Nate Knows Nada

Rhodes Scholarship winners were announced yesterday, and unsurprisingly, Harvard had the most of any school in the nation.  Of the thirty-two winners, four are Harvard students.

Students from public universities comprised six winners overall, and two of those were from the US Air Force Academy.  So the number of non-service academy, public university winners in the whole country is equal to the number from Harvard alone.

Harvard students are good, but they’re not so good as to be heads and shoulders above the combined student bodies of the best public institutions.  The best kids at the public universitites are equal in talent, achievement, and potential as the kids at Harvard.

My guess is that students at public universities are just not getting the support and advice needed to fare well in a competition like the Rhodes.  When I applied from UC Davis to the big scholarships like this, I was the first person that most of the administration could remember who had applied for some of these scholarships, and as much as they tried, the faculty and administrators who helped me were unsure about how to do that.

There’s probably also a bit of academic nepotism here.  The members of the selection committees are more likely to have gone to the prestigious private institutions, and (not maliciously) they are more plugged into that network of people and schools, knowing more about them than they would about Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, UCLA, and such (the cream of the public schools).

But there’s a serious bias here.  What happens is that kids like me, who went to the public universities because they were affordable when the private Ivies were not, not only don’t get the advantages that come from smaller, more individually focused schools (such as many of the private colleges and universities are) but also miss out on being considered in the running for prizes like the Rhodes or even from getting sufficient advice on how to begin being competitive.

Yesterday’s results remind us that the Rhodes Scholarship has a long way to go before one can consider it meritocratic — it still reeks more of privilege and connection than acheivement and  merit.

And don’t even get me started on where Rhodes’ money came from…. *grin*

Republicans should be jumping on the bandwagon to legalize gay marriage, as David Brooks points out in his Saturday column.  I don’t agree with Brooks much of the time, but he’s a hell of a smart guy, and very worth listening to.

I hear he based this column on a piece he read on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Here’s a response to my letter (and a couple of others) in the Times the other day:

November 22, 2003

Customers Can Be So Rude

o the Editor:

Re your Nov. 19 letters about self-service systems in stores:

I used to work in retail. My spouse continues to do so. When he comes home from work upset and fed up, I understand why.

Many customers are rude: they talk on their cellphones in front of the
clerks trying to wait on them, toss money or credit cards onto the
counter rather than putting it into the clerk’s hand, speak to the
clerk as if he or she is a total idiot, blame the store’s staff for
product problems, and then react nastily when the clerk can’t solve
their problem.

If customers want to have a better shopping experience, they can hang
up their cellphones upon entering the store and treat the staff like
the human beings they are. They will be surprised at how helpful the
staff will be. They might even learn to prefer human help to automated
help.  
ELEANOR S. HUDSON
Austin, Tex., Nov. 19, 2003

Eleanor’s right.  But what do you do when the clerk has dealt with
the jerks all day and won’t respondly humanly when you initiate some
sort of human contact?  What if I say “Hi!”, refuse to talk on my
phone when I’m checking out (my mother raised me to be much more polite
than that), hand the card nicely over, say “Please” and “Thank you,”
and still get treated pretty shabbily?  What am I supposed to do
then?  Any more ideas?

“The diocese of Fort Worth, the whole diocese, has voted to bar any
participant in the Robinson consecration from any church activity in
Fort Worth.”  -from an article recently in The American Spectator

Which includes me.  Because I may not have laid hands on Gene
Robinson,but I assented to his ordination, along with 4000 other
Episcopalians. I may not like these people, but I would be willing to
commune with them, I think.  But Bishop Iker doesn’t want me to do
this.  He and his diocese would prefer that I don’t commune with
them at all.  

But in reality, that state of affairs is nothing new.  Here’s the dirty
secret that many conservatives in the Episcopal Church does not want
you to know.  Many of them have been “out of communion” or
whatever phrase you want to use to describe it these days for years now.

When I was at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2000,
we had a daily Eucharist, presided over each day by a different
bishop.  Many days, the delegation from the diocese of Fort Worth
would not come to the common Eucharist service, especially when the
presider was a woman.  They simply stayed in their hotel, had
Eucharist there, and then came to the sessions to participate in the
political aspects of the convention.

But since they wouldn’t observe the most basic sacrament of our life
together, I think it’s fair to question whether they are really part of
our understanding of the Christian faith.  If one can’t come to
the Eucharistic table, the basic source of Christian unity, then what
business does one have in participating in the rest of the life of a
church?

The recent gay debacle in the ECUSA really only provides a legitimating
cover for a group of people who have been pissed off since the 1970s
about a perceived loss of power.  The theological and the
political are nearly synonymous here.  Finally there’s an issue that can polarize
people in and out of the church.  It’s hard to portray the
revision of the Book of Common Prayer as a pressing moral issue. It’s
hard to argue that ordaining women really cuts to the heart of a
“timeless moral code.”  But firing salvos at the faggots wins
votes from the peanut gallery in a way that liturgical renewal and
non-gender discriminating ordination does not.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again.  The political and
the religious cannot be disentangled here, and the group of churches
led by the American Anglican Council appear more interested in power
and property than anything else.  They declare “war” on their
fellow Christians, they refuse to be “tainted” by them, they declare
that they are the only true remnant of the real Anglican faith
left.  They won’t accept or read the message of the Presiding
Bishop of the ECUSA at their secret meetings, but they will read with
approbation messages from Roman Catholic Cardinal Ratzinger (who’s the Vatican’s head theologian).

Maybe their motives are good (I’m not going to attempt to read minds),
but their tactics don’t seem any different than any other political
lobby practicing a scorched earth policy.  Their theology, ecclesiology,
and social stances really appear much more at ease in the Roman
Catholic tradition.  Why not join that tradition?

Again, the power explanation is pretty persuasive to me — becoming RC
would mean a concomitant loss of power for the leaders of this
movement.  Some of their ideas (not just the big social ones that
are getting all the coverage) would also be much more at home in a Baptist
or Calvinist (presbyterian governance) setting.  But again, the
move to that piece of the Christian tradition would engender a loss of
power.  Staying close to the ECUSA maximizes their future power,
whatever the eventual theological and dogmatic ramifications.

(Again, I’m not conducting a theological analysis here, but a power
politics analysis.  And the path that the AAC has taken is exactly
the one that will maximize its future power, no matter what its
relationship to the ECUSA eventually ends up being.)

And nothing that this group is doing is particularly unexpected. 
The human desire toward the will to power is particularly common, and
what we see on this side of the debate (and later, I’ll try to address
the will to power on the “liberal” side of the whole debate) shouldn’t
be surprising.  Any basic background in social theory (read some
Paine, Burke, Marx, and Weber, if you want more info) makes this
entirely predictable.

This “battle” is as much about power as it is about faith, perhaps even
more about power than faith.  And this is entirely human. 
But the stunning arrogance on both sides of this debate is
discouraging.  The Christian New Testament has much more to say
(by orders of magnitude) about money and living in community than it
does about sex.  And the debate, after we peel away the sex-talk
on both sides, often revolves more around money and living together than anything else.

Isn’t Christianity (and other religions, but I speak less
knowledgeably about many of them) supposed to help us find the way to
our full
humanity?  As the mystic Johannes Metz noted, sin and the will to
power are
compromises in the battle against death that God has already
done.  The essence of Christianity is poverty of spirit, an
emptying of ourselves, a full submission to God.  Only then can we
become fully human.  That’s why Christ was even more human than we
are — in refusing to sin, he became the most poor of all, never making
the compromise with death that the rest of us do.  Sin strikes a
compromise, wherein we take the easy way rather than the hard way that
leads to God.

Here’s a response from a friend regarding the NYT letter:

What do you do, dear readers?

The Times saw fit to print my letter this morning.  Here it is.

Well, there’s plenty, but we can’t blow it.

Unless you’re living in a vaccuum, you’ve heard about the Supreme
Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruling that the Constitution of the
Commonwealth requires that same-sex couples be entitled to the rights,
privileges, and obligations of marriage.

This is great.  Whatever your religious beliefs regarding
marriage, the civil compact that we live under requires that we do not
discriminate agaisnt other people in the legal protections that we
afford them, no matter how much we may disagree with them.  A just
society is one in which one’s affective identity memberships do not
engender discriminatory practice on the part of the state.  I.e.,
the state should not deny legal protections and obligations from a
person on the basis of some characteristic the person contains, no
matter how few people share that characteristic.  As John Stuart
Mill, perhaps the clearest disciple of modern liberalism noted,

If all mankind minus one,
were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary
opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one
person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing
mankind.

Now, the focus will be on the next step (I’d guess other states or the
U.S. Supreme Court and the 1996 “Defense of Marriage Act” and its
egregious rewrite of the “full faith and trust” clause), but there’s an
event that intervenes — the Presidential election.

(An aside.  The President said, “Marriage is a sacred institution
between a man and a woman. Today’s
decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this
important principle. I will work with Congressional leaders and others
to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of
marriage.”  What does George Bush know of the sacred?  Does
he have any training in divinity or theology?  Is he a religious
leader?  Is he a pastor or bishop of his church, the United
Methodist Church?  Can he provide any evidence that he’s in the
sacredness business?  And since the answer to the above questions
is “No,” then I’d like to thank him to keep his nose out of the
sacredness and sacramentality business.  He’s the president, not
the preacher, pastor, or priest.)

The issue of the place of gays in our society is going to be the
hot-button culture wars issue of 2004.  There are people convinced
that Western society and the Republic will both fall if we don’t keep
the gays from equal treatment and “preserve marriage.”  (Although,
straight people, you’ve done a good job with fucking up marriage on
your own, which makes me wonder sometimes why we gay people want to get
in on the deal….)  If we push too hard (which might mean “at
all”) in the next 12 months, then that could solidify a Republican
victory in the election.  People who regard this as at all
important and who oppose the extension of this basic equality to their
fellow Americans will vote with the Republican party next year. 
(A coda: don’t misinterpret me and say that I think that Republicans
are opposed to the extension of this basic equality; while most
probably are, not all Republicans are.  But all those who regard
opposition as an important issue will vote Republican.)  And,
fair-weather friends that the Democrats have been, they’re much more
likely to take the just course of action in the end.

But please, my dear gay activist friends, please don’t file any suits
until 3 November.  Let us get someone in office who will do us a
favor in legislation approval and judicial appointment.  Keep as
much of the gasoline as possible away from the fire that we’ll see in
the next election cycle — it’s likely to burn us otherwise.

Her parents are starting my goddaughter early….

No, it’s not actual coffee.  She’s mostly just interested in the plastic lid.  But I think it’s a good sign.

So the New York Times ran a story about electronic checkout machines
this morning, which you can find here.  One of the concerns
expressed by some psychologists and sociologists is that such machines
lead to further social atomization, as we have to interact with other
people (especially, perhaps, across class lines) less and less.

But I can’t say that I’ve found that to be the case.  Here’s the letter I wrote to the editor:

Star Market and CVS!  I’m talking about you!

Here’s an article from the online religion journal Killing the Buddha. It’s really good reportage of the consecration, written by someone who’s (by appearance at least) not an insider….

And from the same site, “Cash has died, Cash has risen, will Cash come again?”

Sorry I haven’t posted many of my own thoughts lately, but I’ve been feeling a bit lazy and even uninspired….