Category Archives: Political culture

Water cooler conversation

“Hey, didja see it on YouTube?”

“What?”

“That crazy preacher guy. You know, the religious leader that presidential candidate follows?”

“Oh yeah, him.”

“What a nut case. Ya know what he said? He said, ‘You impostors. Damn you! You slam the door of Heaven’s domain in people’s faces.’ [1] What’s up with a preacher saying ‘damn you’? Isn’t that swearing?”

“Huh. I didn’t know he said that.”

“Yeah, doesn’t it sound like he’s a communist or something? I saw this other video clip where he said, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ [2] Hey, in my church I learned that you gotta earn your daily bread. This preacher sounds like a goddam Commie who wants to give everything away to homeless.”

“Jeez, he sounds like a radical nut.”

“You don’t know the half of it. He also said the peacemakers are children of God. [3] You know what that means — he’s one of those anti-war nuts that wants us to pull out of Iraq and leave it to the terrorists. Anyway, that’s what Brush Limburger said on his radio show.”

“Christ, that’s pretty bad.”

“Well, it gets worse. If you look at those picture of him, he looks like a hippie nut, with that long hair braided down his neck. And I’m telling you, he doesn’t look exactly white, if you know what I mean. Like maybe he’s Middle Eastern, where all these terrorists are coming from. [4]”

“Hoo, boy. You think the guy is a terrorist?”

“Hey, all I know is he doesn’t like us Americans. There was this other YouTube clip of him preaching, and he said, ‘How much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?’ [5] You can lay money on it that he wants to bring down the American government. [6]”

“Man. Thanks for telling me all this.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just trying to keep America safe. No way am I going to vote for anyone who follows a religious nut like that — I’m a good law-abiding Christian, not some kind of Commie peacenik who wants to bring down the American government.”

“They should just execute guys like that.”

———

Notes:

[1] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23.23, Scholar’s Version translation.
[2] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.4, King James Version.
[3] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.9, from the King James Version.
[4] Scholars generally agree that Jewish men in Jesus’s time wore their hair long and braided; as for Jesus’s skin color, it could have been a light to medium brown.
[5] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 9.19, New Revised Standard Version.
[6] Not to belabor the point, but Pilate accused Jesus of being “King of the Jews,” i.e., a possible political threat to the government.

My take on Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, strikes me as the best kind of prophetic preacher, someone who speaks without sugar-coating his moral and religious message for the comfort of his listeners. Jeremiah Wright now has the misfortune of being Barack Obama’s former minister, and Wright is being trashed because he preached a prophetic message, a few seconds of which have been replayed as sound bites on national media in recent days.

But preachers have to answer to religious standards, not political standards. We are not bound to preach patriotism for the United States, we are bound to preach the permanent truths that we find in our religious traditions. It may not be politically acceptable to do so, but we preachers at times may be called to point out that our country cannot legitimately take the moral high ground until we face our own moral failings with candor. And we prophetic preachers may find ourselves called to proclaim, for example, that ongoing racism demonstrates that some white Americans do not treat their neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. No one likes to hear that they have moral failings; this is one reason why some of the things we preachers say are not appreciated.

Politicians, on the other hand, have a very different task from preachers. Politicians do not speak prophetically; they speak in order to build political consensus. As a preacher, I am not surprised when I hear Barack Obama trashing Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. Wright preaches a religious truth: Our country has done moral wrongs, and those of us who are religious persons need to engage in repentance and forgiveness for those wrongs. Obama’s political truth is different; he needs to distance himself from Wright and build a political consensus.

It should be obvious by now that I’d rather hear Jeremiah Wright preach than Barack Obama speak. As a preacher, I might want to take Obama to task for sugar-coating our country’s moral failings. But then, I guess I should accept that he’s only a politician and thus is in the business of sugar-coating moral truths (from my point of view, anyway).

One last point: I wonder why we have not heard about Hillary Clinton’s minister, and John McCain’s minister. If I had a presidential candidate in my congregation, I trust they would be embarrassed by some of the moral stands I have taken; if they weren’t embarrassed, I would take that to mean that I had been sugar-coating moral truths.

The Alignment Game

Hey kids! Want a fun new game that allows you to make moral judgments, while minimizing the depression caused by the presidential primary season here in the United States? “The Alignment Game” gives us a way to judge the moral and personal characteristics of any politician, and have fun at the same time!

To play this game, you place politicians in one of nine possible moral/personal alignments. There are two axes: Lawful through Neutral to Chaotic, and Good through Neutral to Evil, with the following brief definitions (which I stole from this source):

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit…. People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.

Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. Chaotic characters follow their consciences, resent being told what to do, favor new ideas over tradition, and do what they promise if they feel like it. Someone who is neutral with respect to law and chaos has a normal respect for authority and feels neither a compulsion to obey nor a compulsion to rebel. She is honest but can be tempted into lying or deceiving others.

When you put everything together, you get a grid like this (links go to the DnD Wiki definitions):

Lawful Good | Neutral Good | Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral | True Neutral | Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil | Neutral Evil | Chaotic Evil

Now it’s time to play! (1) Pick a politician, assign him or her to one of these nine alignments, and explain why you assigned them the way you did. (2) The real fun comes when someone else disagrees with you — say, you’re a Barack Obama supporter and you assign Hillary Clinton to the Lawful Neutral alignment, and a Clinton supporter says, “No way is she Neutral, she’s Good!” (3) Reveal your own alignment.

Safe Example: George W. Bush is Lawful Evil. He is clearly Evil because he is willing to take or do whatever he wants without worrying about whether or not he is hurting another human being — and he is clearly Lawful, because his actions must conform closely to his own internal code of conduct. My own alignment is Chaotic Good, thus diametrically opposed to this Lawful Evil person.

Scoring: (1) You get points for creative explanation of why you’ve assigned someone to a given alignment. (2) You also get points for riling up other people. (3) For bonus points, reveal your own alignment.

Scoring for Safe Example above: Two points for explanation (totally ripped off from the System Reference Document for DnD). Zero points for riling up another person (Rush Limbaugh is not a person). Five points for actually following the rules and revealing my own alignment (whereas if I were Lawful Good, I only would have gotten one point for following the rules).

Now it’s your turn! Play The Alignment Game at home, at work, at church, or even in the comments below! Survive the appallingly bad selection of presidential candidates by Having Fun!

Based on an idea from Charlie’s Diary.

A poetic politician? Hard to believe….

I try not to write about politics here, but I am always willing to write about efforts to resist the anti-intellectualism that is dominant in the United States today. Columnist Ben Macintyre, writing for the London Times, has uncovered poetry which was written by Barack Obama “for a college magazine at the age of 19.” Macintyre’s assessment of the poems? — “Surprisingly good.” Apparently even Harold Bloom, the critic who is the self-proclaimed guardian of the “Western canon,” likes Obama’s poetry. Hillary Clinton, while not a poet herself, at least has no less than Maya Angelou to write poetry in her defense. Link to Timesarticle.

For the record, Macintyre reprints one of the 19-year-old Obama’s poems:

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.

No it’s not Maya Angelou, but yes, Obama’s poem is “surprisingly good” — and, given the current anti-intellectualism of the political scene, I find it utterly surprising that a U.S. politician even cares about poetry. We can only hope that this will start a trend of U. S. politicians aspiring to be smart and well-educated, instead of aspiring to be badly-educated corporate hacks.

Just the facts, ma’am

As the United States news media focuses on campaign minutiae — like the ongoing New York Times in-depth coverage of campaign advertisements (who cares?), and the fluffy personality pieces about candidate spouses — it’s hard to find solid factual information. So I turn to the BBC news Web site, which now features US elections map: state-by-state guide, an interactive map which shows who won (or is projected to win) how many delegates in which states.

Speaking of terrible election coverage, our local daily newspaper, the New Bedford Standard Times, never seems to have reported the result of many of our local elections last fall. They give us in-depth coverage of the Patriots (which is covered far better by the big regional papers like the Boston Globe), but ignore such important news stories as who won the New Bedford school committee race. I learned who was elected to the school committee from the local freebie paper, The Weekly Compass.

No wonder newspaper readership is rapidly declining in the United States. They feed us pundits and pablum, and expect us to suck it down and like it. When readers like me turn to the Web for our news — because that’s where we can get the facts we’re looking for, instead of pundits and pablum — the newspapers howl that blogs don’t provide “real journalism.” As it happens, blogs like Justin Webb’s BBC blog have given me more real news and factual information on the U.S. election than the New York Slime or the Wall Street Urinal.

Too bad, because I’m actually very fond of newspapers. But it seems to me they’re doing the damage to themselves, by not providing the facts readers want.

The primaries begin

Today is the date of the New Hampshire presidential primary elections. This quadrennial event causes me to reflect on American democracy.

Some people tell us that the United States of America is a true meritocracy, where only the most capable and talented people rise to the most prominent political positions.

By contrast, Teresa Nielsen Hayden tells us: “Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.”

If Nielsen-Hayden if right, United States presidential politics is not a meritocracy.

Political compass

Thanks to Will Shetterly, I discovered the Political Compass Web quiz. The folks behind this Web quiz contend that the old way of designating people as leftists or rightists just doesn’t work any more — after all, how can you compare two leftists like Stalin and Ghandi?

So they add a second dimension to the left/right scale, creating a graph with left/right on the x-axis, and authoritarian/libertarian on the y-axis. That separates Ghandi and Stalin, because Stalin was an authoritaian, while Ghandi valued the individual conscience.

It’s a useful distinction for religious liberals. There are plenty of religious liberals who would be classified as politically rightist on the old scale, but feel comfortable as religious liberals. Could be that politically rightist, religiously liberal folks would score in the social libertarian side of the y-axis of the political compass — that would be my guess, anyway.

Not that I think the Political Compass Web quiz is particularly well-done (it’s far too U.S.-centric, for example), but it does provide food for thought. By the way, in the interests of full disclosure, I scored as “Economic Left/Right: -9.63; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.67” — I’m only surprised that I didn’t score much higher on the social libertarian scale. This might reveal a flaw in the Political Compass Web quiz formula, because I suspect they don’t take into account the value of voluntary associations and related institutions in maintaining social libertarian values in a mass democracy.

Don’t forget to vote April 5

…in the upcoming elections in Kane and DuPage counties.

For those of you living in Kane County or Du Page County, don’t forget that we have an election coming up on Tuesday, April 5. I don’t care how you vote, but we Unitarian Universalists have long been supporters of democracy and this is one of your ministers telling you — make sure you get out and vote!

You can find information about Kane County elections on the Kane County Web site. Du Page County residents can find election information on the Du Page County Web site.

For Geneva residents, I see the most recent issue of the Geneva Sun has a letter from our own Steve Hanson. Steve supports the referendum for a 20-cent tax rate increase. If you don’t happen to agree with him, you still have a chance to write your own letter to the Sun to express your opinion.

Once again, I don’t care what your political position is, or whom you support, or how you vote — just vote. No excuses, now!!