Captain MidNite's Political Decoder Ring

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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When the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign divided the state of Virginia into the “real Virginia” of the rural, agrarian south and an undeclared shadow Virginia in the north, they drew predictable jeers like John Stewart’s, above. Yet while Stewart says nothing incorrect in the above clip, his response reflects exactly the problem with current political discourse. People of good value and noble intent simply talk past each other without realizing it.

Obery Hendricks asserts that the values we treat as absolute are frequently positional. Most Americans agree on work’s ennobling quality, that holding a full-time job is an emblem of a responsible and mature personality. But we disagree on the meaning of the word “work.” Manual laborers—farmers, factory workers, janitors, and such—often regard desk and office jobs as not “real work.” Conversely, educated professionals tend to consider manual labor as menial.

The problem is not that one definition is more “right,” but that these positions have contradictory definitions for the same word. Manual workers consider their labor admirable; professionals regard manual work as something to escape. Neither is more correct, though some people are better disposed by psychology and culture to one or the other. But instead of seeing past that divergence, the parties often turn defensive and treat each other as opponents.

When the McCain campaign called rural southern Virginia “real,” the educated professionals of the urban north, many of whom were born elsewhere, took that as a challenge, a declaration that they should pack their bags and leave. Whether McCain and his deputies believed that is a matter for debate. But I believe that calling the south “real” doesn’t imply that the north is “fake,” so much as that it defines reality as accord with the speaker’s own values.

Let’s pause to see the world from that perspective. Sarah Palin has claimed, following her doomed national campaign, that her humble roots and relative lack of sophistication make her uniquely qualified to represent Americans in Washington. Urban magazines like the New Yorker easily deride that attitude, since it implies any schlub off the farm could be President. Yet I think Palin means nothing of the sort.

Rather, I think she means that career Washington professionals are different from you and I, and she has the skills necessary to translate our goals and aspirations into their language. Leaving aside the question of accuracy (this overeducated progressive disagrees), this claim bears a certain validity. I do not mean it is correct, but that if we accept her major premise and her minor premise, the conclusion makes sense.

People who dispute Palin’s premises must play what critic Peter Elbow calls the “believing game.” Let’s view her position from another perspective: bureaucrats are not Bolsheviks, but skilled professionals who want to earn a living while contributing to society. But their various aims must be corralled by a superior who answers to voters every four years. Thus, a plainspoken, folksy candidate makes less sense than one who grasps Washingtonian lingo.

Linguist George Lakoff, in Whose Freedom?, explains that two people, using the same word, can have two very different meanings. We see this when candidates use words like “patriotism,” “honor,” and “family.” Non-verbal symbols are even worse. Images of the flag, Abraham Lincoln, the Rocky Mountains, and a farmer in a checked shirt stir warm bipartisan feelings, yet have wildly divergent meanings according to the audience’s prior philosophy.

A key scene in Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed illustrates this point. He claims that Intelligent Design, because it supposes an active creator, encourages moral living, while godless Darwinian evolution justifies Nazi atrocities. This is a reversal of assertions by New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. But history says Hitler was a consummate chameleon, purloining the jargons of Christianity and science while embracing the tenets of neither.

Let’s follow the logic:

1. I am different from Hitler; and
2. I am different from those people over there; therefore
3. Hitler is similar to those people over there

Hitler enters this story as neither a historical figure nor a person with real, if distorted, motivations. He simply illustrates my identity versus theirs.

When Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum argue who is the real conservative, or Barack Obama trades snipes with either of them over who is authentically American, they don’t speak the same language. The lack of shared suppositions prevents them not only resolving their differences, but even debating productively. Until we share the same code, the partisan nastiness of current politics will only become ever more ingrown. Surely nobody wants that.

A Cautionary Tale in How to Write Historical

Susan Elia MacNeal, Mr. Churchill's Secretary

Historical fiction writers have to walk a fine line: how much detail is too much? Historical mystery writers have double that problem. After all, history is about sharing detail, while mystery relies on withholding detail until just the right moment. Authors can find it easy to share too little, keeping audiences confused, or hitting readers with a firehose of undifferentiated information. Sadly, in her debut novel, Susan Elia MacNeal chooses the latter option.

British born but American raised, Maggie Hope only intended to stay in London long enough to sell her late grandmother’s house. But the outbreak of World War II reawakens her “King and Country” sentiments. She joins the staff at 10 Downing Street, only to find that her old family secrets are less than secret in the halls of power. As war moves from possibility to reality, she becomes enmeshed in the inner workings of a country she still hardly knows.

Halfway through this book, one member of Maggie’s inner circle accuses another of a years-old rape. These two have sat to dinner together, carried on political conversations, and attended parties, without a hint of animosity. Neither character gives any hint of a prior history until two pages before the secret comes spilling out. This revelation occurs, I suspect, simply because the author thinks thinks we need one at this juncture.

Understand, please: this happens at the midpoint of a putative mystery, though no detection takes place. Despite a teaser intro about the murder of a member of Winston Churchill’s typing pool, the death occupies less than five of the subsequent 170 pages. A secondary plot about the IRA, Nazi sympathizers, and fifth columnists feels tacked on from another, possibly better book. The author’s attempts to sandwich in some red herrings are painfully obvious.

Instead, MacNeal barrages us with hundreds of pages of historical detail. This includes windy street scenes, descriptions of London before and during the Blitz, the privations of living in Britain on the brink of war, romances that begin and end with precious little detail, and extended soirees and assorted nightlife vignettes. While a few such scenes might have made interesting background, they swell to occupy numerous, interminable chapters. I could have read this in any war memoir.

Susan Elia MacNeal

Between these scenes, MacNeal continues to bury us. Several pages brim with transcripts of Churchill’s speeches to Commons, larded out with many authorial insertions about the characters’ emotional responses. In other places, characters have long, windy conversations about then-current affairs. Partway through one such discussion, which ran over ten pages, I realized the characters weren’t really talking to each other; they were explaining the history to me.

Then, while flooding us with so many external details, MacNeal withholds personal detail. One major part of this story deals with Maggie Hope’s elusive father, whom she believes dead. So many characters state so many times that she must not discover the truth, that I think I break no confidences to say that Maggie discovers he did not die when she thought, and everything she believed about him is false. MacNeal practically signals this fact with jazz hands.

Sometimes I praise books for their “cinematic quality.” Usually I mean that details are well realized, and the author communicates important points in actions rather than telling us what to think. I don’t mean a compliment this time, though. Scenes consistently break on cliffhangers, and so many chapters end with sudden revelations that readers can practically hear the cheesy organ music. This doesn’t read like a book so much as a treatment for an unproduced movie.

Prior to this novel, MacNeal’s greatest literary triumph was a book of recipes for mixed drinks. For some reason, she has chosen to move from the world of how-to, in which everything must be spelled out as explicitly as possible, to the world of literature, in which authors must make choices. Unfortunately, she still writes like every thought, image, and detail which occurs to her deserves a place on the page.

An author like Charles Todd uses history as milieu for an active story. For MacNeal, history is the story. Todd gives enough historic context to keep readers engaged, and focused on the characters. MacNeal uses the characters as authorial sock puppets to explain the history, and never quite gets around to her own story. I blush to admit, after the unearned midpoint revelation, I put this book down, and now can’t bring myself to pick it up again. And I see no reason I should.

Ancient Sins in a Modern Society

Todd D. Hunter, Our Favorite Sins: The Sins We Commit and How You Can Quit

According to new research, the majority of Americans, and between a third and half of Christians, do nothing when faced with temptation. No spiritual discipline, no accountability measures, just wing it. And that “wing it” often consists of ad hoc solutions, like distracting oneself, which don’t solve the underlying problem, or else giving in and feeding the beast. No wonder we’ve become a fat, procrastinating, media-addicted nation on a historic scale.

Todd Hunter, Anglican priest and recovering vice addict, believes we could do better. But he sees it as no coincidence that our vices have run rampant as pop psychology and cultural messages have devalued the concept of sin. Until we recognize where temptation comes from, and how it transforms from a fleeting thought into a sin, can we redress the problem. And it is a problem, no matter what talk show psychologists say. Sin arises from a deeply disordered spirit.

Hunter examines the misplaced priorities and riotous desires that foster temptation. Not all wants are temptations, he says; only when desire matches offer does temptation arise. In other words, I’m not tempted by Las Vegas indulgences or plush circumstances, as some people are, but I am tempted to stay in bed an extra hour, do today’s work tomorrow, and plug the holes in my soul with food. And you have your own set of temptations.

No less an authority than Thomas Aquinas asserts that things themselves—even vilified things like sex, food, and leisure—have no moral weight of their own. Only our relationship to those things makes them good or bad. It is we, and not something external, that turns the morally inert substance of this earth into lust, gluttony, or sloth. And recovery from our bad relationships marks the beginning of our recovery from temptation.

I am not the first to notice our culture's diminishment of the concept of "sin." Because sin and redemption lack the economic cachet of illness and recovery, pop psychologists like Dr. Phil treat us like colds that need cured. But Todd Hunter asserts we are souls which need aligned to a source that can give us meaning. In this opinion he has the backing of such august sources as John Chrysostom, CS Lewis, Saint Anthony, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Once we know how we reached this position, Hunter examines how we can emerge to a life of freedom and productivity. He contrasts “modern and futile” solutions, which in his telling are mere rationalizations, to the “ancient and fruitful” traditions which have stood the test of time. His solutions come from Christianity (and in a few cases, though he doesn’t acknowledge it, even earlier), yet they speak to the disorder at the heart of our modern struggle.

I especially appreciate two choices Hunter makes in this book. The first is that he doesn’t prettify common sins in euphemism. Many Christian writers seem queasy when they need to talk about sex in particular, as though Christian audiences are made up of Victorian schoolmarms. Hunter not only speaks frankly about sex, but he doesn’t blush to admit his former struggles with porn, as well as food. This honesty makes a remarkable, and refreshing, change.

Second, I appreciate Hunter’s emphasis on silence and solitude as the beginning of spiritual realignment. We cannot put our spirits right if we continue to immerse ourselves in the noisy, crowded environment that fostered our original disordered desires. Many evangelists create multimedia extravaganzas to stir our emotions, but don’t give us a moment’s peace to speak with God. In this, Hunter jibes with what I've said before about the need for Godly silence.

Hunter offers us difficult, unhip options that will cause us discomfort and suffering, at least in the near term. But he admits this early and often. Christians used to embrace suffering and privation as signs of growing sanctification. Hunter urges Christians regain the ideal of self-sacrifice, in the sense of striving to be holy as God is holy (1 Peter 1:16). Anyone offering easy, painless redemption is an advertiser who wants to part you from your money.

In a world of pat solutions and eager justifications, Hunter offers hope that we need not live at the whim of momentary appetites. We needn’t enslave ourselves to somebody else’s vision of happiness and prosperity. Hunter’s time-tested Christian solutions encourage motivated readers to take responsibility for their choices. More important, it reminds us where we can’t take such responsibility, and so turn it over to the only one who can.

Quiet Christians in a Church that Won't Shut Up

Author Susan Cain caught my attention with a quote in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. In a passage on the extroverted nature of Evangelical Christianity, she quotes one priest’s advice to churches seeking a new pastor: he tells them to first check an applicant’s Myers-Briggs score. “‘If the first letter isn’t an “E” [for extrovert],’ he tells them, ‘think twice... I’m sure our Lord was [an extrovert].’” (Brackets and ellipsis in the original.)

I wonder if this priest means the Jesus who spent forty days alone in the desert; the Jesus whom Peter couldn’t find when the crowd clamored for His attention; the Jesus who repeatedly throughout the Gospel of Mark admonishes the apostles to keep His secrets; the Jesus who crossed the Sea of Galilee when the crowd got too noisy; the Jesus who, hours before His arrest, had the apostles wait outside the Garden of Gethsemane so He could pray alone.

Extraversion has become mandatory in most white American churches. From the public prayer and stem-winding sermons to the “passing of the peace” to the concluding coffee hour, parishioners are packed shoulder to shoulder, and not permitted a moment of quiet time alone with God. The near-constant stimulus of language, music, and human company makes church feel oppressive for those of us who would like a moment to talk honestly with God.

Even “silent prayer,” which in traditional monastic liturgy could occupy half the service, has been whittled in most churches to about thirty pre-scheduled seconds. Congregational prayers are primarily scripted. Times in the service when prior generations could expect an opportunity for private thoughts, like Communion, have become venues for one more hymn, soloist, or anthem. Programmed talk and music comprise nearly the whole liturgy.

As Cain notes, many “seeker friendly” congregations no longer have pew Bibles. This means Christians cannot even grab a copy of the Good Book and read passages like that where Jesus warns believers not to pray on street corners like Pharisees, for “they have already received their reward.” Or the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, where Jesus extols the soft-spoken prayer of a broken heart over the loud trumpeting of the self-righteous.

Though I lack evidence to support this, I blame the culture of televangelism. As many churches see volunteerism and other involvement steadily decrease, most parishioners see their flesh-and-blood pastors only one hour a week. However, the ubiquity of Christian radio and television means that many people have some form of message streaming at them for hours every day. Unfortunately, now as in Marshall McLuhan’s day, the medium is the message.

Media critic Neil Postman observed a quarter century ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that television had cheapened Christian discourse. Because Christian sermons now enter our homes through the same devices that deliver old Seinfeld reruns and bawdy country ballads, they occupy the same space in our psyches. And if the TV and radio Christians don’t entertain, we will find somebody else who will deliver.

Too many pastors, reared in that televangelistic culture, fall into the trap of trying to secure ratings. Because a live church service, mainly made possible by volunteers, can never have the spectacle value of million-dollar multimedia extravaganzas, congregations try to close the gap with the stimulation of dozens—nay, hundreds—of bodies in proximity. For people seeking that elusive “worship high,” this tactic probably works.

Yet this goes right to what I've said before about the first person singular emphasis in modern worship. As long as my need to have my senses stimulated trumps our need to pray, or God’s need for a place in our hearts, church will remain an unsatisfying place for those who seek meaningful spirituality. Not for nothing has church attendance diminished as Christianity has gotten noisier, and religions like Wicca or Buddhism, which reward solitude, have grown.

Some people will say that Christianity is not a solitary pursuit, and they’re right. The church described in Acts is unmistakably communitarian; and many parachurch organizations have sprung up recently to emulate that community. But groups like Rutba House, Shane Claiborne’s Simple Way, and other modern monastic groups give members rooms where they can, as Christ said, close their doors and pray in secret.

As Christians, we are all in this together. But that “together” consists of individuals, not a mass. Until we reclaim our right and ability to be quiet, together, we will wander in search of the ministry most of us know in our hearts that we have lost.

Firefly's Shepherd Book—Faith and Fistfights in the Final Frontier

In “Serenity,” the pilot episode for Joss Whedon’s Firefly, Shepherd Book looks like the show’s biggest misfire. Though he leaves his abbey to seek the world, this monk seems unprepared for the conflict, moral compromise, and violence he encounters. In his final scene, he confesses to another character: “I think I’m on the wrong ship.” Anyone who has spent time around most pastors (“pastor” translates to English as “shepherd”) would roll their eyes.

Perhaps, in this story, Whedon hadn’t yet found the voice he wanted for Book. Or perhaps he focused more on the Western myth he appropriated for his story arc. Religion usually intrudes on the frontier, taming the wild spirit and bringing the emasculating effects of urban civility. As Lee Marvin caterwauls in Lerner and Lowe’s cowboy musical Paint Your Wagon: “When I see a parson, I gotta put my arse on a wagon that follows the tail of a crow.”

More likely, Whedon, an avowed atheist, probably didn’t know many religious professionals. As one pastor I know says: “God calls those He most needs to keep an eye on.” Far from the blandly beatific figures much loved by mockers like Richard Dawkins or George Bernard Shaw, most pastors I’ve known struggle to maintain staid public faces for their parishioners, then in trusted company, prove able to cuss and tell bawdy jokes as well as any sailor on shore leave.

By the second Firefly episode, “The Train Job,” Whedon evidently twigged to this, and incorporates it into his mythos. Though an early comment makes clear that Book regards the smuggling vessel Serenity as his new mission field, later in the episode, he knows a crime boss by name, and proves able to help organize a breakout from a guarded police facility. This only presages how complex the character eventually becomes.

As the series progresses, Book demonstrates familiarity with military protocol, and in one episode, proves to have an ID card that gets him preferential treatment on a military vessel. He knows how to use firearms, and though he must first construct a convoluted moral justification, he proves both willing to shoot to defend his colleagues, and quite the sharpshooter. Combined with his well-marbled physique, these showcase Shepherd Book as a man of action.

Yet he is no mere actor, nor is his Christianity a veneer. In times of stress or fear for his life, he reaches first for his Bible. He is able to quote Scripture and conventional forms of theology, and when River Tam tries to critique the Bible from a scientific perspective, he provides a strong defense of why we should not read Scripture literally. In short, despite his violence, he also makes a good poster boy for modern Christian humanism.

Like much of Firefly, this is not new; Whedon didn’t so much break new ground as adapt myths in a spirited, inventive way. The Avenging Christian has good standing in Western Mythology, in movies like Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider or albums like Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. The preacher, normally a civilizing influence, must conform himself (it’s always a man) to the ways of the savage West, keeping one foot in the frontier, the other in the church.

Notably, the Avenging Christian is always a man of mystery. Both Pale Rider and Red Headed Stranger feature a protagonist known only as “Preacher.” Firefly identifies the character only as Book, a presumably a characternym for his Biblical influence, with no first name. A concluding scene in the sequel film Serenity shows Book’s tombstone with the first name Derrial, but the comic books Whedon wrote to complete his story arc reveal this is a lie.

These comics reveal what the TV series only implies, that Shepherd Book became a Christian to deal with his overwhelming guilt. Like Augustine or Francis, Book needs God as a path to make peace with his own past. But unlike these and other church leaders whose testimony make up key parts of their ministry, Book keeps his past secret. He proves quite the raconteur about monastic life, but turns evasive about anything that came before.

In essence, Shepherd Book presents Christianity not as a form of thought, but as a way of life. Faced with the vastness of space, he turns to God as a source of continuity that brings him safely through the tough times. And if he doesn’t always live up to the highest Gospel ideals, he at least proves that it’s possible to live for something greater than ourselves.