Towards a Politics of Imagination

When Bill O’Reilly, on his Fox News show, claimed this week that nobody sponsors the Tea Party movement, I was befuddled. When he claimed America’s political left is dishonest because it gets copious financial support from George Soros and MoveOn.org, I was frustrated. But when O’Reilly claimed the Tea Party’s lack of financial support makes it America’s moral spine, my jaw hit the floor.

Even O’Reilly’s opponents, after speaking to him, admit he’s a smart man. Though his famous quick temper and dogmatism let some accuse him of thick-headedness, most who meet him agree that he’s actually quite intelligent. So I can’t believe O’Reilly has never heard of the Scaife Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Koch brothers, and other conservative funders. I first read of them in Rampton and Stauber’s Banana Republicans, clear back in 2004.

Initially, O’Reilly’s attempt at the same spin he claims to loathe in others took me aback. Surely he wouldn’t muddy the already turgid political waters on purpose. After all, he works for Fox News, owned by the intensely connected and possibly corrupt Rupert Murdoch. As Rampton and Stauber observe, the American right leaves fewer fingerprints on its idea system than the left, but its connections run every bit as deep, possibly deeper.

Recall how, during the February conflict over Wisconsin state workers’ rights, Ian Murphy of BuffaloBeast.com called governor Scott Walker, pretending to be David Koch, and got the governor to admit gaming the legal system to benefit the wealthy. The Koch brothers have campaigned for such preferential treatment at least since the 1970’s. They even paid to bus “non-partisan” protesters to Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010.

The political left is hardly less tainted. As long as they keep accepting support from George Soros, “the man who broke the Bank of England,” they’re elbows-deep in dirty money. Old Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, made his fortune bootlegging, and torpedoed his own presidential aspirations when, as US ambassador to the United Kingdom, he expressed sympathy for Adolf Hitler (or at least antipathy for his victims).

In considering this money-based politics, and comparing it to the ideological inflexibility we’ve all seen in recent politics, I can’t help recalling a quote from Shane Claiborne. In The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne recalls visiting an Iraqi Christian church prior to the 2003 war. An English-speaking parishioner lectured Claiborne that war is a failure of imagination. When frustrated and unable to resolve our differences, unimaginative persons just lash out.

America lacks a politics of imagination.

Our winner-take-all electoral system has yoked together people with conflicting impulses. If you oppose gay marriage, you must also support unlimited gun ownership. If you oppose war, you must also support the welfare state. Fox News and MSNBC take potshots at one another, making the conflict all the more doctrinaire. As we see with the religion debate, dissidents and fair-minded moderates have little voice in our democracy.

Yet some maintain their drive to resist. In Anarchy and Christianity, Jacques Ellul notes how these two movements, often at odds, actually serve a similar drive. Anarchists believe power (including religion) diminishes humans. Ellul says God agrees. Consider how, in Scripture, Jesus brings hope to sinners, but castigates priests. Scripture extols David, Israel’s golden boy resisting Saul, then mocks David, the increasingly impotent kingly ruin.

The 2003 anti-war protests saw liberals join forces with traditional “peace churches” like the Quakers and Mennonites. As inveterate protesters, the churches arrived with pre-made signs. But when the liberals raised the signs to brandish their peace slogans, they found anti-abortion signs on the reverse. Two groups that seldom talk found common ground, at least briefly, and engaged in dialogue too many had previously resisted.

The imagination to have such dialogue will never come from the top. That’s the politics of passivity. All politics deals with how ordinary people relate to power, and when we give control of that relationship over to the other side, they will always pursue their own purposes. People in power, no matter how benevolent their goals, can only lead when they hear from committed, passionate followers.

We cannot limit our vision of power to mere voting. The media who report (and steer) the debate, wealthy individuals and corporations who decide what merits their subsidies, and those who claim to speak for God engage in politics as much as politicians. George Soros and David Koch may hold no official office, but they are instruments of power.

And we must have enough imagination to refuse their limiting, autocratic scripts.

Curse of the Working Class

Socialist writer Barbara Garson admits, in All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, that she began researching labor issues assuming that work itself is an unjust imposition by a hierarchy that sees humans as disposable equipment. It didn’t take long to realize why she was wrong. While managers resented her intrusive, sometimes inflammatory interviews, laborers were mostly pleased that someone took an interest in their work. She concluded that human beings need, and even enjoy, work. But management consistently begrudges its mere human workers.

This should not surprise anyone who reads Judeo-Christian theology. Christian theologians traditionally emphasize God’s injunction in Genesis 3:19:

By the sweat of your brow
  you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
  since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
  and to dust you will return.

From this theologians derive that humans must work. Labor is not optional drudgery, or something we can escape. Work is a divinely ordained part of human existence. Observe people who lack meaningful work: they drift quickly into what psychologists call existential malaise, or what theologians call the Dark Night of the Soul.

But scripture is not absolute on this. Work—like religion, family, and other God-given blessings—can impede anybody’s true calling. When Moses came to Egypt and distracted the Jews by bearing Yahweh’s liberating word, Pharaoh ordered: “Make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies” (Exodus 5:9). Later, one of Moses’ commandments said:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns (Exodus 20:8-10).

Poet and philosopher Wendell Berry, in The Unsettling of America, notes that few people anymore work where we live, or live where we work. Labor forms a separate part of our lives, something we go to and then leave. Not coincidentally, he notes that we no longer have personal access to life’s ingredients. We do not grow our own food or draw our own water, and thanks to industry, we have limited access to clean fresh air.

By abandoning agrarian culture, wherein people work the land they inhabit and own the product of their labor, we have grown indifferent to ourselves. America, Earth’s most industrialized nation, also has the highest rates of depression and other affective disorders. We work jobs that enrich others yet give us no meaning. This, Berry says, is no way of life. Abandoning God’s work makes us poorer, sadder, diminished people.

It goes further than Berry may realize. Joshua Holland, in The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy, claims that less than eight percent of Americans in 2009 were unionized, though nearly two thirds say they would like to join unions. Where is our era’s Samuel Gompers? Like Pharaoh in Exodus, or the trusts in the Gilded Age, bosses today work employees beyond the point of exhaustion, and not surprisingly rule their empires with little dissent.

I was recently offered a job with a decent wage and benefits, contingent on a seven-day work week. This seemed so obviously absurd that, when I commented on Facebook, I was astounded by how many people said I should take it, because “you were offered a job.” As though the bosses were magnanimous philanthropists presenting a gift from their largess, rather than needing me to do something for them.

Even disregarding Scripture, the human body isn’t built to work that way. In the 1990s, the Tokyo Zoo experimented with running every single day, but discovered that, unless the animals had one day in seven to rest, they became sick, and even died. Workers who do not receive one rest day in seven—a number that applies across cultures—develop heart disease, musculoskeletal disorders, mental illnesses, and other crippling conditions.

Work is good. I accepted another position, with a six-day week, in the same company, and am much happier than when I was unemployed. But work is not good for its own sake. If it stops making meaning for workers, and becomes the nucleus of their lives, what lives do they have left? Humans are not machines to use and discard. We should not accept those who would treat us as such.

Why Johnny Only Thinks He Can't Read

I conclude every semester teaching university composition by telling my students this story:

In his memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the famous runaway slave and eloquent speaker recounts how he learned to read. Sold at age ten, his new master’s wife took pity on the boy and began to teach him the alphabet. When the master discovered young Frederick had rudimentary literacy, the master beat the slave within an inch of his life. The master then delivered a matching beating to his wife, and declared that, if Frederick continued learning to read, the master wouldn’t hesitate to hang him.

After the story, I ask my students why the master would beat not only his slave, but his own wife, because the slave was learning to read? In the antebellum American South, literate slaves were hanged. Free people who taught slaves to read faced stiff fines and prison, and though they seldom risked execution, some white activists and free black teachers were lynched. What made literacy so offensive?

My students never get the answer right away. After watching them tapdance, I rephrase myself: what can literate slaves do that illiterate slaves cannot? Now they recite stock answers—“Follow the news?” “Write their ideas?” “Think?”—until one, usually near the back, finally reaches the right answer. Literate slaves can communicate with someone not right in front of them. Corollary: literate slaves can organize.

Put another way, literacy gives individuals power over their own lives. Similarly, mathematics isn’t about balancing your checkbook; it grants the ability to apply reason and answer questions you’ve never encountered before. History lets us see our actions in humanity’s larger social context. Educated persons, by definition, do not necessarily know their subjects. They know themselves, and no other human being can ever unjustly dominate them.

Early American colonists claimed to save slaves’ souls, so teaching them to read Scripture was mandatory. But after King Cotton made bottomless unpaid labor necessary, and Nat Turner’s rebellion proved slaves weren’t really happy, keeping slaves compliant took priority. (The BBC’s Huw Edwards reveals something similarly controversial in the history of British Sunday School: “if you could read the Bible, you could also read Tom Paine's The Rights of Man.”)

Compared to American slaves or British colliers, my students—usually white, usually middle class—generally come to school secure that nobody will beat them with a hickory switch for refusing to tote that bale or drag that cart. Though my small regional university receives few scions of wealth, my students generally do not fear going hungry, unclothed, or otherwise deprived. This can let them feel complacent, and take education for granted.

Resisting apathy isn’t helped by students’ prior schooling. When I ask about their background in my field, many say they see writing, literacy, and most English language and literature as distant from their real lives. If they can complete a job application and write e-mails and text messages, they’re satisfied, which makes me an imposition on their time.

I can’t blame them, if their education resembled mine. My 9th grade English teacher said our class could tell Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was profound because we couldn’t understand it. Only when I entered the university and saw future teachers taught did I realize my teacher probably didn’t understand the book either. Most teacher education consists of classroom management; prospective teachers have little grounding in their subjects.

Please don’t misunderstand: I respect teachers. Most I’ve met are enthusiastic people of high ideals and sterling character. But both teacher training and school culture encourage them to perpetuate ignorance and boredom in their students. Administrators increasingly come from non-educational backgrounds. American schools, already underfunded and short-staffed, are generally first on the chopping block during budget cuts.

Convinced that core academic disciplines are distant and artificial, but told repeatedly that they need degrees to get good jobs, students enroll at universities already alienated and bored. We teachers must (metaphorically) beat them to make them read. The reversal from Frederick Douglass is complete. Education no longer occurs at school, and our efforts have already failed.

Unless the point of school is to encourage illiteracy, innumeracy, and indifference. Unless school deliberately produces docile graduates who look to others for motivation and identity. Then school is a rousing success. But I cannot accept that. We must recapture that Frederick Douglass spirit, if not for society’s cultural and economic future, then because that attitude is just ethically right.

The time for change is now.

Three Women of Strength and Character

Kristen Jane Anderson’s suicide attempt came at the culmination of several traumas: death in the family, a friend’s suicide, and a brutal and degrading attack on her body.  But she held her despair inside, as our society expects women to do, until it became too much to bear; then she threw herself beneath a train.  That’s when the real misery began.

Anderson’s memoir, Life, In Spite of Me, details how she discovered she could not rely on her own strength.  Even in trying to kill herself to end the pain, she misfired: the train didn’t kill her, it just severed her legs.  Thus she sank into even greater pain, and wondered at her own inability to even commit suicide correctly.

And who can blame her?  American society has very strict expectations of women.  We expect them to remain cheerful, never complain—especially about men—and beam forth pollyannaish rays of sunshine.  When Anderson tried to do that, after suffering demeaning violence, it came to nothing.  Her human strength could never overcome the inevitability of failure.

But Anderson’s memoir doesn’t just detail her steady decline.  When she reached what she considered her lowest point, she realized her family, friends, and God were there.  As long as she relied on human strength, she came to nothing; only when she trusted in something greater than herself did she find meaning.

Unfortunately, such bastions can be hard to find.  Like Anderson, Kristen K. Brown lost everything she thought she had in one cruel sitting.  In The Best Worst Thing, she describes the torture she felt when her husband, only thirty years old, died in his sleep.  Kristen went to bed one night a happy young wife and mother to an infant, and woke a widow and a single mother.

Brown enjoyed constant support from family and friends, and even investigated her faith more deeply (though her insights remain fairly abstract).  But if she learned one lesson, it was that loss germinates inside until it seems as large as your universe.  Like Anderson, though, Brown finally reached the point where, to keep living, she had to surprise herself and do something profound.

Unlike Anderson, who tells an essentially religious story, Brown’s memoir deals with the secular struggle of loss and recovery.  Nevertheless, she learns the importance of turning outside herself.  If she wants to survive, she must stop relying on her own resources and join the larger human community.  Only then does she become who she was meant to be.

I like Brown’s memoir, but it lacks Anderson’s unity.  Now a working minister, Anderson has found a voice to reach an audience, and her story has a clear through-line with an unmistakable take-home message.  Brown’s story is more anecdotal, a string of occurrences to create a mood.  Only in the final fifty pages does she bring the threads together into a meaty story.

Missy Jenkins combines the best of both worlds in I Choose to Be Happy.  As the worst-hit survivor of the 1997 Paducah, Kentucky, school shooting, no one would blame Jenkins for nursing her grievances.  After all, she lost every dream that had anything to do with walking.  Yet she realized she had a choice, and let self-pity go by the wayside.

On the one hand, Jenkins describes how formerly routine activities, like getting up and getting dressed in the morning, have become excruciating.  But where she had previously drifted through life as aimlessly as any teen, Jenkins suddenly found a purpose.  Once she regained her autonomy, she found herself an unlikely celebrity and acknowledged expert on youth violence.

Life, for Jenkins, became a constant discovery.  She uncovered the dark side of her pristine small town, and how many youth suffer in silence.  Then she discovered an unmet need that she was uniquely positioned to address.  As a guide and counselor for victims of violence, both through her media life and now in her profession, she has become a source of strength for others.

Like Anderson, Jenkins offers her readers a mainly religious resolution.  Though I have occasional problems—I fear she makes forgiveness look too easy, especially for those who struggle to forgive—her story of how she didn’t let someone else write her script is both uplifting and bold.  And like both Anderson and Brown, Jenkins proves we cannot trust our strength alone.

These three insights into life lived despite tragedy remind me why life remains worth living.  And it gives me three women I can look up to with pride.

Why the Kindle Hasn't Killed the Book

When George RR Martin’s A Dance with Dragons appeared this week, my local bookstore held a midnight release party so readers could grab the book as early as possible on its official release date.  Just as with the new Harry Potter and X-Men movies, determined fans want their favorite books early, not to be the first to read them, but so they can enjoy them with fellow fans and peers.  This proves, I believe, why printed books will survive the digital revolution.

As I’ve said before, premature postmortems on print literature overlook books’ cultural significance.  The Kindle and other electronic readers ballyhoo themselves on the same grounds that critics once used to claim that movies, radio, or TV would kill print: the ease, speed, and economy of more advanced technologies should make them more desirable than books.  Amazon recently emphasized this in an admittedly well-done and funny ad:




I cannot deny the Kindle’s ease.  As the first person in my English department to own a Kindle, several people who make their living parsing books approached me early to ask what I thought of the device.  My favorite anecdote involves me entering my local brewpub, ordering a beer, and clicking “Buy Now” on a book I’d wanted for some time.  My book arrived before my beer did.  That’s clearly both easy and convenient.

Yet I still purchase print books.  Not only do I read hard copy, I hoard it, making regular trips to the hardware store for new shelf space to stockpile my books.  If Kindle books are so clearly superior, reason dictates I should donate my paper books to Goodwill and go all digital.  Why don’t I?

Henry Jenkins, America’s foremost scholar of fandom and fan culture, writes in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers that fans, often derided as nerds and outcasts, actually build strong communal identity around whatever they adore.  Our pluralistic society is no longer unified by religion, language, patriotism, or even national myths like the Pilgrims or cowboys.  In lieu of this, fans congregate around some cultural artifact, like books or movies, to forge a shared heritage.

This very brief paraphrase doesn’t do Jenkins justice.  But I offer it because sharing is no mere luxury.  Where it is absent, people seek it wherever they can find it, often looking in wildly inappropriate places.  Many people who return from cults, hate groups, and other destructive social syndicates admit they joined not because they agreed with the groups’ defining principles, but because they felt loved and accepted.

Despite Ayn Rand hyperbole about individualistic supermen and parasitic crowds, humans are psychologically geared toward group membership.  We make friends early and often, not because we need them to do our work or create mutual utility networks, but because we get simple pleasure being around people we care about.  But in our mobile, professionally segmented society, few people make friends based on physical proximity or career compatibility.

Love of a common artifact, like a desired book from a celebrity author, links people around both the object, and the experience of enjoying the object.  Sharing books builds important bonds.  Back in high school, I lent my friend Edward some books by humorist P.J. O’Rourke, and we bonded by reading each other our favorite passages.  Edward and I remain in touch today—which I cannot say about “friends” with whom I lacked such bonds.

I appreciate my Kindle because it lets me snag information quickly.  If I need to dredge up a fact, or consume a book for the knowledge it contains, I reach for my Kindle.  And it makes a convenient door into publishing for new authors in today’s conflicted economy.  After Time-Warner dithered on publicizing my friend Jerry’s first novel, he jumped ship and published his short story collection God, Time, Perception & Sexy Androids digitally.  It has received several warm reviews from true fans.

But digital reading is an innately private phenomenon.  I can’t share my book with friends.  (The Nook, with which I have no familiarity, lets readers share books.  I’ll withhold judgment for now.)  For true book lovers, those who forge an identity with others over reading, this is no small loss.

Today, you can purchase nearly anything (other than perishable food) online, usually cheaper than in a store.  Yet shopping remains an important social enterprise.  As Jack Trytten says, we seldom purchase what we purchase; we actually purchase some virtue we associate with the purchase.  In the case of shopping, especially shopping for cultural experiences, we purchase the bond the item brings.

Digital reading does not yet provide that bond.  Until it does, print books will occupy a unique and irreplaceable pinnacle in our culture and our lives.