Nate Knows Nada

Excellent post summing up exactly the way I feel about Boston’s Gay Pride this weekend.

As the New Yorker cartoon of a couple of years ago put it, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re over it.”

Got this in the mail this morning:

Don’t buy Pepsi in the new can. Pepsi has a new “patriotic”
can coming
out with pictures of the Empire State Building, and the Pledge of
Allegiance on them. However, Pepsi left out two little words on the
pledge, “Under God.” Pepsi said they didn’t want to offend anyone. In
that case, we don’t want to offend anyone at the Pepsi corporate
office, either. So if we don’t buy any Pepsi product, they will not be
offended when they don’t receive our money that has the words “In God
We Trust” on it.

This is apparently an urban legend, as documented at many urban legend sites.  Here’s the best one.

The pledge of allegiance, as originally written, did not have the words
“under God” in it.  Those words were added in the mid-’50s,
as part of that Red Scare, to contrast the nation to “godless
Communism.”  Interestingly, it was almost entirely the work
of the Knights of Columbus.  And as you will see from the
history below, it depended on some scare-mongering of a sort, raising
the spectre of little Muscovites being able to recite it in present
form.  (It’s interesting that God seem to show up in the
public discourse much more at the most uncivil, most divided times of
our history.  Everyone seems to want God for their side, when
they feel beleaguered, not when peaceful.)

I
don’t really drink soda, so it’d be hard to participate in this
boycott, but I also think that this is a silly
issue, and that there are far more pressing ones to get excited
about.  Failure to say the pledge of allegiance will not lead to a
mass movement of disloyalty to the nation.  We seemed to get on
quite well as a nation for 120-odd years before it was introduced, and
another 60 or so before God got invoked.  And somehow the nation
remained coherent and fairly religious without a daily morning
reminder.  There’s a lot of talismanic superstition surrounding a
number of our national symbols, as if their destruction (flag-burning,
pledge alterations, invocations of God in money and such) would lead to
a cosmic necessity to destroy the nation.

Also, boycotts like this often seem to assume some sort of
covenish machination on the part of the company, when it’s usually just
incompetence or a tendency for some people to see conspiracy everywhere.  More often it seems to be the latter.

Some interesting background history:

In
1953, the Roman Catholic men’s group, the Knights of Columbus mounted a
campaign to add the words “under God” to the Pledge. The nation was
suffering through the height of the cold war, and the McCarthy
communist witch hunt. Partly in reaction to these factors, a reported
15 resolutions were initiated in Congress to change the pledge. They
got nowhere until Rev. George Docherty (1911 – ) preached a sermon that
was attended by President Eisenhower and the national press corps on
1954-FEB-7. His sermon said in part: “Apart from the mention of the
phrase ‘the United States of America,’ it could be the pledge of any
republic. In fact, I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar
pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag in Moscow.” After the service,
President Eisenhower said that he agreed with the sermon. In the
following weeks, the news spread, and public opinion grew. Three days
later, Senator Homer Ferguson, (R-MI), sponsored a bill to add God to
the Pledge. It was approved as a joint resolution 1954-JUN-8. It was
signed into law on Flag Day, JUN-14. President Eisenhower said at the
time: “From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will
daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural
schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the
Almighty.”  With the addition of “under God” to the Pledge, it became
both “a patriotic oath and a public prayer…Bellamy’s granddaughter
said he also would have resented this second change.”

We were in Nantucket this weekend, and got back Sunday.  By coincidence, the Times ran an article on the new hyper-rich of America, and the effect they are having on places like Nantucket.

I found this one of the most interesting parts of the day’s articles:

Note how money is moving toward the disparities we saw in the early 20th century.

Anyway, as regards Nantucket, I found the clash between the old nouveau
riche and the new nouveau riche quite fascinating, and I wonder if the
process we have seen in the past will repeat itself, with the new rich
becoming classy and part of the money society, rather than crass
spenders.

Moreover, I wondered.  Just as Edith Wharton chronicled the rise
of the rich in the Gilded Age, I wonder who our chronicler of the New
Gilded Age will be.

There’s been a little discussion running in the comment section of an earlier entry on this series. 
The discussion has been on which constitutes the greater, more
affective marker of class: educational-type attainment or gross
wealth.  I’m going to remain cagey on the matter, as I’m enjoying
watching my friends try to figure this out.  but I have to wonder
if the lesson from the other day’s Nantucket article is that the rich
develop “class” as they settle into their money.  The old rich in
the article are not necessarily the new rich of 100 years ago.  Go
to the island, and the leading families–the Starbucks, the Coffins,
the Gardners–are mostly the descendants of some of the original 17th
century settlers.  They have been this way for hundreds of
years.  And the nouveau riche of the 19th century are not so
well-represented.  So I’m not sure that we can depend upon the new
rich developing the sense of obligation or of the privilege of
privilege.

Slacktivist takes up National Association of Evangelicals’ president Ted Haggard’s claim:
“They’re pro-free markets, they’re pro-private property. … That’s
what evangelical stands for.”  12 times.  With a John Paul II
reference thrown in for a 13th.

Public Radio has this new show, with Christopher Lydon as host, called “Open Source.” 
It’s an attempt to bring radio talk (the intelligent kind) together
with blogging, and it combines its topics, it seems, with their
presence on the Internet.

Tonight’s show was on God-blogging, with Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer, Gordon Atkinson of Real Live Preacher, and Sarah Dylan Breuer.  They all had intelligent and insightful things to say.

(I don’t read RLP too often any more, which may be too bad.  I
once had what I can only describe as a mystical experience, just a tiny
fraction of what the great mystics like Julian or Teresa seem to
describe.  But on reading one of his stories, I had a brief few
moments where I understood, and I gasped.  My molecules got
it for a small piece of time.  God was very big and very small,
all around and right in front of me, overpowering and still as
night.  I’ve had a similar experience at a U2 concert [don’t
laugh, it’s true] though not as intense.)

Jeff is one of the smartest people out there right now, besides a
couple of sociologists that I know;  he has an intuitive grasp of
what the contours of a religious sensibility feel like.  On
tonight’s show, Jeff spoke lots about how the Internet is a sort of
“protestant” place for religion, in that it offers the God-bloggers a
place to be, to talk, to worship, to do religion where they don’t have
a mediating authority.

Jeff’s partly right, but I think he dates this tendency altogether too
late.  The tendency to individualize the religious experience
exists in all religions, whether hierarchical or
hyper-individualized.  And it takes two different forms, because
it’s about the rejection of the world (a la Max Weber): one can either
become a protestant, seeking to make the world over for God, or one can
withdraw from the world, seeking to experience God within one’s
self. 

I think most of the god-bloggers out there, especially in St. Blog’s
parish (the conservative Roman Catholic bloggers), are these
protestants.  They sense a calling to what they do, a vocation, as
it were.  The protestant god-blogger sees him or her self as God’s
agent, put here to do God’s work.  S/he (and in the RC
blogosphere, it’s pretty she-heavy, ironically) engages in a mighty
call to rally the true to the standard of orthodoxy, whether the
content is orthodox or heterodox.  These bloggers are the majority
of the god-bloggers.  They seek to transform the world, or at
least to figure out who is in the community of the redeemed.  And
I’ve noted this taking place whether the blogger is Christian or
not–the Western mindset, based as it is in the protestant worldview,
is might hard to escape.  These people are the agents of God, the
Higher Power, the Buddha, or whatever.  Americans, especially,
like to save people with whatever they were saved by, be it Jesus or
Krishna.

But what’s interesting is how much we don’t see of the mystic
withdraw-ers.  These are the people who seek not to be the agent
(especially in the full, legal sense of that word) of God, but God’s
vessel.  They empty themselves out.  “The creature must be
silent so God can speak.”  Now, I’m not talking about necessarily
seeing blogging of documentation of mystical experience. 
(Although, it seems to me that there’s a place for that.  Blaise Pascal did it in one way,
and I’m surprised we don’t see more like that on the Internet.) 
But it seems reasonable that people might use the Internet just as they
have used drugs, self-abnegation and asceticism, and “automatic”
writing as means of emptying self and filling up with God.  I
would be hard pressed to think of any of these sorts of mystical
experiences of or through the Internet.  God’s agents outnumber
God’s vessels in the electronic ether.

Here, in no particular order or logic, are some interesting and fun God-blogs.
Philocrites
Michael Povey
U2 Sermons Blog
Salty Vicar
Baptized Pagan
AKMA
Hugo Schwyzer

Killing the Buddha

Anybody got any well-written Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist blogs?