THE TRUMP DEBACLE

Jerry Harkins

Regardless of how things turn out in the 2016 election season, America seems headed for a political upheaval that is likely to yield unintended and frightening consequences.

Donald Trump is the greatest con man ever.  He makes Bernie Madoff look like a dabbler, a smalltime gonif.  Trump has duped the uneducated, the unemployed, the disaffected and even the religious right in a way reminiscent of the entertainments staged in the Roman Coliseum.  He has bamboozled the media into covering his political circus in the same breathless way it treats the Kardashians.  He is a narcissist, a liar, a hypocrite, an ignoramus, a yahoo, a racist, a misogynist, a vulgarian and a failure as a business person, husband and human being.  He reminds me of no one so much as Benito Mussolini except for the fantastic hair.  Otherwise he displays the same bombast, the same scowl, the same gestures.  Like Il Duce, he is a nightmare to be sure but a comic figure nonetheless.  I freely confess that to me the most amusing thing about him is the agita he provokes among conservative intellectuals.  David Brooks, one of the New York Times house Conservatives, issued this cri de coeur on March 18, 2016:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president.  He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn.  His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress.  He doesn't know what he doesn't know and he's uninterested in finding out…Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.  All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

I am trying not to enjoy the discomfort of the Republicans.  At this writing, The Donald is almost certain to be the Republican nominee for President and, as such, is likely to receive the votes of tens of millions of our fellow Americans which is depressing.  Of course he can't actually win the election or, at least, that's the way to bet.  Serious Republicans know this and are saying so in public.  Only newspaper pundits, desperate as always for something to write about, entertain fantasies about how he could wind up inhabiting Trump 1600.  But Mitt Romney is right:  Even in defeat he has the potential to destroy the Republican brand and bring about the end of the two-party system.  We have been here before.  Barry Goldwater nearly killed Republicanism in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy did the same for the Democrats four years later.  George McGovern might have done in the Democrats in 1972 except that was the year of CREEP, the re-election campaign of Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew.  Trump could actually pull it off this year but he himself is not the major problem.

The problem is, and for decades has been, the Republican platform which presumably reflects the views of a large majority of the party's core constituents.  The 2012 version is, as would be expected, a radically conservative document:  cut taxes, especially taxes on business and the wealthy, cut spending on everything except the military, enact a national Right to Work Law, repeal virtually all gun control regulation, oppose gay marriage, outlaw abortion and contraception and so forth on and on.  In some ways, it was less strident than the 2008 version, more the product of Madison Avenue wordsmiths who peddle the same nonsense using oleagineous logic.  Ever since the Nixon era, the platform has been a wink-wink document designed to placate the base without discommoding practical politicians whose primary goal was to get elected.  In the interest of full disclosure, the same thing has always been true of all platforms. 

If Bernie Sanders wakes up in the White House on January 21, 2017, he will waste little time trying to fulfill his promise of offering free college tuition to everyone by instituting a cockamamie tax on Wall Street "speculators."  Admittedly it's a decent, humane idea addressed to several serious social problems.  But it's a non-starter for many reasons not the least of which is the problem of defining who the speculators are.  Bernie is a socialist and may not know this but he does know the long futile history of American Socialism.  Radicalism, left or right, simply does not sell.  Serious Republicans know this too.  Every once in a while, though, they feel compelled to toss a bone to their proletariat base.  Thus, for example, they have supported Right to Work laws since 1947.  These have the advantage of being attractive to their big business constituents even if they are also an immoral  abrogation of the fundamental human right to bargain collectively, a return to laissez faire and David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages.  But they are an easy sell.  Right-to-work has become the lynchpin of Republican labor policy and has actually been enacted in 25 American states.

Like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump has no intention of delivering on his own most characteristic promises such as a border fence paid for by Mexico.  At a minimum, he knows from personal experience the joys of hiring immigrants by gaming the immigration system.  To his supporters though foreigners constitute a dire threat to motherhood and apple pie.  They feel besieged not only by immigrants but by scientists who teach evolution and climate change, by gay people who want to get married, by teachers who want their children to read dirty books like "Romeo and Juliet," by politicians who insist they buy health insurance and by doctors who force them to have their children vaccinated.  For more than forty years these people have been losing ground economically and are sick and tired of candidates making empty promises to cure their ills.  They'll give their votes to The Donald because they think he's different.  It's hard to blame them;  in so many ways he is different from the politicians we have come to know so well.  God help us when they discover that he's more corrupt and malicious than any they have experienced before.

It's easy to poke fun at the Republican base which, however, is a failure of both sympathy and understanding.  It's like laughing at clowns and overlooking their sad faces.  What we count as stupidity is more often a symptom of psychic and economic distress.  These are the direct descendants of Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape and we do not hear their anguished cry, “Christ, where do I get off at?  Where do I fit in?”  They are caught in the middle of a great digital and global upheaval.  It is not that the rest of us don't feel their pain.  It is fear that we ourselves are not far behind them in being left out in the cold.  We know they are right to be disgusted by the professional politicians who have long perpetrated fraud on the voters.  Promise them anything.  They have limited intelligence and short memories.  They are, in short, sitting ducks.

Those ducks are now coming home to roost.  They're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.  They're getting violent, becoming what one of their gurus, Pat Buchanan, once called "peasants with pitchforks."  In one sense, history is repeating itself.  In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War there was Daniel Shays and his ragtag band of farmers rebelling against taxes imposed on them to pay the debts of the state and its wealthy merchants.  Before the Civil War, John Brown led an armed insurrection in Bloody Kansas in an effort to abolish slavery.  Five years of warfare spread to violence even on the floor of the United States Senate.  In 1968, a left wing mob led by liberal intellectuals conducted a bloody protest during the Democratic convention in Chicago.  In  the scheme of things, all these were tempests in teapots compared to the Labor Wars that raged in the United States between the 1890's and the 1930's or, of course, to the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans between 1860 and 1865.

Southern politicians are still fighting the Civil War and secession is still on their agenda.  A Republic of Texas movement is said to have 250,000 members and has been encouraged by former Governor Rick Perry and current Governor Greg Abbott.  And Texas is not unique.  Political fragmentation has become an important characteristic of the global village.  There are separatist movements in at least 110 nations and multiple movements in a majority of them.  In recent years there have been successful divorces in India, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and near misses in Spain, Great Britain and Canada.  It could happen in the United States where there are currently eight serious, dozens of fringe and several tongue-in-cheek separatist movements underway.  In the age of social media, revolution is on a hair trigger.

And that – a break-up or a serious attempt at one in the United States – is the end game made possible by the incivility of Republican politicians in general and Donald Trump in particular.  It will not be a peaceful process.  Only violence can spark it and, once afoot, violence is a contagious disease.  Exposure to violence increases a person's probability of becoming a perpetrator, a victim or both.  Incitement to violence need not be physical and the tipping point between verbal and physical confrontation can be very subtle.  One has only to study the so-called "Arab Spring" to show how even a minor incident can trigger outrage and rebellion.  Or, closer to home, the race riots of the 1960's.  It is true that the earliest (and least bloody) of these were spontaneous localized responses to racist provocations.  But the Long Hot Summer of 1967 and those following the King assassination the following year were triggered by the black power rhetoric of the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups.  More recently, we have witnessed how rapidly protest – legitimate and otherwise – can deteriorate to blood in the streets.  Think of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street.

Several factors make the Trump Uprising different and more volatile.  Most obviously, it has captured the loyalties of tens of millions of Americans – far more than the black power movement or its antithesis, the racism of George Wallace and the other Southern governors of the civil rights era.  Wallace got ten million votes (and 46 electoral votes) in 1968.  Trump will do much better.  More importantly, the mainstream media thought of Wallace as a démodé embarrassment and largely ignored him.  Trump by contrast, a creature of reality television, is allowed to dominate the headlines and the television coverage simply by virtue of his extremism.  It may be that he can't win the presidency but, win or lose, Donald Trump is a menace.  He sows the grapes of wrath.  He ignites the flames of class, race and ethnic resentments. He toys with violence.

It is not given to humans to see the future.  Will Trump self-destruct? Will the Republican establishment stage a coup at the convention?  Will a third party emerge on the extreme right as is happening all over Europe right now?  Will Donald's evangelical followers come down with a case of buyer's remorse in time?  And, of course, who might replace Trump?  Senator Cruz who seems to be despised by everyone who has ever worked with or near him?  John Kasich?  Paul Ryan?  Mitt Romney?  Not that it makes much difference.  It is to be fervently hoped that the Republicans have already lost the election and I, for one, am delighted.  But beyond my happiness there is a more important consideration. We Americans have an investment in the two-party system.  It's not perfect and, in recent years, it has barely functioned.  But it works better than any one-party or multi-party system I'm aware of and I sure as hell hope we don't replace it with a system determined by the current cast of Republican clowns.

IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

Jerry Harkins

Wadoo!  Wadoo!

Zim bam boddle-oo!  Zim bam boddle-oo!

Hoodle ah da waah da!  Hoodle ah da waah da!

Scatty wah! Scatty wah!

                                                                                                   —Sportin’ Life

Sportin’ Life [1] is not a biblical scholar but rather the purveyor of Happy Dust to the denizens of Catfish Row.  But he is certainly right that, “De t'ings dat yo li'ble / To read in de Bible…It ain’t necessarily so.”

You don’t have to be a skilled copy editor to find contradictions, ambiguities, blatant immorality and logical fallacies in the Bible.  For example, you may have been taught that Jesus came to bring peace on earth and good will to men [2].  But the man himself is supposed to have said, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” [3].  Luke (12:49-52)  records the same teaching even more dramatically by prefacing it with these ideas:  “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!  Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.  From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.”  Granted, a few days earlier he had said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).  But a few days after that he reverted to his original idea, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).”  A sentiment shared by every maniacal tyrant through history!

I have often said the evangelists needed better copy editors.  Without doubt, the principal theme of the four gospels is love which is said by Jesus to be the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38, Mark 12:29-31).  We are told to “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  But this did not apply to everyone.  When the disciples asked him why he taught in parables he said, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.  But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-12).

This sort of thing goes on and on.  Jesus says he has not come to abolish the old law and then immediately proceeds to re-write four of the ten commandments and to add a prohibition of casting pearls before swine.

Suppose Jesus had added a sentence like this to the Sermon on the Mount:  “You have heard it said of old, ‘…the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.  You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.’  But I tell you that unless you eat bacon cheeseburgers on the Sabbath, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Can you imagine the learned essays the theologians would have written about this down through the centuries?  You would undoubtedly learn more about the cryptic meanings of ancient Hebrew verbs than you wanted to know.  Hundreds of learned essays would paraphrase the famous remark of President Clinton, “It depends on what you mean by eat.”

Bible bashing is an ancient sport but it is no more sporting than shooting sitting ducks.  A lot of it, of course, is pure fiction beginning with the first chapter of Genesis.  Its themes were not revealed to a man named Moses by a God named Elohim or Yahweh but were borrowed and bowdlerized from the mythologies of the neighboring tribes of the Israelites.  Some of the stories are probably true at least in the sense that some of the stories in the Odyssey and the Iliad are based on real history.  But not the story of Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant cannibal or, sadly, the one about the lovely Sirens whose song would “spellbind any man alive” [4].  Similarly, Noah did not build an ark and the world did not flood to a depth of fifteen cubits [5].  Joshua’s priests did not blow down the walls of Jericho with seven trumpets and the shouts of their soldiers [6].  Nor did the sun stop in its orbit around the earth when he fought the Amorites, possibly because the sun does not orbit the earth.  Jesus was not a magician.  He did not raise the dead or turn water into wine or feed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes.  He was an itinerant preacher whose words were recorded many years after his death by scribes who had never met him and who forged the names of disciples and other followers who had [7].  These scribes had heard the stories and sayings at second and third hand.  The only contemporary who wrote parts of the New Testament was Paul who also never met Jesus but claimed to have been granted a private interview with him in heaven during which he corrected the mistakes being made by his disciples (2 Corinthians 12).  However, Paul actually quotes Jesus only twice, both in brief aphorisms.

The King James Version of the Bible consists of 80 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament and 14 in the Apocrypha.  It has a bit more than 31,000 verses and nearly 775,000 words.  Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew beginning perhaps around the time of King Solomon (r. 970 – 931 BCE).  Christian scholars believe the Apocrypha were also written around that time.  It is believed that the New Testament was written between 50 CE and 100 CE with significant editing as late as 400 CE. Finally, there are scores of additional Jewish and Christian texts many of which were considered for inclusion in the canon but ultimately omitted.  Many of these were preserved by Gnostic Christians in Egypt who also preserved the most complete copies we have of the Pauline epistles.

In spite of everything, the Bible is the most influential book ever produced.  It is the unquestioned foundation of the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise and the principal inspiration of European and Middle Eastern culture.  There is nothing like it, not the Tao-te Ching, not the Vedic texts and not even the Quran which can be thought of as the final part of the revelation tradition begun by the Bible.  There are, however, two fairly obvious problems with it:

First, reader beware.  Every single author who had a hand in its creation also had an ax to grind.  Now this may be true of any book purporting to be non-fiction but the Bible is more explicitly contentious than most other works.  Paul’s epistles constitute a running, fractious debate with the apostles regarding the fundamental nature of the new sect.  Mark (whoever he was [8]) wrote the first gospel.  Matthew thought Mark’s version was not rigorous enough while Luke thought it missed the poetry of the good news.  Believers often call these the three “synoptic” gospels implying that they are similar in content, structure and wording.  But their differences are much more interesting.  You can check out, for example, the different accounts of the resurrection.  How many went out to the tomb that morning?  Who were they?  Who met them at the entrance?  What exactly did they find?  If you’re tempted to think these are trivial details, please remember the resurrection is the lynchpin of the Christian faith.  As St. Paul says, “If Christ be not risen, then is our faith in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).  Well, some translations say it’s your faith that’s in vain.  In any event, one might expect the “synoptic” gospels to agree on what happened that first Easter.  But your expectation is in vain;  they do not.

Second, the synoptic gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are factually unreliable.  They are the beginning of a hagiographic tradition that persisted in Christianity for more than fifteen hundred years.  Their primary purpose is not education but edification and in this respect they differ markedly from both the Old Testament and the Epistles.  The stories, parables and miracles ascribed to Jesus, including the resurrection, have almost exact counterparts in multiple cultures throughout the world and in the lives of the early Christian saints.  From a literary point of view, this should not be surprising in that there are only a limited number of themes that have attracted the attention of writers, philosophers and historians.  Theologically, the similarities point to the almost universal human sense of the divine.  From a narrower, purely Biblical perspective, they illustrate the intense intellectual and cultural evolution that occurred throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin in the millennium leading to the birth of Christ.  An example is the Book of Job which is now thought to have been written in the middle of that millennium about events imagined to have taken place a thousand years earlier.  Job has many close parallels in neighboring cultures, among them:  the Institutions of Amenemope is a similar and roughly contemporaneous work from Egypt;  A Dialogue About Human Misery is a slightly earlier treatment of the Job story from the Akkadian Empire;  I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom is an even closer telling from nearby Mesopotamia dated about 1000 BCE.  The story of evil befalling a good person is profound but Job, the carrier of the story, is a fictional or mythical character.  At the same time, he is Everyman.  There has never been any shortage of people who had reason to cry, “Why me, O Lord?”  No amount of scholarly exegesis about Job’s patience or lack thereof or the identity of the “Redeemer” (go’el) upon whom he relies can alter the fact that Job is a victim of Jehovah’s injustice just as Odysseus is a victim of Poseidon’s injustice.

Perhaps it was Mark Twain who claimed, “God created man and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”  But from the beginning, God has been a necessary explanation for everything we don’t understand, including good and evil.  The Bible struggles with such issues and offers the reader both wheat and chaff.  There are, for example, better strategies than turning the other cheek, plucking out an eye that looks at a woman with lust or weeping and gnashing one’s teeth because of a failure to wear the right clothes to a banquet you were dragooned into in the first place.  The laborers in the vineyard would have been better advised to form a union and the last thing the good shepherd should do is to lay down his life thereby leaving the wolf free to dine on the sheep at its leisure.  But the beatitudes, the corporal works of mercy, the golden rule and the great commandment to love one another are the perfect recipe for building the shining city on a hill.  Read chronologically, the Bible tells the story of the Jews gradually coming to the recognition that God is love and that may be the most hopeful idea that the human race has ever had.

Love is not some adolescent sentiment found in saccharine Valentine cards. It is not sexual attraction or infatuation although it can emerge from such over time [9].  Rather it is a sense of fellow-feeling that expresses itself across a wide spectrum of emotions.  Most generally, it is the ability to stand in the shoes of others, to feel their emotions and to act with sympathy toward them.  Sympathy, in fact, is the word used by Adam Smith, the preeminent genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, as almost a synonym for love.  In his first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he argued that sympathy brought about three great virtues, prudence, benevolence and justice which, together with self-interest, formed the basis of what Rousseau would call the social contract three years later.

Like Smith, we need to be careful here.  Love is by no means the strong force of the social contract.  That, of course, is self-interest or, more precisely, what is perceived as essential to self-interest [10].  But untempered by sympathy, self-interest very quickly becomes toxic.  As Smith said, we do not gain our supper through the benevolence of the butcher.  At the same time, the butcher cannot long survive without the good will of the community which will ameliorate any temptation he may have to cheat [11].  For Smith, good will or benevolence tempers self-interest thereby enabling what he famously referred to as the “invisible hand.”

Ultimately, we are trying to deal with extraordinarily complex concepts which are impossible to quantify.  The Bible deals with nebulous intimations of a reality beyond our senses.  How should we behave and why?  Is there a purpose to our existence?  We seem to be born with a sense of alienation or estrangement from something very important, something many people have called God.  Entire mythologies have been built up to explain this something including the oxymoronic idea of an uncaused first cause who or which continues to act in history.  The Bible is a record of the thinking that has been done on these matters.

To return to a chronological reading of the western scriptures, the Israelites appear to have borrowed the idea of monotheism from the Babylonians who worshiped Baal, a fearsome and unforgiving deity.  When Genesis was written, the historians portrayed Yahweh as having had a similar sociopathic personality.  He slaughtered the innocent including the innocent women and children of Sodom and Gomorrah in spite of his pledge to Abraham not to do so.  He committed genocide with his flood.  He toyed with Abraham and Isaac and forced Jeptha to sacrifice his only child (Judges 11: 30-39).  He tormented Job, a blameless and upright man who “feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1) merely to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  But Job is a turning point in that, unlike Abraham who begs obsequiously for God to spare the innocent Sodomites, Job confronts his tormentor and is finally restored [12].  From then forward, God begins to realize that love is a two-way street.  And as embarrassing as it may be, God needs the love of his creatures [13].

Until recently, the idea that God is love (1 John 4:16) was stoutly resisted because it is the same thing as saying love is God.  As indicated above, both the Old Testament and the New are replete with examples of this resistance.  When God is about to give Moses the ten commandments, he says, “The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.  Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished;  he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34: 6-7)  There is only one explanation for the apparent contradictions.  The Bible has been extensively edited by those with a vested interest in God’s wrath.  Almost every example of God’s love is quickly paired with an example of his irrational wrath.

Cui bono?  Who gains from a fearsome, mercurial even capricious God?   If many are called but few are chosen what is a pilgrim to do?  How do you get to the promised land from this world of trials and temptations when your God seems so arbitrary?  Neither saint nor sinner has a chance without the brokerage of the anointed, the magic of the sky pilot.  Neither Porgy nor Bess can escape the evil strewn either by the distant white demi-gods of Catfish Row or the devil in the guise of the aptly named Sportin’ Life whose Happy Dust brings only despair.  Interestingly, there is no God figure in the folk opera but there are several priests, Clara and Serena among them.  They pray and lead the community in prayer but to no effect.  The prosperity of the priesthood depends on the fear of God.

It is often said that Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so that common people would be able to read it and that was likely part of his motivation.  But he also had a variety of axes to grind to make scripture consistent with his own theology.  Among other things, he tinged his version with some not-so-subtle anti-Semitism.  He even refused to acknowledge that Jesus made his final trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.  Instead, he translated the Hebrew word Pesach as Ostern, Easter.  He did not bother to explain to the common people why Jesus, a Jew, would celebrate an event that was yet to occur.  The Bible and all its translations are, first and foremost, products of their times and places and of the preconceptions and  prejudices of those who produced them.  The wisdom it contains is real and remains vital today even if it must be carefully separated from what ain’t necessarily so.

Notes

1.  From Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, 1935.

2.  Luke 2:14.  Some versions translate it as “good will to men” while others say “to men of good will” which is different entirely. The Greek and Latin versions are not ambiguous; it is the men who must display good will.  Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations in this essay are from the New International Version, Biblica, 1973.

3. Matthew 10:34-36.

4.  The Odyssey of Homer translated by Robert Fagles, Book 12, Line 45, Viking, 1996.

5.  Fifteen cubits is only  about 22 feet but spread out among the 197 million square miles of the earth’s surface, it’s a hell of a lot of water especially since it has to flood Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon.  Where did it all come from and, more importantly, where did it all go when God finally pulled the plug?

6.  Actually the Bible says they were rams’ horns or shofars in which case the cacophony probably drove the inhabitants crazy enough to tear down the walls themselves.

7.  Two of the Evangelists, Matthew the tax collector and John were said to have been among the twelve apostles.  Mark was thought to be an associate of Peter, some say his son-in-law.  Luke was a physician and may have been literate.  He is also said to have written the Acts of the Apostles.  Both works underwent heavy editing for at least two hundred years after they were written.  None of these works however was written before about 60 AD, nearly thirty years after the death of Christ.

8.  No one really knows who “Mark” was.  One ancient and widely help opinion is that the gospel that bears his name was an amalgam of Peter’s sermons in Rome.  Peter is thought to have been crucified in 64 CE and internal evidence suggests the gospel was written between 65 and 70.

9.  In his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI makes a similar point, differentiating between eros, essentially sexual love, and agape which he does not define but which is usually thought of as, “the highest form of love, especially brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God.”  The encyclical is brilliant although I would argue that he is wrong to think that eros can only be fulfilled in agape when it is “disciplined and purified.”  An English version is published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops but the translation is unreliable and argumentative.

10.  Or as E.Y. Harburg’s lyric has it, necessity “…is the curse that makes / The universe so all bewilderin'.”  In the aftermath of World War II, Finian’s Rainbow (1947) was a modernist and progressive take on both individual and social ethics.

11.  Adam Smith is best known today as the father of capitalism, an economic system which illustrates the propensity of humans to ignore the lessons of history.  The pursuit of capitalist incentives periodically becomes addictive and metastasizes into greed which invariably brings about the collapse of the system.  Still, it is the only system that has historically been able to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number over extended periods of time.

12.  Confront may be too strong a word.  But where Abraham pleads and whines, Job is merely polite.  As he tells his friends, “I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.”

13.  The great Puritan theologian and poet, John Milton, wrote “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts, who / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.”  The first two lines have no application to the post-Job God.

CHURCH OF THE HEAVENLY POOP

Jerry Harkins

            On December 30, 2005 the New York Times ran a piece about teenagers shopping around for religious encounters designed specifically for their age group.  There was a Page 1 photo of a large number of them writhing in various states of ecstasy.  It appears many of them had earlier attended Sunday services elsewhere with their parents and then, instead of repairing to the mall like red-blooded America adolescents, they congregated at the youth services chapel of one the local supermarket churches.  The New Life teen center [1] in Colorado Springs looks more like a nightclub to me but what do I know?  There’s a picture of a youth minister, one Brent Parsley, leading some sort of liturgy.  According to the church web site, the Reverend Parsley says he is married.  His exact words are,  “You betcha! (and she's hot).”  He allows that his third favorite book of all time is Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi [2].  In the photo accompanying the article, he’s dressed like a white urban rapper in disheveled layers with ski goggles worn over his forehead.  He is telling his congregation, “Christmas ain’t about presents, yo!  The true meaning of Christmas is my main man:  J.C.”  Deep dude.  Fucking deep.

To some, Reverend Parsley’s service may seem based on the willing suspension of intelligence in favor of unbridled emotional expressionism.  Whatever its appeal, perfervid worship is not limited to teens.  A similar phenomenon can be witnessed among Christians called “Holy Rollers” who are a small minority of fundamentalists who speak in tongues and worship in primitive frenzy.  In one expression of this, adherents are encouraged to handle poisonous snakes thereby adding  elements of danger and excitement.  It would be easy to say all these liturgies tap into the compulsive, concussive power of sex and that may be part of it.  Pain, danger, sexual excitement, ecstasy:  somewhere in that brew there’s the Eros/Thanatos theme that has been part of the religious experience for millennia.  Ecstasy liberates.  Indeed Bacchus and Eros share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator.  Still, I’m not sure it applies to those writhing teens in Colorado unless at a layer of the subconscious I have no wish to explore.  They’re just too young.  They have too little experience of life to link sex with death never mind with religious ecstasy.  Or, given the natural state of their hormones, to have any need to do so.

            The archetypal gyration of ecstasy is a throwing up and shaking of one’s arms, a universal gesture with a rich semiotic subtext.  Most obviously, it conveys the thrill of victory achieved against significant obstacles.  It also expresses confidence and openness.  A politician arriving at an airport or a dais will often throw up his or her arms as if to accept the laurel wreath or the acclamation of a friendly crowd.  Look, I have nothing to hide.  Of course no one over the age of six believes that of any politician.  But the arms-up gesture also signifies an element of emotional surrender.  It may in fact derive from the hands-up stance universally required of prisoners.

            You used to see a slightly less animated version of the New Life service at the World Youth Days run by the late Pope John Paul II.  These typically involved hundreds of thousands of highly engaged young people but there was never any trashing of downtown, no street theater, no endless chants of protest, no binge drinking and, especially, no dirty words directed at the establishment.  The only offense they gave came from the really bad hymns they invariably sang. Asked why they were spending their summer in the heat and mud, two themes would emerge, neither terribly profound.  First, was simply, “I have to be here” or “I’m called to be here.”  Second was the pure joy of being near the Pope.

            This is not the first time I have found myself out of sympathy with our young people.  Smart as they are, there seems to be much in life that eludes them.  Many have strong opinions about the global economy but absolutely no understanding of it.  They enjoy the most inane entertainment including such dubious jewels in the crown of civilization as Christian Rap.  They tend to dress like slobs and, back home, they often binge like bums.  They don’t read and they don’t write, in many cases because they can’t.  And, yes, an awful lot of them get caught up in the Jesus thing.  They—adore is not too strong a word—a man who has done his utmost to crush the “People of God” theology that emerged from the second Vatican Council fifty some years ago.  They worship at the clay feet of an idol who has degraded and demeaned the female half the human race with his immoral and hypocritical rantings.

            What’s wrong with these kids?  What need did a decrepit old man fill for them?  Why not someone more wholesome?  I do not refer to Brent Parsley.  How about Britney Spears or the Kardashians?  Actually, I think I understand his attraction.  He was pastoral.  He loved these children and what’s more, he respected them.  He had the soul of the poet he once was.  He was courageous in the face of debilitating illness.  He wrote some of the most incisive social commentary of our times.  He faced down the Evil Empire and played a role in moving the world back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon.  Unfortunately, he also preached nonsense and failed miserably the most important test of any cleric, the ability to help people create a satisfying relationship with the divine.  On the contrary he drove many people away from the sacred and he left a legacy of deceit that will be almost impossible to undo.  The Church will crumble and it will be his fault because he was given the last best opportunity to save it and he squandered it tilting at stupidities like priestly celibacy and the use of condoms. [3]

            The kids, I think, know nothing of all this, positive or negative.  I suspect they do know he was crazy but they admired his persistence, his refusal to bend to others, his iron will.  Not a single one of those kids ever read his masterpiece, Centissimus Annus.  Nor have they read any of the sanctimonious drivel he published.  They don’t care, and maybe they shouldn’t.  Adolescence has always been challenging and never more so than at present.  In an Age of Information, today’s young people know far more than they understand.  There is more pressure put upon them from every quarter and, looking forward, they see little relief.  It must seem that the best times are long in the past.  John Paul represented certainty in an uncertain world, loyalty in treacherous world, hope against all hope.  Jesus said to and of Peter, “Upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  For all his frailty, John Paul was a rock.  He insisted, against all evidence, that he was infallible.  In the moral sphere, he could not be wrong.  The young people believed him where they’d be far too smart to believe their political leaders, their gurus or even their parents.

            The differences between New Life and World Youth Day are not insignificant but the similarities are impressive.  The late Pope, for example, probably never savored the literary pleasures of Everyone Poops and it is a good bet that Reverend Parsley has never encountered the prose of Thomas Aquinas.  But like all professional religionists their stock in trade is the answer to all of life’s problems, big and small.  Such folks know that, in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “Shit happens.”  And they are delighted it does.  If it didn’t they’d be out of business.  As it is, they have a vested interest in assuring that it continues to happen and do whatever the can to assure a steady supply.

Notes

1.  The New Life Teen Center is part of the New Life megachurch formerly presided over by Rev. Ted Haggard, a graduate of Oral Roberts University and once regarded as one of the most politically influential evangelicals in America.  He has said that the only difference between President George W. Bush and himself is that he prefers a different brand of pickup truck.  Otherwise he consulted with the White House every Monday.  Rev. Ted was later fired from New Life after admitting to drug use and a liaison with a male prostitute.

2.  An illustrated book from Japan written for children ages “baby to preschool.”  Part of the same series as that classic of children’s literature, The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts by Shinta Cho .  It may be sacrilegious to wonder what Rev. Parsley’s Number Two all-time favorite book is (assuming, of course, that Number One is the Holy Bible by Daddy-o, the Spook and his main man, the late J.C.  Yo!).

3.  Comparing John Paul II with Pope Francis is irresistible.  Francis too attracts ecstatic crowds but, as a general rule, they appear to be much more diverse and, on average, older.  Like John XXIII, Francis has the chops that would be needed to undo two millennia of the devil’s work as promoted by the church hierarchy.  But like John, he may not have the time.  Moreover, in spite of the theatrics, he has yet to demonstrate that he has the inclination.

MODERN ART

Jerry Harkins

Once upon a time, art was not nearly as convoluted an undertaking as it is today.  Artists did what they did to earn a living or maybe only to nurture their own emotional lives without actually articulating a nebulous theory about it and without the benefit of critics to explain it.  Nor did they need to concern themselves overly with the vicissitudes of a marketplace beyond a handful of patrons.  Aside from works commissioned for churches, the public rarely encountered most of what they produced and art as we understand it was not a force in the lives of most people. Artists were mostly anonymous craftspeople. Of course, there had always been exceptions.  Virgil, for one, was widely acclaimed by both the elite and the ordinary citizens of Rome.  Chaucer himself was not well known to the public at large but The Canterbury Tales was the medieval equivalent of a best seller.  Michelangelo was widely recognized as the greatest artist of his time by contemporary artists, patrons and the Italian public.   Mozart and Handel were favorites of the aristocracy and their large scale works attracted large audiences.  Mozart, however, remained very much a mid-level employee of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and was poor through most of his short adult life. [1]  But Handel died a wealthy man with an extensive art collection.  Thousands of Londoners attended his state funeral and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Such exceptions notwithstanding, most artists labored anonymously even as their art often attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians and litterateurs.  Plato and Aristotle both wrote detailed explications of the role of the arts in society and both worried about the power of art to deceive.  In late antiquity, Longinus’ extended essay “On The Sublime” described the Bacchanalian power of art almost admiringly to the point that he is sometimes referred to as Dionysius-Longinus.  The great nominalist debates of thirteenth century Paris dealt extensively with the ethics of representation.  Even Abelard addressed the central issue:  if, as Aristotle wrote, art is the heightened and selected imitation or representation of life, does that mean it automatically violates the standard of truth?  Heightened and selected, after all, implies different from and less accurate than its referent.  The truth is being distorted deliberately to make a point.  The artist who carved the Venus of Willendorf, some 24,000 years ago re-imagined female anatomy to emphasize its fertility symbolism.  Modern cubism distorts to emphasize the multi-dimensionality of the subject.  Picasso’s portraits of his mistress Dora Maar are thoroughly misleading if all you want to know is what the lady looked like.  The artist depicts his unique perspective of her.  No other viewer can possibly share that perspective which may be why early cubism was often greeted with disdain.  Modern music, literature and dance were similarly criticized for precisely the same reason:  they distorted, indeed violated reality.  For many, modern art seems meaningless and even tedious.

Of course, all art inherently distorts the world as perceived by our unmediated senses which are in any event often unreliable. Artists bravely stand outside the mouth of Plato’s cave and try to tell us what they see.  Art proceeds from the imagination and deals in metaphor.  Its purpose is not to deceive but to invite the mind to consider something beyond the obvious.  Some find this threatening.  The Bible, for example, condemns “graven images” [2] as sinful enough to be dealt with in the decalogue.  The second commandment begins, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

 By the nineteenth century, however, the perception of art was changing.  The arts were going public and artists were suddenly exalted members of the community.  The transition is exemplified by a famous incident in the spa resort of Teplitz in what is now the Czech Republic.  In the summer of 1812, Beethoven and Goethe, friends a generation apart in age, were walking in a public park when they came upon members of the royal family walking in the opposite direction.  Beethoven told Goethe to keep walking as artists are more important than aristocrats and “they must make way for us,” not the other way around.  Goethe thought differently;  he took off his hat, stepped aside and bowed while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their retinue. The royals drew aside to make way for him, saluting him in friendly fashion. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too much esteem to those people.” [3]

By the end of the nineteenth century, Puccini to the contrary notwithstanding, La Vie de Bohème was no longer the default condition of artists.  Indeed, art itself was undergoing a profound revolution.  In Paris, painters turned their attention to renditions of ideas about things and to emotional responses to those ideas.  Monet’s 1872  “Impression, Sunrise” had suggested the term for an entire movement.  In an earlier era, this painting might have been a recognizable picture of the harbor at Le Harvre.  Now it appeared to be a quick sketch done at the scene and meant to be taken back to the studio for refinement. [4] At first, critics used the term "impressionism" pejoratively.

Impressionism became the progenitor of a dazzling variety of isms that arose in its aftermath as painters and sculptors sought to depict interior rather than exterior realities.  Most of their works remained grounded in representation even as they were explicitly trying to break away entirely from the object in favor of complete abstraction.  It was a difficult quest.  Ultimately, Jackson Pollock developed a thoroughly abstract genre called “drip painting,” and others such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still invented color field painting.

Abstract expressionism, derided by many at first, ultimately became widely if not universally accepted by  connoisseurs, collectors and the general public.  In 2012, a color field painting by Mark Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” brought $87 million at auction, 2.6 times the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt.  This was only the thirtieth highest price on record for a painting but, among the top fifty, all but two or three are modern or contemporary.  Acceptance was not, of course, universal.  In 1975, Tom Wolfe published a cri de Coeur denouncing and ridiculing modern art, especially abstract expressionism. [4]  His main complaint seemed to be that the retreat from representation, the “de-objectification” of art, amounted to nothing but pseudo-intellectual masturbation.  It was a theme he returned to twenty-five years later in a remarkable defense of the sculptor Frederick Hart who had  been excoriated by the art establishment for “defacing” the abstract purity of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial by providing a realistic portrayal of “Three Soldiers” nearby.

The entire brouhaha was an exercise in absurdity.  Ms. Lin’s wall may be the most moving war memorial ever erected. It does indeed “de-objectify” the war but, in place of jungles and weapons and burning villages, it forces the viewer to focus on the price we paid in terms of individual lives cut short.  Mr. Hart’s soldiers are majestic as sculpture and innovative as memorial art.  Moreover, they are casting their gaze at the wall with a combination of reverence and grief.  They, together with Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial are a subsidiary but integral part of experience.  They honor the wall and encourage us to see it as they do.

Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan explained the difference between “hot” and “cool” media any debate between the relative merits of representational and abstract art is bootless.  The former is hot, engaging the viewer quickly and completely without requiring extensive interaction.  The latter is cool, demanding a great deal of involvement.  Both communicate between artist and audience.  Neither does so perfectly.  Both seek to seduce your imagination.  Both celebrate the uncertainty and ambiguity that are part and parcel of the human condition.

What is new in “modern” art is not abstraction per se of which there are examples going back thousands of years [5].  But over the past century and a half, artists have developed an entire spectrum of genres which rely more or less on non-representational imagery.  Very quickly, such art has become dominant, especially in North America and Europe.  Many forces encouraged this transition:  the declining influence of the aristocracy and the church, urbanization and a more educated populace, a sudden rise in academic interest in the arts and, not the least, a sense that the humanities in general had reached something of a natural climax.  Museums were established, attracting a large audience of people yearning for culture and advancement.  The British Museum had already opened to the public in 1759 and the Louvre followed in 1793.  Nicholas I admitted the public to The Hermitage in 1852 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1866.  With broader interest came both artistic and economic independence and a favorable environment for innovation.

The new forms occasioned a wide range of responses, positive and negative, from a startling array of sources.  Suddenly everybody was a critic.  Modernism was greeted with ridicule by the public press, condemned as “degenerate” by politicians of the left and right and denounced as the “new iconoclasm” by at least one philosopher.  Less than three weeks after leaving the White House, Teddy Roosevelt published a review of the seminal 1913 Armory Show.  He was not impressed by the European “extremists” and recommended that Americans “should keep track of the avant-gardes but by no means approve of them.”  Both he and The New York Times were actually offended by Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2.”  More recently, the poet John Ciardi summarized what many traditionalists still think of modernism. “Modern art,” he wrote,  “is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”  The negative reactions, however, were overpowered with startling rapidity and, as we have seen, traditionalism was relegated to the defensive.  A similar seachange in perceptions accompanied the arrival of modern poetry and fiction while almost the opposite occurred in the reception of modern music.  But such reactions are a matter of taste which cannot be the subject of edict or fiat.  Thus, critics who proceed from a theoretical bias expose themselves to irrelevance.  What happens in art—any art—is a kind of intercourse between an artist and a witness.   As Rainer Maria Rilke explained to the young poet, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Notes

1.  Mozart earned 150 Florins a year in Salzburg.  The Florin contained 3.5 grams of pure gold (.123 oz.) which, at today’s price ($1,564.20/oz.) would be equivalent to $28,859.49 a year, roughly the median income of all U.S. workers in 2012.  Such calculations are, of course, less reliable and less meaningful than a writer would hope.

2.  Exactly what constitutes a “graven” image is a matter of some ambiguity.  Most English translations of the second commandment (Deuteronomy 5:8 and Exodus 20:4) specifically limit the prohibition to graven or carved images and most commentators believe that the Hebrew original refers only to idols.  But the text clearly refers to all images.  In both books, it reads, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”  The next verse prohibits the worship of such images but it is clearly referring to one type of the generally prohibited graven images.  Leviticus 26:1 specifically addresses the question of idols.  “Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it.”  This is one of many priestly regulations, not part of the Decalogue.  To complicate matters further, in Numbers 21:8-9, God commands Moses  ‘“Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’  So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”  A bronze snake is clearly a graven image.  Of course, this is one of those things you should not try at home.

3.  This description of the famous incident is taken from a written account by Bettina von Arnim, a friend of both Beethoven and Goethe.  There are other accounts offering slightly different details but there is no testimony that I know of by an eyewitness.  For one thing, Beethoven’s mild reproach does not sound like the great man who had a titanic temper.  The famous 1887 painting of the scene is by Carl Rohling who was born 37 years after the event.

4.  It almost seems the Impressionists were borrowing an idea from the Romantic poets.  In 1798, William Wordsworth had written, “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:  it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

5.  The book (or extended essay) was titled The Painted Word is a notable example of the New Journalism of which Wolfe was a pioneer.  There is irony in the fact that the journalist who dethroned objectivity from journalism should complain about pretty much the same thing in art.

6.  The pre-historic people of Ireland were among the earliest abstractionists, etching their elaborate spirals and other designs on rocks and in metal.  Some of these appear to be standardized patterns which recur in widely separated locations.  Such constructions as the passage tomb at Newgrange which was built between 3200 and 3100 BCE display elaborate designs some of which seem to be symbolic while others appear to be pure design.  They are much more recent than the cave paintings of Lascaux and other sites in Europe which are astonishingly representational.  Greek and Roman architectural ornamentation used abstract motifs but are, of course, much younger than the Irish material.