April shorts

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Spring comes to the Northern hemisphere. This year I feel it more deeply than usual. I'm not exactly sure why, but it may have something to do with another feeling that has been unfamiliar in recent years: normalcy.

I don't want to exaggerate this normalcy -- aside from a massive container ship causing unprecedented traffic jams in the Suez Canal, we have many of the usual signs of official overreach, bad planning, indifference, or incompetence in high places -- whether we look at refugee children on our own USA borders; Brazil's COVID crisis; Russian authorities' gratuitous cruelty toward Aleksei Navalny; or the fractured humanitarian horror in Yemen. Here in the USA, we're reliving May 25, 2020 in excruciating slow motion, as a court in Minneapolis, Minnesota, tries Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Nobody I know claims that the USA's new president, Joe Biden, is perfect, but he is manifestly fulfilling the role of a president in time of crisis. He is assembling a cabinet of people who actually respect government, who seem to appreciate the agencies they serve, and are good at it; his administration communicates daily with the press; he serves as an effective communicator of his own policy initiatives; and those initiatives seem scaled to the challenges faced by an ailing and very fragmented superpower that is suffering from deferred maintenance at every level.

Finally, he is not a source of daily embarrassment and scandal. Maybe that's what feels like normalcy.

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Christ; Mark Antokolsky; State
Tretyakov Gallery; source.

Holy Week, by the Western calendar -- it's a time when I particularly feel the contrast between human cruelty and the infinite mercy of God, a contrast made so acute by God's son's treatment at the hands of people. He was arrested, tried, treated as a political football and framed as a challenge to the Roman empire, mocked, and subjected to a humiliating execution.

He is God's answer to whatever it is in the human heart that resorts to cruelty. Wherever that impulse -- to bind, humiliate, torture, and kill each other -- continues to grind on, we Christian people, as his body in the world, ought to be getting in the way. Some of us are best at analyzing and strategizing, others at teaching and mobilizing, others at direct action, others at prayer, still others at evangelizing in broad and narrow channels to everyone still bound by the mythologies of violence. Thank you for whatever you might be doing to challenge cruelty.

My Holy Week reading.

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I've written before about the importance of radio in my youth, and specifically about disk jockey Ron Britain, whose weekday and Sunday radio programs on WCFL in Chicago were my reliable havens in a chaotic and sometimes violent family life. 

Britain's program was a riot of humor and spontaneity -- in addition, of course, to the Top 40 tracks that were the station's bread and butter. (This interview touches on some of these antics and how they were arranged. Here's a sample show.) He even read commercials in the same style, with the same sound effects, and apparently the advertisers loved it. One of my favorite memories of Ron Britain was his visit to our high school in 1971, to be interviewed by our television production class. His biggest influence on my life was introducing me to the blues, for which I wrote and thanked him a few years ago. I was delighted to get King B's courteous response.

Two days ago I learned that Ron Britain died last October 25. After 62 years with his wife Peach, her unexpected death on October 19 apparently undid him. He ended his own life the day before her funeral. Now he is buried beside her.

Robert Feder wrote this wonderful appreciation of Ron and his place in Chicago radio history.

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One of the high points of my years in Russia was participation in a Russian Orthodox-Protestant conversation group. This Zoom conversation under the care of the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative brought back some of the memories of those meetings.

The next event on the Quaker Religious Education Collaborative's calendar: April 20 and 22, on collaborative Quaker youth ministry.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism provides a working definition of antisemitism that is not simultaneously a means of suppressing criticism of Israel as a nation or of its policies with respect to Palestine. Here are two commentaries from Mondoweiss: mainly positive, and somewhat more critical.

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Another rendition of last week's track, "Walking Blues" -- this time the musicians are Liz Lucas and luthier A.J. Lucas.

Inadequate

Perennially sarcastic Dmitri Kiselyov. Source.

When I think about Donald Trump's response to losing the 2020 election, a certain Russian word pops into mind that is difficult to translate into English: неадекватный, pronounced nye-adeKVATny. It's a partial cognate for the word inadequate, but it has particular nuances in Russian that seem sadly applicable to our graceless president. 

As Michele Berdy explains, the word refers to "someone whose thoughts, behavior or emotions are inappropriate to the situation or are out of touch with reality." A "neadekvatny" person isn't just being petty and petulant at a given moment, but could be incapable of ever rising to the occasion. And what occasion is more important than that crowning achievement of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power?

It's not just that Trump wants to dispute the results in certain states because his team detects significant irregularities; they could raise those concerns in a calm way, through well-defined complaints conveyed through the court system and the election bureaucracies of the states involved. Naturally, they would also want to get publicity for their complaints -- even that is not out of the ordinary.

What is absolutely beyond the pale is their resorting to inflammatory accusations, charging unambiguously that the Democratic Party is a "mob" that is hell-bent on electoral sabotage to accomplish a socialist coup, despite a) lack of evidence, b) success of many local Republican candidates, and c) the fact that much of the vote-counting bureaucracy is under Republican management. More than that, their allies in the fringes of white evangelicalism are trying to convince their audiences that the opposition to Trump is nothing more nor less than opposition to God.

Am I exaggerating? After all, some of Trump's allies in Congress speak in measured tones to the press, urging us to allow the lawsuits, recounts, and certification processes to unfold until the formalities wind up. It sounds like sweet reasonableness, despite their disregard for the normal practice of conceding when it's credibly determined that the 270-vote electoral college threshold has been passed. Given the lack of normalcy in this pandemic year, maybe we could allow some modest delay to check on actual irregularities.

However, first of all, election officials around the country seem agreed that, in terms of both logistics and security, the 2020 elections went remarkably smoothly. Secondly, the Trump campaign itself has been the very opposite of sweet reasonableness. I am on the Trump-Pence campaign e-mail list, and just sixteen minutes ago I got another e-mail entitled, "Proof of Election FRAUD" -- but with no proof at all in the body of the e-mail, nor even an allegation. It was the eleventh e-mail I received from them just today. I received eight yesterday, including one entitled "📎234 pages of sworn affidavits" (with the paperclip implying attachments, but there were none); and 22 arrived the day before, all begging me to "step up and join your fellow Patriots in the fight against the Left-wing MOB."

A thirty-six-hour harvest of donaldtrump.com e-mails

So whom should I take more seriously -- the calm operatives who speak to the press, or the campaign that is working overtime to alienate its audience from the democratic process?

It is clear which of these sources is being picked up by the government-sponsored media in Russia. Dmitri Kiselyov, the sarcastic presenter of flagship news program Vesti on Rossiya-1 television, is delighted to tell his audience that the USA, fond of lecturing others on democracy, couldn't even pull off its own 2020 elections. (Of course, under Trump, no such lectures have been forthcoming. No doubt some in the Kremlin will miss him. As for national elections in Russia, they do have the advantage that no one is in doubt about the results.)

Those in the Trump-Pence campaign audience who are Christians, particularly prophecy-oriented charismatics and Pentecostals, are getting special attention from their celebrity prophets. (See Julia Duin's post at GetReligion.org, "Who's covering this? Are charismatics and Pentecostals behind Trump's refusal to concede?") I see multiple layers of danger here: 

First of all, there are the intended and unintended consequences of using the powerful language of faith to build or expand a hard-core disconnected and embittered subculture that is totally available for future mobilization using the same manipulative tactics.

Secondly, those watching this spectacle from the sidelines -- particularly non-Christians -- can be excused for seeing it as a circus. On the plus side, maybe it all reinforces healthy skepticism about religious theatrics, but it might also confirm theological and class biases among those who already look condescendingly on what we might gently call the more enthusiastic flavors of Christianity. It might be easy to dismiss these brothers and sisters in Christ as "neadekvatnye" (so please don't!), but at the moment I'm reserving that term for the ringmaster himself, Donald Trump, for those who could tell him to pack it up but don't, and those who give him cover by publicly pretending that he's just looking for justice.

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More about those Trump-Pence campaign e-mails.

"A new con" ... is this a fair assessment of what Trump is actually looking for? Maybe it's a bit severe, but do you have any argument to the contrary? Clearly, Trump makes no concessions of fairness to his opponents; I'm way past giving him any benefit of the doubt.

Jennifer Rubin on the intersection of religious affiliations and political preferences.

The Kremlin and the rise of the zombie voters.

GetReligion also covers a new kid on the news media block, sponsored by a controversial sect. I guessed who it was ... I bet you will, too.

When a global pandemic interrupts your careful mission plans, what you say and what you're thinking might differ. Marilyn has no easy answers.

When our kids were growing up, we loved watching Bob Ross, and went to Muncie once to meet him at a public television event. Now, in that same location, there's a Bob Ross museum.

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Another gem from Taj Mahal.