One that Frankie is doomed, and watch helplessly as, like Amanda Palmer, her story plays to its inevitable conclusion. Gwen is desperate never to fail, or be that heartbroken ever again.

Sarah J. Sover

However, boring old reality persistently intrudes. Gwen can only pursue the case by remaining in the Korranthia PD’s good graces, and the fuzz cares more about maintaining order than pursuing justice. And Gwen never formally completed her magical training, meaning she still needs her old Academy connections to decipher the scanty evidence she’s collected. Thus, despite her desire for independence, she keeps falling back on the two institutions dominating young people’s lives: law and school.

Not that Gwen’s truly alone. Two allies, a griffin homicide detective and a pixie true-crime blogger, continue supporting Gwen, despite her cynical façade. And her old Academy mentor makes frequent overtures to tempt Gwen back, promising the largess of power and old-girl-network connections. Gwen, like Harry Dresden, is extremely powerful, but needs guidance to channel that power. But Gwen finds the temptations of friendship, insidership, and power threatening. Especially in fairyland, there’s farther to fall.

Sover mixes contemporary and folkloric influences in different measures at different times. The flashbacks presaging Princess Frankie’s murder, and Gwen’s fall from grace, read like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, salted with allusions to contemporary politics and culture war issues. Sover’s “present” chapters read more like a conventional hard-boiled procedural. This duality hits harder because this is the first novel I’ve read which effectively uses the COVID-19 pandemic in its setting. Sover’s fairyland feels very real.

As an aside, Korranthia’s mythic beings come from European myth: fairies, gnomes, ogres. The characters swear by Danu, an Irish goddess. Nowhere do Native American mythic beings appear, despite the New England setting. It’s entirely the mythology of the colonizers, not the colonized. This feels like a real missed opportunity, especially in light of Sover’s use of contemporary politics in her mythological milieu. I hope she corrects this understandable but large oversight in future books.

This novel feels like the slipstream genre I read extensively ten years ago, but haven’t seen much recently. Sover uses the imagery of myth and folklore, but brings the stakes into a contemporary scope. She addresses issues that seem timely to modern readers, especially women, but narrates those issues in ways that seem sometimes almost whimsical. She doesn’t lecture or scold her readers, but like in the best literature, ultimately, the story is about us.

It's Time For a Harry Truman Moment

President Harry Truman

It’s easy to forget, at this late date, how wildly unpopular President Harry Truman was in 1948. Having inherited the Presidency accidentally, only 89 days into FDR’s fourth term, Truman was considered a bench-warmer, holding the Oval Office until a better candidate became available. The famous “Dewey Wins” photo happened because Truman’s defeat was considered a foregone conclusion, despite FDR’s lingering shadow.

This perception wasn’t entirely unfair. A longtime darling of the Kansas City political machine, Truman got nominated for Senator as a compromise candidate, and was so surprised by his Vice Presidential nod that his first response was reputedly: “Oh shit.” He initially showed no temperament for executive action, and dithered terribly. Historians attribute Truman’s chronic inaction for the Democratic Party’s widespread losses in the 1946 midterms.

But when Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, a Northern semi-progressive, for President, Truman saw his opportunity. Truman had recently converted to antiracism, and desegregated the military by executive order. Dewey pledged an antiracist Republican platform. So Truman called the Republican-dominated Congress back into session to vote on bills essentially supporting Dewey’s racial policies. The Republicans’ inability to vote on their own platform probably got Truman reelected in 1948.

Watching events unfold following this week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, feels like watching a prewritten script stumbling toward an inevitable ending. While conservative voices offer crinkum-crankum “thoughts and prayers” tweets, progressives insist somebody needs to do something, but feign helplessness against intransigent bipartisan indifference. It’s hauntingly familiar, and it’s currently poised to result in the usual outcome: a multiparty agreement to do nothing.

Nineteen children under age ten were slaughtered by one shooter with a military-grade rifle. Many bodies were so badly mutilated that the only hope of reliable identification is through DNA matching. Though the Uvalde Unified School District has its own six-member police department, the shooter received no meaningful interference until he’d racked up a double-digit body count. Clearly the standard responses—waiting periods, increased security, “red flag laws”—didn’t work.

President Joe Biden

This only compounds the threats to young people’s future. Children today will face social and economic dislocation caused by Global Warming; the only question is what, not whether. Our democracy is under assault by groups that repeat conspiracy theories which originated in neo-Nazi circles. Our middle class is disappearing, and soon a majority of Americans won’t be able to afford health care, assuming SCOTUS hasn’t banned it all anyway.

America hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 1991; all of the twenty hottest years on record have happened since then. We haven’t had an budget since Barack Obama’s first term, and have funded basic functions like national defense and road repair by short-term spending bills. Meanwhile Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema keep promising that bipartisanship will happen any day now, despite overwhelming evidence that the parties speak different languages.

Our two major political parties are hemorrhaging right now. Republican policies are deeply unpopular, particularly as they’ve increasingly become mere Trumpist whims, yet unless something happens, they’re likely to sweep this year’s midterms. That’s because the Democrats have descended into bickering and inaction. The big-tent party means Democrats can’t agree on almost anything, and handle policy disagreements by punting every ball further down the field.

Now is the opportunity for a Harry Truman moment. The Biden Administration, suffering from almost exactly the same accusations of dithering inaction that plagued Truman in 1948, can simply force Congress to vote on something, anything. Slamming an omnibus bill on Congress to protect our children’s future will require Congress to take some position, any position, as we move into the general election campaign. Make them do something.

It won’t work, of course. Just like Harry Truman’s civil rights reforms crashed in 1948, anything Biden pushes will collapse now. The point, sadly, isn’t to accomplish anything; it’s to get incumbents on record, in their home states and districts, taking positions on issues that Americans care about, particularly ensuring children have a future. By making working legislators take concrete, specific sides, we can potentially reforge the New Deal coalition.

Politics in 2022, like in 1948, isn’t working by existing rules. The way we’ve done everything previously is failing now. We can’t naively rely on bucolic nostalgia for days when legislators made things happen by back-room log-rolling sessions. Joe Biden needs to learn the lesson that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton all learned, eventually: “politics as usual” is almost always an illusion.

If we want to get anything done, force legislators to take a concrete position in public.

Heaven, Hell, and the SBC

Back before college, the United Methodist congregation I attended had a youth pastor who loved telling stories of how awful his oversexed youth was. Over and over, week after week, so many stories. He was the JRR Tolkein of elaborate anecdotes about lust and promiscuity. Eventually, I realized, he didn't regret his debauched youth.

He missed it.

As news broke this week that America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is structurally rotten with male sexual violence, I returned to that youth pastor. Back in the 1990s, purity culture infiltrated White Protestantism. Though quasi-puritanical attitudes weren’t invented in the Clinton era, they were codified in new and exceedingly intolerant ways. They divided the world into “pure” and “impure” camps, identity clusters which were reinforced through pulpit sermons, layperson testimony, and in-school outreach.

Purity culture has multiple forms. The lurid popularity of purity balls has attracted attention, as has voluble online condemnation of women wearing leggings and low-cut blouses. The adults governing purity culture have gained notoriety for punishing even the most rudimentary forms of female sexuality. Women’s bodies, according to this reasoning, are so inherently suffused with temptation, that men and boys need constantly shielded from their influence.

Notably, purity extends beyond sex. The SBC, like many conservative denominations, divides theological roles according to biological sex: women are excluded from authority though, as Jim Henderson writes, women mostly keep such congregations working. This division, called by the faux-doctrinal name “complementarianism,” pre-slots people into roles according to accidents of form, and just like racial segregation, gender segregation inevitably carries a whiff of uncleanliness.

The news emerging from the SBC should horrify anybody of any religious persuasion. An all-male pastorate preached sexual purity and defense of “family values,” while sexually abusing parishioners, including minors. A male power structure turned sex into a power prerogative, while spreading a message that women and girls were responsible for men’s libidinous reactions. Constant messages of submission and culpability turned out to have—quelle horreur!—an ulterior motive.

I’ve never heard any accusation that my youth pastor, whom I’ll not name, ever actively abused anyone. By all accounts I received, he was a paragon of respectability… I guess. Because his constant messaging had definite effects. I watched church youth descend into doom-spirals of self-recrimination (Christians are no less likely than anybody else to have premarital sex). Youth, drawn to our congregation by his personal charisma, soon drifted away in a fug of self-hatred.

This problem isn’t universal. As Austin Channing Brown observes, chastity is a preponderantly White church obsession. Freed from the impositions of oppression, poverty, and captivity, White Christians could pursue a ministry of service and responsibility. But that’s a difficult sell; much easier to convince believers they’re secretly oppressed. The belief that, if sexual violence happens against you, you’re covertly responsible, is an outgrowth of Calvinist belief in depravity.

Functionally, this sexual fixation doesn’t preserve anybody’s purity. It just transfers sexual autonomy onto powerful, mostly male, adults. It creates an atmosphere of guilt, stifles forgiveness, and convinces those who most need Christ’s guidance that they’ve fallen outside His domain. I’ve watched Christians, mostly youth, leave the church, not because they don’t believe, but because they believe they’ve done something God can’t forgive. That’s heartbreaking to witness.

Let me stress, irreligion isn’t the answer. The secular world of commerce hasn’t liberated anybody; a casual browse through the internet, or a stumble through any shopping mall, demonstrates that irreligious influences frequently conflate a woman’s dollar value with her sex appeal. Who can blame youth, browbeaten by constant sexual messaging from the spiritual and secular realms, for relinquishing control of their sexual choices?

My youth pastor probably meant well. His voracious sexual history innately entailed disrespecting not only the girls he had sex with, but also himself, and he wanted other youth to avoid that pattern. But his single-plank platform turned Christianity into a vehicle to shame sex, and especially female sexuality. He presented a world without hope, only momentary escape from constant temptation. That’s no way to live a life.

Extreme and repressive attitudes about sex are innately abusive, even before powerful people exploit those attitudes for selfish ends. What we’re seeing revealed at the SBC is simply the end result of a cosmology that ties people to their pasts, rather than opening them to a better future. White Christianity's relationship with sex has been distorted and toxic for some time.

And sadly, evidence suggests that it's going to get worse before it gets any better.

The American Century and its Discontents

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 112
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

America has a message for the world: we’ve come into prominence for a reason. We come to bring justice, freedom, and democracy throughout the earth. The problem is, if we’re honest, we know we haven’t always lived up to our own rhetoric; but we’re not always honest, and therein lies the problem. When challenged on the gap between our language and our actions, we frequently respond with violence.

Journalist and foreign policy scholar Stephen Kinzer spent much of the 1980s reporting from Central America, from countries touched by America’s foreign policy backwash. He became conscious of the cognitive dissonance that arises in United States administrations when our small-D democratic values run aground on real-world political exigencies.He chronicles here the times America has, directly or by proxy, overthrown fourteen lawful governments. The butcher’s bill isn’t pretty.

The United States overthrew its first government in Hawai’i, in 1893. White planters, mostly American, owned extensive tracts of Hawai’ian land, growing sugar for export. They perceived Queen Lili’uokalani as an impediment to their economic expansion. With the private backing of William Henry Harrison’s administration, the White planters overthrew an internationally recognized government and declared themselves an American protectorate. To the Queen’s shock, the world seemed okay with that.

Thus begins a pattern which Kinzer identifies clearly throughout America’s “regime change” foreign policy: we verbally express commitment to global democracy and international autonomy, but flinch when autonomous nations, many of them democratically elected, go against American wishes. The gulf between American values and United States government actions is frequently huge. And sadly, it hasn’t gotten much better since 1893.

Sometimes, the United States has overthrown international regimes directly. This has happened openly, as when George W. Bush authorized regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also happened covertly, as when President Kennedy approved the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. In both cases, these governments have opposed American policy, but enforcing that policy ultimately undermined American interests. We’re still paying the price for all these interventions.

Stephen Kinzer

Other times, America has overthrown governments by proxy. Besides the White plantation owners in Hawaii, America permitted United Fruit to overthrow home governments in Nicaragua and Guatemala. This not only led directly to decades of civil war in both nations, it required the United States to intervene to prevent popular Marxist uprisings. Cold War rhetoric required America to interfere with other countries’ autonomy to prevent Communism from gaining ground.

Kinzer has differing relationships with different overthrows. He’s largely forgiving, for instance, of America’s invasion of Grenada. In truth, Grenada’s socialist government had descended into infighting, and was probably about to collapse, leaving a power vacuum in the Caribbean. But Kinzer depicts that government as illegitimate anyway, led by a lite-beer Leninist university dorm room bull session. This interpretation is, let’s politely say, still debated in foreign policy circles.

He’s also more forgiving of America’s overthrow of Hawai’i than most Hawai’ians would be. He depicts American control as largely popular. But he bases that opinion on people living in Hawai’i; because of militarism and resource hoarding, most Native Hawai’ians can’t afford to live in their homeland. Even in America, the overthrow was divisive: President Harrison privately approved the coup, but before it was complete, Grover Cleveland was President, and was horrified.

Conservative readers will probably interpret Kinzer’s critical attitude toward United States interventionism and regime change as anti-American. Not so. Kinzer criticizes America, not to disparage it, but to hold its people, collectively, to their highest ideals. He wants America to follow its own teachings of freedom, democracy, and justice, teachings we’ve long espoused but frequently not followed. Kinzer wants America to be as good as its rhetoric.

Therein lies the message. America has historically believed in Enlightenment-era principles of popular sovereignty and rule by the population. But we’ve also believed the Enlightenment’s myth of universal truth. We believe our interpretation of democracy and justice applies everywhere, and when different cultures read their social, religious, or economic needs differently than ours, America believes these countries have strayed from universal truth. We believe they need correction and “rescue.”

Like me, Kinzer believes America has great potential to do good in our conflicted world. It can correct human rights injustices, bring democracy, and stabilize an unstable globe. But the ways it’s attempted to do so have often created terrible blowback, and resulted in greater instability. Kinzer doesn’t want to blame America; he wants America to live by its own principles. It can start by stopping overthrowing world governments.

Governor Pete Ricketts is a Toxic, Gaslighting Liar—and So Is His Party

Pete Ricketts

Nebraska appears to be on a COVID-19 upswing. Official figures indicate five consecutive weeks of rising numbers, including nearly doubling last week. Given this opportunity to demonstrate energetic engagement in Nebraska’s public health, Governor Pete Ricketts, Republican, chose instead to appear on CNN, announcing his intent to unilaterally ban abortion at the first chance. He’s so focused on what he calls “preborn babies” that he’s forgotten the literal living.

I’m conflicted in my response. Ricketts, who was born rich and never held office before being elected governor, has a history of saying complete bilge on national media to gain cheap attention. This isn’t even the first time Ricketts has used the “Nebraska is a pro-life state” line, because he apparently believes he’s entitled to pronounce for all Nebraskans. Ricketts believes himself, not an elected representative, but Nebraska’s embodied avatar.

Yet for all his “pro-life” flexing, Pete Ricketts has demonstrated dismal performance among the actual living. His economic policies have favored the rich and urban in an overwhelmingly rural, working-class state. He continued flooding agricultural conglomerate ConAgra with cash subsidies and tax breaks, only to watch ConAgra move its headquarters to Chicago. Ricketts later tried the same trick to hold TD Ameritrade, which his father founded, with marginally better results.

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricketts has resisted even the most nominal efforts to curb the spread. As recently as this January, at the second-highest peak of the pandemic, the Ricketts Administration did worse than nothing; it actively opposed local mask mandates, attempting to declare face hankies “illegal.” Hey, remember April 2020, when Grand Island, Nebraska, briefly had North America’s highest COVID rate? I sure do.

Throughout his administration, Ricketts has defined “freedom” as whatever comforts well-off White men, like himself. Massive interest-free cash transfusions to multinational corporations? Don’t mind if I do. Extended unemployment benefits to protect unskilled workers during a pandemic? Piss off, working-class people have a moral obligation to work. Ricketts also opposes even the most fiddling gun control measures, claiming “Nebraska is a pro-Second Amendment state.”

But letting women make reproductive choices unhindered by government bureaucracy? No dice, we’re “pro-life.” Never mind the things we do that cause death, like obstructing any effort to stem a highly transmissible disease. You have a lawful right to breathe your potentially lethal vapors on somebody’s grandma without impediment, that isn’t a life issue. The mere fact that, under current conditions, the wrong person’s exhale is literally deadly, means nothing.

This contradiction baffles me. Even if we accept Ricketts’ premise that a fertilized zygote is already human (which I don’t), then you know what else is already human? An actual walking, talking human being. Calling yourself “pro-life” because you value a glob of meiotic cells, while actively opposing attempts to protect living humans, or ensure they earn enough to buy groceries during a pandemic, makes you worse than contradictory.

It makes you a liar.

Don’t mistake the importance here. I’m targeting Governor Ricketts because, as a Nebraska resident, I’m familiar with his policies, and their lived consequences. But these effects don’t stop at the Nebraska state line. Republicans nationwide are floating bills that would classify abortion as homicide, bills which have already had intrusive consequences for women who miscarry. Many such laws are actively ignorant of biology.

Simultaneously, the same party actively opposes any attempt to make life easier for employed people. A newly floated bill would preemptively forbid any attempt at student loan forgiveness. In the midst of a much-publicized baby formula shortage, House Republicans voted against fixing the conditions which caused the shortage by 192-12. Easier to blame the Brandon Administration than fix the problem, I guess; doesn’t matter who gets hurt.

(Edit: in the House vote, Nebraska's Congressional delegation split. Don Bacon, a Republican representing the 2nd District, which includes Omaha, was one of 12 to break from the party line. Adrian Smith, a Republican representing the large and mainly rural 3rd District, voted against the bill. The 1st District seat, which includes Lincoln, is currently vacant pending a special election.)

Governor Ricketts isn’t important enough to say that today’s Republican Party follows his lead. Indeed, Ricketts probably follows the marching orders of the cable-news androids whose telegenic outrage drives the base right now. But Ricketts is on-brand for today’s Republican mess: claiming “pro-life” prerogative for actions that will create massive burdens for poor people, immigrants, BIPOC, the disabled, and women, while banning even the slightest inconvenience for themselves.

Today’s Republican Party is opposed to anything that would make life better for those currently disadvantaged. Whether it’s systemic policy, like fixing a student debt machine with interest rates worse than a Dickensian usurer, or pure bad luck, like minimizing the consequences of an infectious disease, they’ve demonstrated they don’t care. Fixing it isn’t their responsibility. Anyone who now votes Republican demonstrates they’re okay with this approach.

Fear of Being Wrong

“Is it worse,” my distant acquaintance asked, “to fail at something or never attempt it in the first case?” I felt convicted by the question, because I’m frequently guilty of punting indefinitely on trying new and important actions. I have countless unfinished art projects, so many manuscripts waiting for my hand to complete them, so many tools I’ve purchased but never used, because on some level, failure is a terrible consequence. Something to avoid at all costs.

We avoid attempting things because, in the near term, failure is the worse consequence. But, because failures are often the building blocks of success, in the long term, avoiding the attempt is worse. So I guess it depends on your perspective.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) May 16, 2022

It’s easy to rationalize this outcome. It’s downright cliché to laugh about former “gifted” children who translate into frustrated, timid adults. Even Malcolm Gladwell writes that people deemed “geniuses” by our academic establishment only sometimes live up to their potential; great success in life and career tends to follow those who face obstacles, not those to whom school comes easy. We former “gifted” kids become averse to setbacks.

But I feel something more particular occurring here. Something closer to my spiritual core. As stated in my response to my acquaintance’s question, avoiding trying something means protecting myself from the disgrace of being wrong. It’s much harder to determine where I acquired this paralyzing fear of being wrong, and therefore, it’s much harder to shake the fear and progress into being able to accomplish goals without fear of judgment.

Sometimes I fall into the temptation of blaming outside forces. That temptation is easy because it isn’t entirely wrong. Teachers correct students’ mistakes in crowded classrooms, in front of peers eager to leap on weakened classmate like leopards on a wounded gazelle. As Dana Goldstein writes, American-style classroom learning is cost-effective, but not necessarily pedagogically effective. Therefore teacher-blaming is tempting, if facile.

I also sometimes recall my father’s instructional technique of public callouts. He loved correcting me in front of friends and family for every minor mistake. As a teenager, I became reluctant to do anything with him until after I’d thoroughly mastered all relevant skills, for fear of public callouts. This behavior was also gendered: he regularly called me out in front of women, but never corrected my sister similarly. I suspect he thought this toughened me up.

But these explanations are unsatisfying. Classroom embarrassment and public callouts are techniques as old as formalized education, and many people emerge unscathed. The problem isn’t that these things happened, it’s my reaction to them. Instead of learning to accept these behaviors as events that ordinarily happen, I internalized them, made them part of my identity. My life’s purpose became not accomplishing goals, but avoiding being wrong.

Perhaps it’s because I was able to read at an unusually early age. Because I’d already spent years reading recreationally before beginning grade school, I talked in complete sentences and with adult grammar. This, combined with my being unusually tall, possibly made adult authority figures mistake me for older than I really was, an expectation I then tried to live up to, acting adult and well-informed before giving myself permission to be young and make mistakes.

Except oops, there I go again, blaming others.

Whatever the reason, from an early age, I learned to associate being wrong with losing face. Getting corrected wasn’t an opportunity to improve in the future, it was always read as a callout for being wrong in the past. Therefore I became invested, not in improving my upcoming responses, but in defending my previous errors. And the surest way to avoid wasting time on old errors, was to ensure I never committed them.

This fear isn’t entirely unjustified. We’ve all known somebody who becomes deeply invested in some esoteric pursuit that others don’t understand, and becomes exceptionally good at it: hard science, for instance, or art. The crowds often handle these people by mocking them. Not only for being quirky “nerds” in their learning, but also, even especially, when they become accomplished and bank everything on wrong ideas. Remember cold fusion?

In other words, we treat those who are wrong as having wasted their lives. We subject them to ridicule, tearing down whatever accomplishments they actually achieved to justify shaming their mistakes. The gifted few are immune to such judgments, shrugging off mistakes as learning opportunities for future learning. But that wasn’t me; I cared what others thought. I learned instead to avoid being judged by avoiding being wrong.

I’m still deciding where to go from here. Reaching this point hasn’t given me insights into correcting this trend. But by naming the effect, by explaining why being wrong hurts, maybe I can plan my next steps.

The Bible as Literature vs. The Gospel as History

John Dominic Crossan, Render unto Caesar: The Struggle over Christ and Culture in the New Testament

How should Christians interact with politics and power? This isn’t a new question; Jesus’ own followers and opponents asked this question during his lifetime. But especially today, as Christian faith and Biblical language gets used to both support and oppose American political power, the so-called Nova Roma. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has some ideas, apparently designed to make everyone, secular and religious alike, as uncomfortable as possible.

Crossan, a Biblical historian and laicized Catholic priest, is just one among several scholars currently active who have dedicated their careers to pursuit of the phantom dubbed “the historical Jesus.” I find Crossan preferable to most because he avoids the extremes of, on one hand, academic obscurantism, or on the other, populist luridness. He uses difficult scholarly language, but always explains terminology, and propounds ideas at length, but never windily.

That doesn’t mean he’s a middlebrow popularizer. Crossan left the clergy because he became persuaded that Scripture wasn’t inerrant, that extrabiblical sources were more trustworthy than the Gospels, and that Jesus’ divinity wasn’t literal. This puts him in the awkward position of being no longer Christian, in the conventional sense, but not secular or irreligious either. He has, by all accounts, reveled in this liminal duality, guaranteed to discomfort everybody.

This volume is, I’ll admit, one of Crossan’s less accessible. His title is somewhat misleading; he addresses the “Render Unto Caesar” account, common to the synoptic Gospels, early on, then largely abandons it, more interested in a global rather than particular inquiry into First-Century political theology. Rather, he addresses, in sweeping terms, the question of how Christians could, and did, accommodate the pressures of assimilation with Roman authority.

Crossan’s first part addresses the Revelation of John. Though Crossan’s career has largely avoided apocalyptic themes, he presumably couldn’t avoid this, because the Revelation’s explicitly political, anti-Roman sentiments have been used recently by end-times theologians and political tub-thumpers. The Revelation’s violent anti-statist sentiments have often given more moderate Christians the willies, for reasons Crossan explains succinctly. This book’s triumphalism often contrasts with Gospel themes of nonviolence.

John Dominic Crossan

Then Crossan transitions into a comprehensive look into political themes in the Luke-Acts duology. Here, I admit, I nearly stopped reading. Crossan does something I haven’t previously seen in his mass-market books: he chases a rabbit trail. Crossan spends entire chapters, plural, determinedly proving that Luke the Evangelist (whom he believes isn’t Luke) wrote Luke-Acts as a single integrated work in two volumes, not two separate narratives, as sometimes postulated.

This intricate, granular analysis proves ultimately relevant to Crossan’s point, but only at some length. He presents the duology as literature, not history (or pseudo-history), and seeks the “main character” rather than defining themes. Though this message proves ultimately relevant, it does so in ways most readers won’t find relevant to spiritual inquiry or personal growth. This passage is scholarly and abstruse, in ways Crossan’s mass-market work usually avoids.

Finally, Crossan breaks down Jesus as he appears in the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. This part most accurately reflects themes found throughout Crossan’s corpus, that external sources are more trustworthy than canonical Scriptures, because they aren’t colored by Christological purpose. This makes sense from Crossan’s “historical Jesus” premise, which seeks philosophical rectitude without recourse to divine revelation. Yet I find this passage least satisfying, because it seems entirely self-directed.

By Crossan’s own admission, Josephus mentions Jesus barely ten times, John the Baptist only once, and early Christian missions never. Crossan supplements this paucity with references from other contemporary sources, like Philo of Alexandria. The ultimate outcome, though, is a Jesus grounded in history, but absent of message, a complete historical cypher. This Jesus is arguably better because he makes no demands, and receives, rather than distributes, a moral core.

Don’t misunderstand me: Crossan isn’t wrong, in the factual sense. When he spotlights the contradiction between Revelation’s violent, standoffish politics, and Luke-Acts’ more accommodationist stance, he acknowledges a friction many devout Christians have wrestled with. Crossan is palpably uncomfortable with the Gospels’ laissez-faire attitude toward historicity. He wants a factually ironclad Gospel, free from contradiction. Let’s be honest, so do seven-year-olds in Sunday School.

I think Christians probably should read this book. I believe in balanced libraries, not balanced books; though Crossan’s analysis will disappoint believers and skeptics alike, some spiritual frustration is often beneficial. Just realize going in that Crossan’s analysis reflects John Dominic Crossan, not his elusive “historical Jesus.” Crossan looks for answers, but astute readers will emerge with the real goal of learning, that is, better questions.

Children Building Cities out of Sand

Stock photo

We quickly learned how to find a place on the playground’s perimeter, the six of us, where we could build our cities made of sand. We were all in fifth and sixth grade, at a standard prefab elementary school in Southern California, one of countless identical schools in countless identical suburbs erected hastily in the building boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. But we built the cities we wanted to live in.

The playground sand was dry and granular, basically low-density road gravel, not suitable for building. That didn’t stop us. We swept it down to create a level surface, and marked out roads. Then we scooped up double-handfuls of sand and began building our elaborate urban arcologies: massive arenas for stout-hearted competitions, for instance, or grand halls for universities or laboratories or kings. Our cities were vast places of epic architecture.

We weren’t building cities, of course. We were building stories. We built the kinds of metropolises we wanted to occupy, cities designed to inspire awe and motivation. All our roads were majestic boulevards; all our buildings were vast palaces of art, science, and leadership. Utopian cities of great aspiration, where somehow, the fiddling business of cities—sewage removal and building maintenance, for instance—happened automatically, outside the story.

Nobody outside our group wanted us doing this, of course. Though we were within the playground fence, adults frequently scolded us for getting literally as far from the classroom buildings as rules permitted. They cited fatuous claims that maybe we wouldn’t hear the bell summoning us back to class, or kidnappers might leap the fence and abscond with us before adults could intervene. Don’t you want, they asked, to play over here with the other kids?

I don’t blame those teachers. Given what I now know about liability insurance and bad PR in the years following the Adam Walsh case, they were bombarded with demands to keep students safe no matter what. They meant well. They just couldn’t comprehend that the places they wanted us to play, and the games they encouraged, were noisy, crowded, and hectic. We didn’t want to run around; we wanted to build and tell stories.

I have considerably less sympathy for the other kids. Frequently, if adults didn’t compel us to abandon our stories and play “accepted” games among the crowds, other students would find ways to thwart our inventions. Sometimes they’d outright lie, claiming adults had summoned us back, with threats of punishment. Other times they just ran through our cityscapes, dragging their feet and making the maximum mess possible.

Didn’t matter much. Either way, we saw bigger kids maliciously destroy our cities, our stories.

We learned, as a result, to dream and tell stories surreptitiously. We continued building our science-fictional cities, but learned to keep one eye out for interference. Whether it came from well-meaning authority figures, or mean-spirited peers who got pleasure from destroying what we’d built, interference was always present at the margins. If our aspirations became too independent, well, then we aspired illicitly.

As a grade schooler, I enjoyed academic subjects, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy them at officially approved times. Schools have designated times to read and write, perform math or science, and the omnipresent phys-ed. Having spent time teaching myself, I understand the importance of having everybody working on the same wavelength simultaneously. In chronically short-staffed, cash-poor schools, independent learning wasn’t much of an option.

But I wanted to write when I wrote, not when my well-meaning teacher said writing was appropriate. I invented elaborate stories for myself involving math, far more interesting than the “skillz drillz” practiced in the textbooks. The approach advocated in textbooks worked, insofar as kids learned basic skills sufficiently to ace standardized tests. But only when allowed to play with words and numbers like toys, was I able to care enough to actually master the concepts.

Our sandcastle cities were the manifestation of this principle. We learned collaboration by building the cities together. We learned math by determining how high we could stack unstable playground sand to make our cathedrals of innovation. As our stories became increasingly elaborate, we learned important language arts skills, in persuading teammates why having this boulevard here, not somewhere else, served the city.

Sometimes I wonder what became of my fellow builders. The military reassigned my father every two years, so most of my childhood friends retreated to the anonymity from which they arose. How many of them are architects, storytellers, schoolteachers now?

And how many of them daily apply the skills we learned at the farthest verge, building cities out of sand?

Why Do White Supremacists Hate Abortion So Much?

Protesters outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house this week

Smarter, more informed commentators than me have spilled copious ink in the week since the leaked draft SCOTUS opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson. I won’t waste your time rehashing what better-credentialed pundits have said. I’m more interested in the realization that this opinion is deeply White supremacist. And not just in the sense that poor, non-White women have less access to family planning, and fewer resources to enact any plans.

Historian Kathleen Belew writes that the White Power movement has anchored its public relations strategy heavily on language of motherhood, particularly White motherhood. They realize that, even in America, a nation where racism remains painfully widespread, openly proclaiming for bigotry won’t sell. Even Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist behind much of our generation’s noxious racist American drum-beating, acknowledged that you can’t say that overtly anymore.

Instead, the White Power movement, which arose from nationalist propaganda during and shortly after America’s Vietnam entanglement, co-opted the “wives and mothers back home” language common in military recruitment videos. It pitched a mythology of a world in constant jeopardy from violence, starvation, and dictatorship. Anything we do, the military myth proclaims, is perforce justified, because the alternative is leaving our poor, defenseless women open to depredation and death.

Nor is this exclusively a Vietnam-era claim. Anyone old enough to remember the news coverage surrounding atrocities in places like Abu Ghraib will remember that government salespeople, and the pundits who repeat their fables unquestioningly, accepted this violence as necessary. We must kill these moral monstrosities on their home turf, the legend went, or they’ll come over here. And when they arrive, they’ll target our wives and mothers first.

Any violence, any indignity, is justified by protecting women. Womanhood, a state that is implicitly both White and maternal, is surrounded by constant threats, beset by ravages of injustice prepared to break brutally over America’s women. Thus women need defenders willing to suspend all moral standards and stoop to any violence that will protect our defenseless lady-folk against exploitation. This justifies purging any implied national impurities, which are helpfully color-coded.

Please note, this defense of womanhood isn’t value-neutral. It positions women as weak and defenseless without male intervention. For readers familiar with America’s racial history, this means women are White. As historian Ibram X. Kendi writes, American mythology positions White women as weak and vulnerable, and therefore good. It counterposes Black women as strong and self-reliant, and therefore bad. The source of this binary is murky, but no less real.

Therefore, American mythology has always coded White women as vulnerable to violence, which is defined as rape. White supremacist mythology, like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, repeatedly present White women as constantly one misstep away from rape. Any violence, no matter how disproportionate, no matter how antithetical to supposed Christian values, is justified by protecting White women.

Now I acknowledge, in a worldview where the worst possible injustice a White woman can suffer is rape, the contradiction that abortion should be restricted or banned. But in this mythology, motherhood is sacrosanct; a White woman’s foremost responsibility, to retain her standing as defenseless and therefore pure, is to give birth. Even if that birth contravenes White Supremacist beliefs about racial purity and the evils of miscegenation, that concern comes second.

That’s why, prior to the Dobbs leak, so many state-level abortion restrictions involved appeals to supposed maternal instinct. Forcing women to listen to a fetal heartbeat (although embryologists know that isn’t, by any definition, a heart) or view transvaginal ultrasounds, are unnecessary hurdles designed to tweak the supposedly muted maternal drive. See the babe, this reasoning goes, and women will melt into puddles of maternal goo.

Perhaps this explains why White supremacist groups also abhor transgendered people. American White supremacy has a rigidly defined gender script, and anybody who doesn’t conform with that script is considered dangerous. LGBTQIA+ people are, to White supremacists, even worse than self-fulfilled women. Because they can’t become, in the conventional sense, parents, they’ve abnegated the one role every person is meant to fulfill. Therefore they are unclean and need removed.

The simple fact that countless women don’t want this protection, that many women don’t consider defenselessness a state they aspire to, doesn’t faze these defenders. Women who make their own choices about motherhood violate the script, and need punished. Hard-right lawmakers may claim they’re defending fetal lives when they outlaw IUDs and investigate miscarriages. But fundamentally, it’s about preserving nationalist myths of White motherhood.

The Right Answer to a Stupid Question

Ryan Cooper, How Are You Going to Pay For That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics

We’ve all heard it, whenever we postulate any changes or reforms, no matter how nominal, no matter how piddling. “How are you going to pay for that?” President Biden’s Build Back Better platform, a mere shadow of his campaign pledges, nevertheless collapsed in part because journalists kept quoting the aggregate price tag, which was, admittedly, huge, if you sand off all context. Large dollar figures are considered project-killers in today’s political milieu.

Journalist Ryan Cooper has grown weary of pretended neutrality. He objects to the widespread American background presumption that private property needs defended at all costs. He calls this position “propertarianism” and derides it altogether. This individualist assumption that my money is more important than social good, has completely failed to deliver the goods. Privatizing collective functions, like public health and climate change, has resulted in cost bloat for inadequate services.

Cooper divides his book into two sections. The first, slightly shorter part, is a lesson in applied economics, the difference between high-minded classroom theory and how economics actually happens at street level. The market, Cooper insists, isn’t antithetical to government interference, despite what both major American political parties believe. Indeed, without government creating enforceable standards and relatively stable money, there can be no market.

One can immediately start mustering counter-arguments. Governments don’t create markets, as proven because black markets exist. Markets functioned in places like Mogadishu during the anarchic 1990s, when no functioning government existed. Admittedly, these were markedly violent markets with no backstop against fraud. But the existence of markets qua markets says nothing incontrovertible about the governments backing them up.

His second part applies his anti-theoretical economics to common American needs. Both political parties and the mainstream media have characterized health care, climate change, and labor markets as individual concerns; the fetish, for instance, for employer-provided health insurance and privatized Medicare have bilateral support. These approaches, however, have produced worse results at higher costs. The rich suffer under this inequality as much as the poor.

Ryan Cooper

Despite the promise of “smart answers” in his book’s secondary title, Cooper doesn’t offer prepackaged responses. Cooper writes primarily for progressives like himself, seeking a broad, inclusive background for economic discussions. His final chapter does include some rhetorical techniques that have worked in political messaging in other countries and other times. However, his primary goal is providing a foundation for collectivist economic thinking in an individualist culture.

Indeed, Cooper’s argumentative style throughout his book is reliant on “smart answers” in the sense of exceedingly well-informed. He quotes statistics and evidence volubly, at quantities far beyond what ordinary readers can hold in working memory. Anybody who’s tried to dispute their racist uncle by quoting stats knows that stats aren’t an ironclad justification. If somebody asks “How are you going to pay for that,” and your response runs over 300 pages, you’ve probably lost.

That said, while I, a Distributist, might debate Cooper’s finer points, he says little out-and-out wrong. He demonstrates how America’s private property morality, which we have exported aggressively, has produced substandard outcomes. America’s life expectancy, after growing for years, has been rapidly contracting, even before the pandemic (which he cites extensively). He makes a persuasive case that lack of economic solidarity is having tragic consequences in real time.

And he postulates workable alternatives with practical applications. Some of Cooper’s suggestions come from other countries, and he demonstrates how successful nations, which he calls “peer countries,” have placed necessary parts of their economy under democratic control. (That democratic control matters to him: he dislikes Marxism as strongly as propertarianism, though less volubly.) It’s important to Cooper that governments shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.

Where Cooper’s alternatives don’t have proven real-world antecedents, he carefully articulates multiple solutions. If one doesn’t work, or produces unintended outcomes, we can repair or replace it. Cooper isn’t a naïve utopian, spitballing solutions for a friction-free world. He wants to create solutions that readers, and the candidates they vote for, can apply practically, drawing on a firm foundation of proven success and consistent theory.

In his final chapter, Cooper articulates a number of rhetorical approaches progressives can use to sell these policies. We live in a world plagued with abbreviated attention spans (stats indicate you probably have already stopped reading this review). Selling innovative policies will mean reconfiguring our message machine, having evidence to support our claims, but also being equipped to penetrate the automatic defenses others put up.

Because Cooper is right. That’s a stupid question, and we need better, more useful answers ready to deploy.

What It Means To Be a Man

Lead image from the load page (click to enlarge)

Behold—the grotesque and alarming spectacle which is the 21 Convention: Patriarch Edition. Like a train derailment, I can’t make myself look away. The website promises four days of seminars, sermons, rallies, and speeches exhorting men to be more manful, in ways which the site defines only through broad comedy. The site promises to “Make Women Great Again,” and “Make Men Alpha Again,” for the low, low price of $2,500 for two for four days.

I’m uncertain how seriously to take this website. On one hand, its roster of promises includes such appalling pledges as that you, poor benighted beta male, can “Dominate Your Wife, Dominate Your Life,” and promises speeches from pastors, entrepreneurs, fitness gurus, male models, power-lifters, and more. Of twenty-five listed speakers, twenty-one are men, only five of whom are clean-shaven in their headshots. This Nuremberg-style rally promises a form of manhood premised on aggression and spectacle.

On the other hand, about two-thirds of the way down the loading page, the text suddenly reverses itself. “This page is funny,” it suddenly says; “The assault on fatherhood is not.” Apparently everything we’ve seen to this point was slapstick. This includes the pledge to Dominate Your Wife, the pastor who compares himself straight-faced to Marvel’s Thanos, and the promise that you can tune-up your wife like a malfunctioning car. What a thigh-slapper, amirite guys?

Conservatives famously enjoy saying things like this to flick people’s noses. The “Just a Joke” defense after saying something dangerously inflammatory has been a beloved technique of Rush Limbaugh, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, and Carl Benjamin. Self-described comedians love making violent statements toward disadvantaged people, then concealing the consequences of their statements behind jazz hands. Whenever somebody like me acts offended, they then act chummy with those hip enough to be in on the joke.

It’s hard to say how seriously we’re meant to take this

This broad burlesque is especially chilling to anybody who reads American religious history. Most Americans outside religious circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism, a theory that emerged from the excesses of postwar prosperity. However, as religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll writes, Christian Reconstructionists have perhaps been the militant vanguard of a strictly hierarchical, and sometimes violent, religious political movement, one which has its fingers in countless pies in American right-wing politics and media manipulation.

Ingersoll writes that, while progressives consider “patriarchy” a backward principle that hampers free people, Christian Reconstructionists see patriarchy as a God-ordained natural order, against which headstrong humans rebel. Reconstructionists believe society is organized in tiers: family supports church, while church empowers the state. A nuclear family, headed by an authoritative male lawgiver, is the foundation of all power structures. Male headship is the only bulwark against violent rebellion; empowered women literally want to overthrow society.

Reconstructionists don’t call themselves political, because they don’t endorse candidates or initiatives. But, Ingersoll writes, they advance a specific theory of political power and secular authority, which privileges those already well-protected by our paternalistic, White supremacist order. They want a hierarchical state derived from male authority, with discretion to involve itself heavily in our private lives in accordance with Levitical law, but an economic order based on Libertarian capitalism; no Year of Jubilee for them.

You thought I was kidding about Thanos, didn’t you?

It’s difficult to find meaningful information on Pastor Michael Foster, the Patriarchy Convention’s keynote speaker. He’s apparently influential enough to headline a rally, but not important enough for his personal website to appear on Google. His professional profile on his parish page shows him surrounded by his wife and seven children—sons in polo shirts, daughters in princess dresses. That encompasses two of Reconstructionist patriarchy’s hallmarks: large families, mostly homeschooled, and strictly monitored gender roles.

Well-informed critics will undoubtedly respond to me by citing women who support patriarchal social roles. Indeed, as researcher Jim Henderson discovered, it isn’t hard to find Christian women who support female disfranchisement, who are complicit in their own second-class status. But that doesn’t mean much. It’s also possible to find poor people who hate the poor, and Black people who hate racial equality efforts; that doesn’t mean we should let such people write our positions.

Pastor Foster apparently thinks it’s funny to compare himself to Thanos, destroyer of billions. Big deal, conservatives love pretending to be the villains they think their opposition calls them. Except it is a big deal, because just like Thanos, Foster can’t control where The Snap goes, or who it hurts. Like Thanos, he divides his world into allies and enemies. Which means that, if we don’t stop him now, his Snap may come for you.