Category: Attitude

Deer Hunting with Jesus

I learn a lot of things from a lot of places, especially from listening to people I formerly blew off.

A book with a title like Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War was kind of irresistible to someone – well, actually, it was my wife – who for some reason – well, actually, it’s because it was on my wish list – gave it to me for Christmas.

All things considered, I suppose it wasn’t too bad. At least I’ve now gotten a flavor of what’s meant by “Gonzo Journalism.”

Joe Bageant is, I guess, a gonzo journalist. He grew up in Winchester, Virginia – unless that’s one of many facts he made up on the fly – and returned to live there after some decades away:

A raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor-and why they hate liberalism.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is web columnist Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which-like countless American small towns-is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”

(From the book’s own description)

“Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man’s life in God’s own backwoods.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch

I think “white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose” is a euphemism for “reckless advocacy, indifferent to factual accuracy.”

“Dead serious and damn funny…Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder…Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. “
—Mother Jones

“Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating … Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Hunter S. Thompson’s booze-and-dope-fueled meditations on Nixon’s political potency, and C. Wright Mills’s understanding of the durability of the power elite.”
—The American Prospect

What’s the Matter With Kansas, from what I hear, was a full-length “how effing stupid are these people!?” But I heard it from conservatives, who Thomas Frank thinks are the beneficiaries of Kansans’ effing stupidity. So maybe I was misinformed.

I’ve accused Bageant of factual inaccuracies, and I owe specifics, I think.

1. First, he says (Chapter 5, page 180 in mine) his parents met “at a Billy Graham tent revival during the Second World War.” I didn’t, and still don’t, think that Graham was doing tent revivals then, but he’s a couple of years older than I thought, and there’s some smallish chance, from his abbreviated biography at Wikipedia for instance, that he did tent revivals as part of his “other preaching engagements” during college. But I’d be willing to bet a modest amount that it was a tent revival by someone other than Billy Graham, or that it was later than World War II.

2. He riffs in the same chapter (page 186) on the “blood” motif in fundamentalist Protestantism, concluding with a quote from an English Professor:

There is a big leap from the liberation of Exodus, when Jews sprinkled blood on their doorposts, to the salvation proposed by Christians, in which blood is drunk by the community of faith. The Christian community not only lives after death by the blood of their Christ; but they feed on it in life. What can this mean, to drink blood?

Well, to a fundamentalist Protestant, “to drink blood” means precisely nothing. It’s pure symbolism. They reckon they’re supposed to have a communion service now and again to recollect Good Friday. The 6th Chapter of the Gospel According to John, where Christ says repeatedly, even to the point of driving away some of His disciples, that we must eat His body and drink His blood if we want life in us, is maybe the only Chapter in the Bible that they resolutely refuse to read literally (even in the loose sense of “literal” that’s pandemic these days). They have elaborate tapdances around that chapter, but basically they reject it because it sounds too damned Catholic.

Bageant was grasping for bloody imagery, grabbed the first faux scholarly blood quote he could find, and in the process confounded a sacrament in historic Christianity with the lurid locutions of Fundamentalism. Even he should know better than that.

3. In Chapter 7 (page 243),  Bageant writes about Medicare when he clearly means Medicaid. I know enough about both that I’d bet you any amount he’s wrong.

Still, the arc of Bageant’s story is credible. Despite the Medicare whopper, for instance, he “shreds through the lies of our times [about “nonprofit” hospitals] like a weed-whacker in overdrive,” in his chapter An Authorized Place to Die. I just wouldn’t rely on him for any little details, such as “and” and “the.” Read him like a good ole’ boy competing in a Whopper-Telling Contest.

Reading his chapter on guns (Valley of the Gun) was especially timely as the press and Hollywood goad us to “demand a plan” for gun control (i.e., “we must do something, even if it’s oppressive and counterproductive, about evil guns, not about an evil entertainment industry that feeds the imaginations of the unhinged with revenge and other gratuitously violent movies and video games.”):

In 1960 common sense was equally distributed between liberals and conservatives. In those days, even liberal personages such as Democratic senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey said repeatedly that guns had a place in the home because history has shown that governments, even the best of them, have a habit of oppressing people who cannot defend themselves at their own front doors. Imagine any Democrat saying that aloud today.

(Page 132.)

Now that most states have passed laws allowing honest citizens to carry concealed weapons, gun advocates are being proven more right than they ever hoped to be. Joy of joys, it is women – in fact, poor urban women – and the poor in general who benefit most from concealed carry laws. It doesn’t get any better than that when it comes to serving up cold crow to Democratic gun controllers. Large declines in rapes and attacks on women have occurred wherever the laws have been enacted. A study by John R Lott Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, found that the urban poor and minorities lived more safely with guns in their pockets or purses: “Not only do urban areas tend to gain in their fight against crime, but reductions in crime rates are greatest precisely in those urban areas that have the highest crime rates, largest and most dense populations, and greatest concentrations of minorities.” …
Most liberal anti-gun advocates do not get off the city bus after working the second shift. Nor do they duck and dodge from streetlight to streetlight at 1 AM while dragging their laundry to the doozy duds, where they sit, usually alone, for an hour or so, fluorescently lit up behind the big plate glass window like so much fresh meat on display, garnished with a promising purse or wallet, before they make the corner-to-corner run for home with their now-fragrant laundered waitress or fast-food uniforms. Barack Obama never did it. Hillary Clinton never did it. Most of white middle-class America doesn’t do it either. The on-the-ground value of the second amendment completely escapes them.

(Pages 146-147.)

And he chronicles many other such blows as well, including “economic conscription.” The poor Scots Irish of places like Winchester make up a disproportionate share of our cannon fodder, by economic necessity. The Democrats are little or no better than the Republicans on feeding them to the coffins in our wars of choice.

Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynndie had held at the chicken processing plant, though many deny it or did not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism in useful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. These so-called volunteers are part of the nation’s defense code draft – economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. 1300 a month, a signing bonus, and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass.

(Page 200.)

Other select quotes:

When our town’s educators decided to hold a conference on the future employment needs of our youth, the keynote speaker was the CEO of a local rendering plant, Valley Protein, a vast stinking facility that cooks down roadkill and renders deep fryer fats into the goop they put in animal feed. He got a standing ovation from the school board and all the Main Street pickle vendors, and not a soul in that Best Western events room thought it was ironic. (Page 29.)

Even if we are one house payment away from homelessness, even if our kids can’t read and our asses are getting so big they have their own ZIP Codes, it’s comforting to know we are at least the best place on earth. There is America, and there is the rest of the world – envious and plotting to bring us down and “steal our freedom.” (Page 83.)

The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and mall and eating fried chicken. (Page 110.)

It has been an orgy so glorious and unholy, so mindless that we have now eaten our seed crop in our spiraling consumerism. (Page 112.)

Independent fundamentalist churches are theologically woolly places whose belief systems can accommodate just about any interpretation of the Good Book that a “Preacher Bob” or a “Pastor Donnie” can come up with. (Page 162.)

After a night of political discussion at Royal Lunch, a British relative, a distant continental member of the Bageant clan, called our gang of locals “the most intellectually squalid people I’ve ever met” – and he had chewed qat with Ugandan strongman Idi Amin’s bodyguards. (Page 206-07.)

We live in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords. (Page 262.)

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably and often exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try to open the door. (Page 263.)

I guess I’d give it four stars for the story arc, but I can’t give five stars or unequivocal endorsement to a book so riddled with unsettling errors.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The Righteous Mind

It may sound impious to say it on the eve of the Feast of Christ’s Nativity, but I just finished maybe the most important “secular” book I’ve read this year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Frankly, I think the title may have overpromised on why good people are divided by religion, but I’m too concerned about our divisive (“Manichean” is how Haidt puts it at the end) politics, which he observes shrewdly, not to forgive him for that.

I’ve often had occasion in recent years to accuse liberals of being simplistic – a charge I especially savor since they started accusing conservatives of being simplistic about the time I was in college. It turns out that in a very important sense, I’m right in that charge.

In a prior iteration of moral psychologist Haidt’s work, he was testing only for five moral bases or foundation:

1) harm/care,
2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights),
3) ingroup/loyalty,
4) authority/respect, and
5) purity/sanctity

You can see how you score by taking the Moral Foundations test at YourMorals.org

Liberals base their political views (instinctively – that’s how both sides do politics, with reasons being a sort of press agent to put a patina of intellectual plausibility on something much more visceral) on only the first one or two of those bases. Indeed, it sometimes appears that all they care about is helping folks they see as victims of oppression (the harm/care foundation).

Conservatives tend to use all five (now six, as liberty has been added) moral bases more or less equally.

Further, conservatives and moderates both understand liberals far better than liberals understand conservatives, who they caricature comically at times.

Now for my dirty little secret.  I’m not as well-balanced as the prototypical conservative. I’m almost as low as liberals on one foundation (and that’s lower than a snake’s belly). But I blow away liberals and conservative on another.

I’d say I’m weird, except Haidt uses WEIRD to describe Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic folks — who are total outliers in the grand global scheme of things. If you want to study human nature, find a lot of subjects who aren’t WEIRD.

This book surely will promote mutual understanding, and in this instance, Tea Party shenanigans of recent years notwithstanding, it’s the liberals who especially need to up their understanding game.

(* I’m not really impious. We had more than 3 hours of Church services this morning and we’ll do another few hours starting at 11 pm. I’m just killing time right now.)

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Things that cheer me up

It’s no secret that in many ways I’m less than sanguine about the direction of the country and the world. As a guy who by long habit (I’ll not make a virtue of the habit) sees the glass half empty, it probably behooves me to mention things that cheer me up. Although I open with an explicitly religious one, they’re not all religious by any means. One of them may even have anti-religious undertones. And not even one is political; where’s the good news in that wasteland?

  1. Romans 8:38-39.
  2. People voting with their feet.
  3. Beauty.
  4. Steven Pinker.
  5. Front Porch Republic.
  6. Craftsmanship.

    7. Continue reading “Things that cheer me up” →

Self vs. Identity

Sometimes, Fr. Stephen Freeman just takes my breath away. I’ve never heard anyone who can so evocatively speak (maybe even deepen) spiritual truths I thought were ineffable. He’s a keen observer, wide reader, and deep thinker.

I highly recommend The True Self and The Story of Me. It’s a podcast of less than 13 minutes if you can resist “rewinding.” From the website:

The true self is “hid with Christ in God,” St. Paul tells us. What then is the “self” that we live with every day? Fr. Stephen looks at how we create our own identity and how we should seek our true self in Christ.

From early in the Podcast (paraphrase):

The story we tell ourselves about who we are actually begins to become our identity. But this carefully constructed and defended story is not our true self. Distinguishing between the two is one of the most essential tasks of the spiritual life.

One distinction that struck me (though Fr. Stephen didn’t juxtapose them explicitly) is that the heart, the true self, is quiet, intuitive, lives in the present and is accepting of circumstance, whereas without an enemy, the mind is unsure even of its own identity.

Another observation: part of our terror of dementia is that we lose the stories from which we construct our egos, and cannot imagine an existence without them.

But I’m beginning to be able to imagine existence without a narrative construct because for 15 years, I’ve been showing up on Sunday morning, trying to “lay aside all earthly cares” – to step out of chronos into kairos. There are no histories in kairos – if only I can stay there rather than thinking “Wow, how far I’ve come! Remember how shallow Sunday services were back pre-Orthodoxy? When will my young grandson start behaving more attentively in Liturgy? What will I have for lunch? What time is it?“ 

Listening would be, I think, a very good use of your chronos.

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If you’re having time wrapping your mind around the possibility of a self without a narrative, try entering into the narrative of Lonnie Sue Johnson, as told by Amy Ellis Nutt – because Lonnie Sue, who has global amnesia as a result of encephalitis, has no narrative of her own.

It’s tragic – but I don’t think you could ever convince me that Lonnie Sue has no self.

“Our identity is made up a lot of what we remember about our past and when that’s taken away, what’s left?” said Michael McCloskey, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins University, who is part of a team testing the parameters of Lonni Sue’s memory. “But clearly something is. She’s not an empty shell that can talk. She has likes and dislikes and has a personality . . . There’s something of a child-like quality about her. Perhaps without a memory of horrible things, she doesn’t know how people can be so cruel.”

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Talk about anticlimax:  Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Wednesday, October 10, 2011

  1. Did you hear the one about the old maid?
  2. Why Handwriting Matters.
  3. On voluntarily leaving the center of the cosmos.
  4. Critiquing the Critics
  5. Redoubling efforts.
  6. Death to smart alecks!
  7. Substance-free foreign policy prattle.

Continue reading “Wednesday, October 10, 2011” →

Whatever it is, it isn’t football

The recently-departed Andy Griffith had a great routine, Football, as a stand-up comic before his long decades on television. It starts off with this:

It was back last October, I believe it was, we was gonna hold a Tent Service off at this college town ….

From there, he goes on to recount his first encounter with football. Like most humor, it’s less funny on repeat hearings, but I laughed until I cried first time. Treat yourself if you’ve never heard it.

I thought of it this morning as I learned that Jason Peters, Front Porch Republic’s “Bar Jester,” is taking a sabbatical from weekly, systematic blogging. To him I owe the tag “Krustianity,” derived initially from my favorite of his blogs, Mere Krustianity (if you’re not in “the club,” that’s an allusion).

Here is, for my tastes, the key excerpt:

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:
If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”
I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Yup. Whatever the new game is, it isn’t football. It seems almost providential that Andy started his story with a Tent Meeting, a progenitor of today’s chapels-cum-coffee-bars in improbable places like former big box stores, the apotheosis of Evangelical Krustianity. The “’Bible Harvest Chapel,’ which is a kind of movie theater retrofitted to a former big box electronics store” was the Bar Jester’s launch pad.

But with even Colorado Springs now trying to distinguish between what it believes and “what Colorado Springs believes,” there perhaps is room for hope that Krustians will again become recognizably Christian. My habitual pessimism has been challenged by lots of little signs, the size of a man’s fist, that people are starting to “get” things of various degrees of importance – things about which American culture generally, and American religious culture in particular, started on a real bender many decades (or even centuries) ago.

One such sign is the establishment of a Patristics Center at Wheaton College, which I grew up seeing as the Evangelical’s Jerusalem. Another is the widespread influence of Orthodox theology through western academic theology over the past century or so. Once you get to know the early Church writers, it’s hard to argue in sincerity – and I’ll give credit for a redemptive dose of sincerity to many Evangelicals (though fewer than I once thought) – that early Christianity was essential Evangelical, especially in its ecclesiology, its doctrine of the Church.

There are people with a financial interest in, indeed a livelihood tied up with, running places like Bible Harvest Chapel, but if the GOP can collapse in a decade, so can Krustianity.

The odds of “New Christians” getting it right will rise dramatically if they cease ignoring or even despising Christian history. “To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant,” Cardinal Newman said, but that’s a risk a person of integrity will take.

* * * * *

A side note may be in Order. I rarely write about mainstream Protestantism, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, I never was a mainstream Protestant, whereas I was unequivocally Evangelical for 29 years and equivocally Evangelical for an additional 20. I’m still connected, as closely as one can be connected to anyone, to an equivocal Evangelical.  In two weeks, I will be recovering from the 45th-year reunion of my class at an Evangelical boarding high school, which was and remains very formative in my life.

These people remain, in a sense, my spiritual family. I care about them. I want them to get it right without further ado.

Second, old habits die hard. As an Evangelical, I wrote off mainstream Protestantism as moribund. I now suspect there was more life there than I thought, but I still think it’s dying and, rightly or wrongly, I give its members less credit for sincere Christian faith than I give Evangelicals (as I said: old habits die hard), and thus have lower hopes for them becoming Orthodox instead of just lapsing into … oh, never mind.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.