Nate Knows Nada

As I walked around downtown Boston yesterday afternoon with BF in tow, picking up my
credentials, reading the 9/11 report, and generally appraising the
messiness that exists before the convention starts, I noticed a few things.

Most prominently, because it was displayed on the sidewalks around BF’s
church (RC) and the Park Street Church (evangelical), was lots of chalk
signage of the ilk of  “Abortion Kills Children”, “John Kerry is
NOT a Catholic”, “You can’t be Pro-abortion AND Catholic”, “John Kerry
— Do you know abortion kills babies?”, “Abortion, the new holocaust”,
“Kerry, Kennedy, and Clintons — Stop Mocking God”, and so on.  I
also noticed
that many of the protestors who were still hanging around appeared to
be 15 or under.  (In fact you can see some pictures of the left
and right protests here, at Burnt Orange Report.)

Here’s what I’m curious about.  These were ostensibly written by
Christians who have a strong opinion on the matter of abortion. 
(Duh.)  And they were written outside of Christian houses of
worship.  The language is that of war and conquest and vitriol.

Even if they are right on the issue of abortion, such language and
tactic violates the spirit of the Gospel purportedly proclaimed by
Christ’s followers.  The Christian right’s major mouthpieces have
often declared that a war for the soul and spirit of America rages on
against the pollution (of liberals, humanists, mainline Protestants,
and “cafeteria Catholics”) from within.  They spout Bible verses
and bad history to support their claims.

One can’t help but think that they are pretty un-Christian, especially for Christians.

On the left of the debate, something different yet similar often
occurs.  Earlier this year, John Kerry got a lot of backlash when
he gave a sermon before a black congregation and, quoting from the New
Testament’s Epistle from James, he questioned the President’s faith,
saying to the New Northside Baptist Church in St. Louis, “We see too
many people hungry in a country where food is
abundant—and too many working families living in shelters, when a
living wage should provide them with a place to live. The scriptures
say: ‘It is not enough, my brother, to say you have faith, when there
are no deeds.’ We look at what is happening in America today and we
say: ‘Where are the deeds?’   Kerry received near-instant
criticism from the White House
in regard to this speech: as Killing the Buddha put it, “Bush spokesman
Steve Schmidt criticized the senator for hypocritically exploiting
‘scripture for a political attack.'”  (KtB’s article on the dust-up is a good one.)

All too often, we on the “other side” of religion, the so-called
“liberal” side fall too quickly into the pattern set by the political
culture at large.  (BTW, in a religion, why are there
“sides”?  Are we really at war with our sisters and
brothers?  And if we are, what real good has that religion done us
in approaching the Kingdom of God?)  We fire back at our
conservative spiritual siblings with scripture and all the other
“weapons” we can muster.

So, as I was at Eucharist at the monastery that I frequent this last week, one of the verses we heard in the lectionary for the day was this:

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

One of the monks was the preacher for the day, and he, in talking about the passage noted the following:

…It is easy, too easy, for those of us who might describe
ourselves as justice Christians – that is to say, Christian women and
men who are prone to be active in the public spheres of both the church
and the secular culture – it is easy to take the condemnations the
prophets hurled at the nation of Israel and to sling them at our own
government when it institutes policies which we believe to be unjust,
when it sets in motion bureaucratic practices that are cold and
unsympathetic to the plight of the poor, and when it engages in wars
that we believe to be immoral.

But we should be careful. As useful as these texts seem to be for that
purpose, our government is not the audience for which they were
intended. These are texts that are for the people of God, not the
secular world. …there is enormous danger for us, particularly in the
United States, in appropriating the language of chosen people for our
political identity. It is a national temptation with which we have
struggled almost from the beginning. It is a legacy of the early
European settlement of this land, and truthfulness on this point is
slippery. We should be quick to ask ourselves questions whenever we
find the language of Scripture informing the identity or understanding
of the secular state.

So we might ask, is it not true that we are a powerful nation, blessed
by God? Yes, of course it is – though less so than in the past (we know
now, for instance, that we really are not invincible). Or we could ask,
is it not true that we are a “city set on a hill?” That one’s a little
harder, but no, I don’t think so, however useful such rhetoric is for
public speech, whether it’s from the mouth of John Winthrop as he and
his band of religious dissenters approached the shores of Massachusetts
in 1630 or from Ronald Reagan in his inaugural address in 1980, quoting
John Winthrop (and quite possibly unaware that he was a secondary
source).

I am confident that the first-century author of the Gospel according to
Matthew did not have in mind the foundation of a political super-power
– or any kind of nation, for that matter – on North American soil.
Matthew was speaking to the people of God about the people of God and
about their role as a beacon of hope in the larger society in which
they were inextricably lodged. We need to be reading Scripture in the
twenty-first century, be it the prophets or the Gospels, with a similar
baseline. These are not texts, however well suited they may seem, to be
used in secular political discourse. These texts are for insiders. They
are for us. They are texts that are for those of us who by virtue of
the covenants which God has established, be it through Moses and the
Law or Jesus Christ and baptism, those of us who understand ourselves
to be people of God, resident aliens, strangers in an even stranger
land.

We need to understand that Micah and Jesus are speaking to us, and if
what they say has some relevance to the culture in which we live, then
the most likely way the message will be heard by that culture will be
by the way we live – as just people, as merciful people, as humble
people….

The prophets are unflinchingly fierce champions of right worship of the
Lord God and the care of those who are on the margins of society –
orphans, widows, the sick, the homeless, those in prison, the poor, the
stranger. We as the people of God in turn rightly represent these
interests in the political process through voting, through lobbying
those elected to represent us, and by our full participation in civic
life, but at the end of the day, as the people of God, the issues are
ours, not the states. …It is not, he says, about the grand and
glorious things we achieve in this life, even those things we do for
God. It is, rather, about the evanescent and ephemeral acts of kindness
and mercy and humility that ultimately matter….

So John and George (and based on past experience as well as the fashion
of his brand of American Christianity, George moreso) will talk about
God and country; justice, mercy, and humility; power, patroitism, and
blessing; and all sorts of other “good”, “right”, and “godly”
stuff.  And little, if any, of it will actually have anything to
do with God, God’s will, or the fulfillment of the Kingdom of
God.  It will be more indication that our politics has become like
our religion. 

As Mark Twain once noted, “On the sixth day, God created Man in His own
image.  And Man, being a gentleman, kindly returned the favor.”

Right now, there’s more of rage than religion, more of fear than of faith.

…showed up at John Kerry’s (and my boyfriend’s) church tonight. 
There were only about 50 people at the evening Mass, and Shields
dropped in a little after the service began, and popped out a little
before it ended.

Incipient research?  Will he gain insight into John Kerry by seeing where he and his wife worship when at home in Boston?

In case you don’t know, he’s one of commentators on News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  Always entertaining.  At least, I think so.

Tomorrow, the madness begins.

Reinvent has a story on how he was edited in the Newsday piece that came out about blogging. 
I was also interviewed for the piece, as you can see if you scroll down
a bit.  His gripe — a legitimate one, I think — was about the
way they edited him.  They cut and paste bits of his responses to
some questions in other questions.

When I do my own writing, it’s like writing a paper or an
article.  I write so that the piece fits together in some
rational, and hopefully organic, fashion.  Sure, you can cut and
paste, but it often changes the meaning of what I’m trying to get
across.

The media seem obsessed (on a very small scale) on how bloggers are
going to be different than the traditional media at this
convention.  And there’s some idea that without constraints, we’ll
perform worse than the traditional media.  But perhaps we’ll do a
better job.  Instead of shaping a set of ideas to fit our concept
about “how the story should look,” we’ll report on what we saw and
heard and then go on to say what we thought about it.  Our ideas
are central to our discussion of what’s happening, but perhaps we can
do a better job of telling people what’s happening, without
predetermined scripts about what telling about what’s happening is
supposed to look like.

Damnit, I knew I should have gone to APSA (American Political Science Association) this year.  There’s a whole panel on political blogging.

Thanks to Crooked Timber for pointing it out.

…is actually fascinating reading, in its own way.

Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist who often appears on PBS, had this
to say yesterday, when it appeared the Congress might not take up the
reports recommendations, had this to say: “Maybe if we find two Hamas
terrorists trying to get a marriage license in Provincetown after
burning a flag, then the Congress might pay attention.”

It appears that Congress has decided that it might be politically
expedient to consider and debate what the commission has to say. 
Joe Lieberman: “You know, when members of both houses go home for this
recess, the folks back home are going to say: ‘Why are you home?
Why aren’t you in Washington dealing with the recommendations of the
Sept. 11 commission?’ I’ve already heard this in a few conversations
with people back in Connecticut, who said: ‘Get this done quickly. It’s
our safety and well-being at stake.'”

Sorry, straight guys, but if this is true, I gotta feel sorry for you.  You have to scare off the other
straight guys?  We use our radar to have a little fun, but it
sounds like straight guys operate pretty fearfully.

Still, a funny piece.

The Hindu, one of India’s national newspapers, is questioning whether Pakistan’s September 11 connection has been investigated sufficiently.

UPDATE — 30 July: There’s a full refutation and discussion of the truth of the article in the comments here.

What more does anyone know about Al-Jazeera‘s presence at the DNC?  They are apparently working with the BBC to provide broadcasting.

They had signs up in their skybox, but someone (unknown) took them down.

And given that Condi Rice, the White House, the Wall Street Journal,
and others on the right of the political camp have decried Al-Jazeera’s
“bias”, do we think that they’ll get to cover the RNC?

So one of the big news stories here in Boston is about the protesters and whether they have an adequate/appropriate space to conduct their protests.

Has anyone asked whether it really matters?

Seriously.  The protesters are not going to convince the delegates
of anything.  You don’t get to be a delegate in the Democratic
party if your opinions are easily malleable, subject to change if
someone, like a protester, contends against them.  The protesters
are not going to convince other protesters, who are all pretty
committed to their opinions already (otherwise they wouldn’t be
protesting).  They’re not really going to convince the public,
because the public will be largely absent the whole thing.

What the protesters want is a few of those cameras trained at the
larger event, a little exposure, a few minutes on television, and the
resultant “controversy” that it all indicates.

The press at large will likely report that the protesters outside the
Fleet indicate that there is controversey over the Democrats’ stances
on various issues, like abortion, gun control, gay marriage, tax
policy, the war, and so forth.  There might even be controversy
within the ranks of the Democratic party.  And they’ll report this
because they’re bored with the script that the DNC (and later the RNC)
will present of unity and cooperation.  But the media will be
following its own script, as it largely does in these things. 
Reporters almost always act as if there is contention in every
occurrence, “two sides to every story,” equal and opposite conflict in
all of human affairs.

But there’s not.  And this reportorial trope leads to some
ridiculous circumstances, such as when reporting on the Holocaust and
including the voices of Holocaust deniers as legitimate.

This is not to say that the protesters don’t have legitimate things to
say.  They do have some legitimate, contendable viewpoints in our
political life.  But what they really hope to accomplish is
unclear.  Opinions probably won’t change, the Democratic party
opinions and platform won’t change, and their media exposure will be
coopted into one of two scripts.  Either the protestors are
slightly nutty, slightly (or more) extreme, slightly out-of-touch, OR
the protesters indicate a serious threat to the Democratic party
establishment because they can’t be controlled, and they represent
significant dissent.

Yes, the portrayal that gets played up in any particular media outlet
will likely depend on whether it’s broadly supportive of the Dems or
not.  So Fox News, for example, will likely subscribe to the
second view.  But the smartest commentators will see the game for
what it is AND call it.  If you see that from any reporting, then
it’s time to begin asking questions about why and what it means.

If you want to see this sort of falsity in action, head on over to
Boston Common on Sunday morning.  There, across from the Paulist Center Chapel,
protesters from Operation Rescue and the “Christian Defense League”
will picket the church.  Why?  Because it’s where John and
Teresa Kerry go to church when they are in Boston, since it’s the Roman
Catholic church closest to their home on Beacon Hill.  But the
church can’t stop giving Eucharist to Kerry just because there’s public
pressure to do so; excommunication is a formal legal process in the
church’s canon law, such that a huge matter like cutting a person off
from the Sacraments cannot happen solely at the discretion of a priest
or even a bishop alone.  Also, I’d be suspicious if the members of
the “Christian Defense League” were not primarily fundamentalist
Protestants of some sort, and so their voice in the matter should not
count.  They’re less eligible to receive the Eucharist than John
Kerry is.

So I ask in a sense of honest inquiry, what will the protesters (of all
stripes) get?  Some public exposure, sure, but will it really
benefit them?

Stay tuned for some thoughts about the life of politics, via M. Weber.

The convention delegates seem to support gay marriage at a much higher level than the general population.

Duh.  They’re Democrats.  And, unlike the ticket, they don’t
have to get elected against an incumbent “war president” who’s made
cultural issues the focus of the election.  What’s truly appalling
is that he and his party have succeeded to the extent that one can no
longer address economic disparity issues without being called a “class
warrior.”

“Class” has become the dirty-word, third rail of American national
politics.  And yet, we know that one of the most predictive
indicators of people’s political beliefs (apart from a candidate) is
socio-economic class.