Insane clickbait? Game over!!! Some thoughts on manipulative exaggeration (partly a repost)

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"By far the greatest Cafe the world has ever seen."

I was walking past a familiar storefront this afternoon, the Classic Football Shirts London shop, and happened to notice this claim in huge letters (how could I not?) on the front glass.

The cafe at this store is indeed nice, as Judy and I have experienced more than once. Does it live up to that claim? (Is it even in the same class as Chapters in Newberg, Oregon?) 

I'd rather ask, does it matter? 

My theme this evening is manipulative exaggeration. The "greatest Cafe the world has ever seen" may be exaggerated, but it's not manipulative. It's so over the top that nobody is likely to argue the point.

"Communist, not socialist. Communist."
Screenshot from source.

A few days ago, I watched a video clip of the USA's president say straight into the camera that New York City mayoral candidate is a "... communist, not socialist. Communist. He's far, he's far worse than a socialist."

I realize that as a rule the current U.S. president is not a reliable source of facts nor a defender of the biblical commandment against false witness, but I want to stick with this one case for a moment. Trump's assertion is an exaggeration (yes, Mamdani is on the left end of the USA's political spectrum, but not that far!) but also an outright falsehood (Mamdani is not a Communist either politically or philosophically, and this is a matter of public record).

The leader of what we used to call the Free World is guilty of manipulative exaggeration.

I realize that he's not the first U.S. politician to engage in this variation of false witness. As just one case study, I've just spend some time in a mixed experience of fascination and horror, reading about the 1884 presidential campaigns of Grover Cleveland and James Blaine. As American Heritage summarized it, "Grover Cleveland had seduced a widow; James G. Blaine had peddled influence [and] lied about it. In 1884, voters had to choose between two tarnished champions."

(My favorite line from Cleveland supporters: "We should elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office he is so admirably qualified to fill and remand Mr. Blaine to the private life he is so eminently fitted to adorn.")

Compared to the raging MAGA bulls in the china shop of democracy, it may seem like indulging in trivialities to point to the cesspool of manipulative exaggeration that makes up much of the Internet. But is this wider context just making it harder to raise a red flag when the president himself indulges? Might we become so cynical that we give up on seeking truth and unmasking manipulation even when it's conducted by our chief executive? And ... when it's conducted by "our own side" as well?

I'm sad to see that people on the left, where I generally find myself, are now constantly using these techniques of manipulative exaggeration, often in the form of "clickbait," in the supposed service of getting our attention for their message. My e-mails and my phone's text messages feature such lines as...

• Re: Taylor Smith...Donald Trump's DISGUSTING rant.
• re: Portland's polling location [Johan won’t respond??] (Portland, Oregon, doesn't have polling locations! Only drop-off points for our ballots, which can also be mailed in.)
• We can't believe you're a Republican!!!
• NOT asking for money, just your signature. (For the record, they did ask for money, too.)
• Impeachment COMING SOON [MUST READ >>]>

And in addition, there are those frequent "surveys" and "polls" which both major parties send out constantly, with questions worded to make it obvious how we should answer.

He is starting to worry about me.

If there's anything unique about the text messages and e-mails from the Republicans, it's how stupid they think their audience is. A frequent theme: the president has been checking with his staff to hear how I've personally responded to their latest plea.

If there's any blessing in this Internet/phone blizzard of manipulative exaggeration, it might be that the formulas (including senders' addresses, CAPITAL LETTERS, shocking headlines, etc) are so absurd that we're probably all learning how to filter them out. The sheer volume of such traffic may also reduce my patience with even using these devices as much as I've done in the past.  SHOCKING! It's WIN-WIN. GAME OVER!

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Four years ago, I posted the following essay on clickbait. I find my YouTube feed to be slightly calmer these days. Is it because I've somehow trained it to reduce this kind of traffic, or are content providers themselves realizing we're burning out on manipulative exaggeration?

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Youtube has figured out that I like videos about space travel, so they serve me up with lots of suggestions about the latest rockets and their builders.

Many of those videos have calm, interesting titles and descriptions, and the day is not long enough to view even a small portion of those. That's especially true for a video like this, modestly entitled "Crew-3 Mission | Approach and Docking," that takes more than six hours to watch from beginning to end.

Six hours may seem like a long time, but it's a lot shorter than the preceding video, "Crew-3 Mission | Coast and Rendezvous," which clocks in at nine hours. Strangely enough, that title completely omits the dramatic centerpiece of the video -- the launch!

Many of the videos I'm invited to watch are exactly the opposite: the titles are far more dramatic than the content. Often the titles reflect today's equivalents of the overused superlative "extreme" of a couple of decades ago.

These overly dramatic titles and descriptions are sometimes called "clickbait." This word entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1999, longer ago than I realized. (According to the OED, clickbait is "Internet content whose main purpose is to encourage users to follow a link to a web page, esp. where that web page is considered to be of low quality or value.")

In our classes at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, Russia, we occasionally presented our students with carefully curated cutting-edge lists of buzzwords and jargon (and sometimes asked them to predict whether those words and phrases would still be in use in five years), but I don't remember "clickbait" being in those lists. I think one of the last classes we did on this topic included the word "binge-watch" ... in case that helps you deduce what years I'm talking about.

Far from exciting my interest, clickbait titles and descriptions of videos relating to space travel usually repel me. Here are the top five words and phrases practically guaranteed to prevent my click:

game over! (which it never is!)

insane! (meaning, as far as I can tell, audacious)

humiliated! (usually comparing one tech entrepreneur/celebrity's success to another)

this is huge! (probably not)

it's happening! (and so is everything else)

I watched one of these videos, out of sheer curiosity and to maintain a shred of integrity for this screed. (What if it really was "game over" and my protests were just ill-informed?) 

GAME OVER! Elon Musk & Google's INSANE Partnership Will Change EVERYTHING 🔥🔥🔥

The video on the "insane" partnership of Elon Musk and Google was underwhelming. The commentator simply described the Starlink/Google collaboration, which was already public news five months earlier, using video clips that were only vaguely related to the narrative, not a single voice other than his own, and no analysis that could not be found in corporate press releases. Youtube doesn't mind, of course -- the video was preceded by two ads.

More samples from one evening's Youtube browsing:

Original post and links for that day, November 11, 2021, are here.

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A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs. Many thanks to Steven Davison for writing about this podcast. I've been sampling it. It lives up to Steven's praise. And if you think that rock music is a bit of a trivial subject for our difficult times, I can point out how multidimensional the podcast's coverage is, taking into account racial politics, business ethics, technical innovations, generational influences, in short, all the ways that music reflects life. What's more, we may need a thoughtful podcast on rock music while we're in detox from all that manipulative exaggeration.

While I'm at Steven's blog, here's a more typical post: a new look at "that of God" through the eyes of George Fox (of course), Lewis Benson, Rufus Jones, and Michael Langford.

What's going on in Richmond, Indiana? Two institutions closely related to Friends report troubling financial news. Here's an item on Earlham College and another on Friends United Meeting. (Part two of the FUM document is here.) 

According to FUM's Weekly E-news, FUM has scheduled an online information session on the financial situation and the 2026 budget on Thursday, November 13, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here. Lloyd Stangeland, FUM’s Acting Chief Financial Officer; Shawn McConaughey, Clerk of the Finance Committee; and Emily Provance, Clerk of the Advancement Committee, will facilitate the session.

"Responding to the calls of Palestinian Christians": a statement and petition campaign arising from the 2025 Church at the Crossroads campaign. Thanks to Kristin Du Mez for the link.

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Blues from Brazil: Little Walter's "Sad Hours" performed by Sacha Gamarra. Below: From Dnipro, Ukraine, Kostiantyn Kolisnychenko with the same instrumental.

The benefit of the doubt, part three (prequel)

As Israel strikes Iran with the stated purpose of eliminating that country as a nuclear threat, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy points out, 

Iran would not be this close to possessing a nuclear weapon if Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu had not forced America out of the nuclear agreement with Iran that had brought Europe, Russia, and China together behind the United States to successfully contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This is a disaster of Trump and Netanyahu's own making, and now the region risks spiraling toward a new, deadly conflict. A war between Israel and Iran may be good for Netanyahu’s domestic politics, but it will likely  be disastrous for both the security of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the region.

Quote: "This is a disaster of Trump and Netanyahu's own making."

The U.S. Secretary of State says that there was no U.S. participation in Israel's attack, but is Trump guilty of a share of the responsibility for Israel's perceived need to attack today?

Truthfully, I'm not in the mood to give the president, who has zealously reversed so many policies of the Obama and Biden years respectively, the benefit of the doubt in this case. Is that fair?

"The benefit of the doubt" has become an important concept to me, a way of identifying and warding off false witness, needless self-pity, and cynicism. I first wrote about this principle in my regular column in Friends United Meeting's Quaker Life magazine, back in June 1998:

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About a year and a half ago, Ellen Cooney, the co-founder of Start-Up Education (see her article), spent six weeks with us at FUM as a volunteer. She had told us she was willing to do anything; she simply wanted to spend time being part of a working group which met daily for Friends worship, and (as a General Conference Friend from Atlanta Meeting) to get to know FUM better.

Knowing of her professional consulting background, we wanted the benefit of her observations of FUM as an organization. She interviewed each staff member privately, talked with several leaders at the yearly meeting level, and studied our organizational charts and documents. She then made a presentation to all of us staff with suggestions for working more productively with each other and more responsively to the constituency. Of her many good ideas, one stood out for its simplicity and central importance: "Learn to give each other the benefit of the doubt."

Ellen said that this principle was one of the ground rules at a large consulting firm where she had worked. When she and her co-workers did not know why someone had done something, and especially when it looked like a mistake or a personal slight, this principle was so ingrained in the corporate culture that many negative assumptions and grudges were nipped in the bud.

We are beginning to learn that when we want to know, "Why would he do that without checking with me? Why did she send that letter without copying to me? Why were they invited and not me?" we need to think, "Until I get a chance to ask, I better give them the benefit of the doubt. They must have had a good reason."

Recently I served on a committee, but missed a meeting because I was not notified. I could have dreamed up all sorts of reasons why I wasn't invited: My input was not valued. I had asked too many questions at the previous meeting. Maybe I was only on the committee as a token to appease some faction. The reality was much simpler: this time, notifications had been done within the committee instead of by a yearly meeting office, so the procedure had been unclear. It was the sort of simple oversight that I might easily have done myself.

The principle of "the benefit of the doubt" is incomplete without personal follow-up whenever necessary. We gave National Friends Insurance Trust (see cover story, March 1998) the benefit of the doubt long after we should have demanded clearer information on the security of our health insurance. The "benefit of the doubt" principle simply says that, if we don't understand why someone did something, we assume that "they must have had a good reason" until we have more complete and direct information; it doesn't excuse us from obtaining that information (first-hand if possible) whenever we should do so.

This principle is just as important in relations between groups as it is between individuals. When FUM decided to stop sending doctors to Lugulu Hospital in Kenya (intending to send money to pay Kenyan doctors instead), some Kenyans saw this as a sign that FUM wanted to weaken ties with Kenyan Friends. Thank goodness they didn't just keep this negative and incorrect interpretation to themselves. The leaders at Lugulu, and our own appointees, told us that the personal relationships were more important than money; the human exchange needed to be continued. As a result, the decision was reversed.

Right now, we're trying to make FUM more productive and responsive to God's leadings and to you. We are trying new ideas, taking more risks and will inevitably make more mistakes. Never stop holding us accountable, but our work together will be much more lively and joyful if, until we all have our facts straight, we agree to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Original article (archived) is here. The March 1998 cover story on the National Friends Insurance Trust is here. (See table of contents for that issue to see the full coverage.)

At the time this was written, I was serving as general secretary of Friends United Meeting, sometimes nicknamed the "orthodox" branch of Friends. Ellen Cooney's Atlanta Friends Meeting was part of Friends General Conference, a broadly more liberal association of Friends congregations. Ellen is currently serving as the director of development for Monteverde Friends School in Costa Rica.

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In an earlier post on this blog, Benefit of the doubt, part one, I described this principle's value in helping me distinguish between realism and cynicism.

In Benefit of the doubt, part two, I applied the principle to my observations of our then-new president, Donald Trump. See if you think my analysis there still applies (if it ever did!).

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Marilynne Robinson's Notes from an Occupation.

Simultaneous with corruption there is also a clash of worldviews that is rarely acknowledged. The country is said now to be polarized, an image that implies that we lie along the same continuum of belief, at opposite extremes but with an expansive middle ground between the two sides that awaits only certain moderating concessions to bring us closer. This metaphor does not really suggest the nature of our problem or the depth of it. It has not been helpful. It is past time to try considering a new image for our situation.

It's Martin Kelley's "pet theory that Quakerism is always dying and simultaneously always being reborn." (Introductory article for the June-July issue of Friends Journal, "Quaker Revivals.") Martin also has some interesting observations on how "Insiders" and "Seekers" use the Quaker Net.

Mark Russ on God's wrath and vengeance—and what we lose if we entirely deny those aspects of the Divinity. It might just be me, but I was reminded of R.W. Tucker's "Revolutionary Faithfulness."

Robert Garon on Genesis: God's rest vs Egypt's pyramid scheme.

Aristotle reminds us that politics is not just power.

Brian Zahnd's tribute to Walter Brueggemann.

See you at No Kings Day.

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Ending scenes and credits from Blues Brothers 2000, including glimpses of my lifelong blues icon Junior Wells. He died a month before the film was released. As some reviewers acknowledged, it was not much of a movie—except for the soundtrack and the incredible list of participating musicians. It's bittersweet to watch this clip now; so many of them are no longer with us.

Ceasefire shorts

A snapshot taken by a British officer showing German and British troops fraternising on the Western Front during the Christmas Truce of 1914. © IWM (Q 11718) [photo and caption at source].

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Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, called for a Christmas ceasefire to begin tomorrow at noon Moscow time, and extending through Christmas (January 7). The purpose of the proposed ceasefire: "... so the Orthodox people can attend services on Christmas Eve and on the day of the Nativity of Christ."

A few hours later, the Russian president followed up by ordering a unilateral ceasefire for that time period.

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Source.  

The Kyiv Independent article linked this ceasefire to the famous spontaneous ceasefires on December 24-26 (and sometimes even longer) in the first year of World War I. I haven't found references to the 1914 events in official announcements, but the connection is made explicitly in a petition circulated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and several other organizations, with "... over 1000 faith leaders in the United States, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bishop William Barber, Rev. Jim Wallis, and Dr. Cornel West, – representing believers from every major tradition..." as signers. You can access the full list of names, as well as videos and other related resources, on this page.

The FOR's materials refer to an earlier proposal by Ukrainian president Zelenskyy: [Link and bold text in original FOR page.]

President Zelensky himself last week referenced the concept, asking Moscow to withdraw its troops on the eve of the holidays as a “meaningful step towards the diplomatic settlement that Moscow so regularly mentions.” This [Christmas] time when normal people think about peace, not about aggression,” he said. Although Putin unsurprisingly rejected Zelensky’s request that he remove all his troops, the fact that such discussion is taking place reflects how palpable the world’s desire for a ceasefire is.

It may be true that these comments by everyone involved—FOR and the other peace organizations, Zelenskyy, Kirill, Putin—reflect "how palpable the world's desire for a ceasefire is." It would be wonderful if this were true. The most 1914-like ceasefire, however, would be from the bottom up, at the initiative of the soldiers actually in the trenches and improvised barracks in Ukraine.

In 1914, the British soldiers and onsite officers were soon ordered by the generals to cease fraternizing with the enemy immediately and go back to full combat. Today, we already know that many of the Russian soldiers are confused and disillusioned by their situation, while the Ukrainian side tries to make the prospect of their surrender as attractive as possible. Maybe we can pray that these human beings on both sides of the front respond directly to the Prince of Peace whose birth they're invited to celebrate, as the politicians cast about for ways to end, or (as the case may be) to prolong this awful war.

The rest of us have apparently have not made our desire for an end to the shooting palpable enough. We're talking about 36 hours, after which Putin's genocidal project apparently continues. As for the Christians involved, it's hard for me to take Kirill seriously when he has given such full-throated endorsement to this cruel war, and did not publicly object to Russian shooting and bombing on Western Christmas Eve (increasingly celebrated in Ukraine) or on the universal New Year holiday.

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Illia Ponomarenko of the Kyiv Independent tweets on his personal Twitter account, "If someone in the Western media dares to delightfully compare Putin’s 'ceasefire' with the Christmas Truce of 1914, I swear I’m gonna throw up." 

As if to reinforce Ponomarenko's resistance to any sentimentality, the head of the Donetsk People's Republic (so-called), Denis Pushilin, says there will be no unilateral ceasefire in the territory he claims. They will continue to respond to the enemy's "provocations." Furthermore, he interprets Putin's ceasefire as follows:

The decision of our President as an Orthodox person applies specifically to Orthodox people, for whom it's important to to go to church, to maintain their faithful attendance at Christmas services. For obvious reasons, we do not consider the leadership of the remaining part of Ukraine to be Orthodox.

Interesting distinction. Orthodox biblical scholar Ilya Grits saw things very differently, as he explained in his essay, "What does the 'people of God' mean in the context of the 21st century?" [Rus.].

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I give you a new commandment:
love one another.

However you and I might interpret this Christmas ceasefire, there are two ways I am trying to drive a wedge of prayer into what otherwise may be a justifiably cynical analysis—yet another appropriation of Christian-scented civil religion for political purposes.

One: each bullet or shell or rocket not fired during this ceasefire may mean a life not snuffed out, a family not torn apart. Thank you, Jesus. 

Two: God grant that the actual Gospel of peace may find some new space, some new cracks in the armor, to influence decision-makers and change hearts in those hours, in the powerful name of Jesus. It's not totally impossible that something like this has already begun, and the ceasefire is a hint. We can pray!

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Although I'm a pacifist, I'm not neutral in this conflict. Here are some past posts on neutrality and on dilemmas for pacifists in this current war.

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Patriarch Kirill and the war: a jaundiced summary.

Eliot Borenstein on Russian propagandists' increasingly extreme depictions of Ukraine: "Video game logic."

A letter to the Friends United Meeting constituency from Colin Saxton.

Marcelle Martin on her spiritual ancestors.

The early Friends 370 years ago who left the shores of England to bring their message across the ocean spoke true revelations, many of which have been broadly accepted in our time, though those revelations still challenge us to further changes. But divine revelation does not stop. We are continually asked to attend to the newness that God is always bringing.

Greg Morgan on magical thinking and the imminence of death.

Last week I did my digest of posts from 2022. Here's a Top 11 list from Kristin Du Mez. Her ranking method is probably more useful than mine: she ranks her posts by numbers of views, and I pick one post per month, choosing the post I like the best (and, maybe subconsciously, the post I believe you should like the best!). Note: Kristin Du Mez would like your help naming her blog.

GetReligion's notable 2022 deaths, as compiled by Adelle M. Banks. Before reviewing this list I had somehow missed the death of Brother Andrew. (More about him at my post on Christian jihad.)

Here's where I'd like to be on the last weekend of this month: Clarksdale Film Festival, which will include two of Robert Mugge's films.

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Speaking of Clarksdale, Mississippi, here's a clip from the film Full Moon Lightnin', featuring Floyd Lee and his friends. (I've used this clip at least once before, back in 2009.)

Digesting 2005—and reader survey

The year 2005 was the first full year of this blog. As I catch up with my self-imposed task of choosing twelve posts from every year I've been writing here, this is probably my last digest of old material.

Yes, old in some ways. I'm struck by how angry George Bush's presidency made me at times. Little did I know what was awaiting us a little more than a decade later. I think I was more bitter and argumentative in these older posts. Is increasing mildness a virtue? You're a better judge than I am.

On the other hand, sometimes when I read these older posts of mine, I notice how often I revisit the same themes, and basically repeat myself. I comfort myself by reasoning that hardly anyone remembers these old posts!

As I said when I assembled my 2006 digest, most comments on my blog came on the blog itself in the olden days. Nowadays, most comments are made on Facebook. I always appreciate comments, wherever I get them.

Thank you for reading.

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January 2005: Jolting Islam Forward

Herbert E. Meyer has just issued "an open letter to opponents of the war in Iraq," arguing that, given the stakes involved (winning a war for the future of Western civilization), the least we opponents can do is be responsible and get with the program, stop whining, and actually do something to shore up the areas where we think the program is weak. To do anything else is aiding the enemy.

A Northwest Yearly Meeting Friend posted this open letter on several Yearly Meeting e-mail lists, saying that "I found this interesting, and thought it worth sharing. While I am against war, Herb has many interesting points to think about."

He was right on several counts. The letter is interesting on its own merits, and gives insights on the ways people in and near power justify the Iraqi war intellectually. Judging by those who link to Herb Meyer's writings, however, he appears to be a hero to many who utterly dismiss us opponents of the war, who celebrate the apparent ascendancy of the neoconservative vision in Washington, and whose rhetoric ranges from sober and intellectual thinking to complete and idiotic nonsense. Some of the latter is sprayed with a repulsive christian deodorant.

(read full post)

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February 2005: Quiet ecstasy

On his Web site, musician Derek Trucks quotes a question he received about his onstage style:

How can you play such soulful music without expressing it physically in your body language. In other words how can you channel all that energy JUST through your playing without cracking more than a grin. Does this help your expressiveness with the instrument or is it just natural?

Derek replies:

I think early on all the musicians that I respected the most just stood or sat there and played (John Coltrane, Ali Akbar Kahn, Duane Allman). It just depends on the musician but for me it feels more natural. As long as I have been on the road people have told me that they thought I wasn't enjoying playing because I looked so bored, but it's actually when I am most aware and engaged.

... It was one of the best concerts I have ever attended. The word "concert" was made for evenings like this: the musicians were completely in concert with themselves and each other. Sure enough, Derek barely moved; often his eyes were closed; he smiled just three times that I could see. But the coordination among the musicians was palpable.

(read full post)

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March 2005: The Return and the cult of the patient woman

On the film The Return:

Referring to the mother as played by Natalia Vdovina, the director Andrei Zvyagintsev says, "My ideal woman? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's close to what was shown in the film. Because for me this woman embodied [femininity] ... for me, this is Woman with a capital W. A woman who knows how to be patient, to wait, and is wise. It is like in Russian fairy tales, where there is Vasilisa the Beautiful and Vasilisa the Wise."

Mikhail Krichman, the cinematographer, adds, "I really like the scene in the house. I like very much how Natalia looks there. I like this shot, where she pours wine and dilutes it with water for the kids. How she obediently carries this out and doesn't say anything."

I don't disagree at all with the extraordinary beauty of this scene and of the bedtime scene that follows. Her bearing reflects dignity and endurance ... and extraordinary acting. But I have no context from the story to evaluate whether her response to her husband's absence is from nobility, or strength, or fear, or pathological dependence, or perhaps it represents the calm before the storm. Perhaps the storm (or whatever form the accountability of husband to wife might have taken) happened while the boys were still away from the house.

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April 2005: Leaving Quakers

Here's a great example of a perennial theme, especially in the earlier years of my blog:

About eight years ago, a weighty Friend in Iowa Yearly Meeting (FUM) came to me with a question. He had found a congregation in Iowa that was actually more in accord with what he thought Friends stood for than his Friends meeting. However, he was torn by loyalties to that meeting and to the Yearly Meeting he had served for so long, and to Friends United Meeting. What did I think he should do?

... When I first joined Friends, shortly after my Christian conversion, the joy of finding a church home where a New Testament faith found prophetic social expression carried me blissfully along past the point where a more discerning person might have noticed some gaps along the way. We still find these major gaps among Friends--meetings that specialize in quakerishness and marginalize the living Gospel from which our peculiar discipleship sprang OR meetings that, on the contrary, talk Christian language with enthusiasm but have allowed that precious and still-needed discipleship to atrophy--and eventually these incongruities became the central ingredients in FUM's civil war.

(read full post)

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May 2005: Creative discontent

[Referring to Martin Kelley's blog] -- In Martin's May 16 posting, ... he asks, "If we could get a message out to larger Quakerdom, what we want it to be?" I read with great appreciation the responses that have been accumulating as comments to that May 16 item. I am happy that important issues are being raised by Martin and the readers of his blog. I am happy that I don't know most of these people (beyond their familiarity to me as a reader of Martin's blog/forum for over a year) -- this means that a whole new generation of prophetic and creative voices is in the Friends movement, no thanks to previous generations, whose lack of vision and encouragement is frightening. And I am shocked at how many of the diagnoses articulated by these Friends and ex-Friends have arisen in my generation and earlier, remaining unaddressed.

(read full post)

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June 2005: Mississippi mellowing?

I have been following the coverage of the trial of former KKK-man Edgar Ray Killen for his involvement in the deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, the three Freedom Summer civil rights campaigners murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

I spent most of the summer of 1975 in Mendenhall, Mississippi, working with Voice of Calvary, founded by John Perkins to promote "Black Christian leadership development" and alternative economic structures. Back then it seemed as if the era of civil rights violence was in the distant past; from my current time horizon, of course, things look different. Eleven years between the Freedom Summer campaign and my first visit to Mississippi doesn't seem long now.

Mendenhall looked like many of the stereotypes I'd received of small-town Mississippi—right down to the railroad tracks dividing the races. We summer volunteers (all but one were white) were not popular downtown, with the exception of the Post Office, where we were treated with almost startling courtesy.

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July 2005: Chaos and community, 2005

Recently, London's mayor Ken Livingstone and an Israeli spokesperson had an exchange typical for modern public discourse: Livingstone suggested that the way the West treats the Arab world was a cause of terrorism, and that our past miscalculations were coming home to roost; and the spokesperson, along with many others, charged that Livingstone was apologizing for terrorism. We are apparently not allowed to reflect on root causes (no matter how obvious) without being counted among the enemy. "Don't think, just use our message." (See New Statesman, "The Politics of Delusion.")

My first response was to remember a book about dealing with difficult personalities. Sometimes you just have to calmly repeat your truth over and over in the face of such blasts.

I also remembered these words by Yakov Krotov, which I also quoted somewhere in my Evangelism and the Friends Testimonies forum. His advice concerns bearing a courteous Christian witness across lines of faith, but I think his disciplines are useful for general discourse as well. In my mind, I combine these principles with the one from the book on difficult people: keep calmly repeating what you believe, over and over.

... I have formulated five principles which aid me in my efforts not to proselytize, and still bear Christian witness. They are: ...

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August 2005: The Quaker voice

In several parts of the world, not just the USA, the dignified Quakers and the restless Quakers are once again struggling over the issue of "freedom in the Spirit" vs long-standing cautions against emotionalism and manipulation. It's an issue that split second-generation African Friends and continues to cause stress in both Africa and Latin America. The issue is understood differently in different places: articulate, liberal, urban Friends may not recognize that they are under any sort of bondage whatsoever, but let someone speak in tongues or speak twice in the same meeting for worship (setting aside theological allergies for a moment) and the limits of freedom may appear.

One doesn't even have to open one's mouth: the late Fred Boots, a very experienced and well-traveled Evangelical Friend (who used to sell copies of Elias Hicks's journal at Evangelical Friends Church Eastern Region book tables, but that's another story), told of the cold shoulder he and his wife received at one unprogrammed meeting simply for being dressed too well.

One of my own relatives, most of whose experiences had been in unprogrammed Friends but who was a member of a pastoral meeting, visited a meeting in the Philadelphia area. After she introduced herself as a Friend from Richmond, Indiana, a local Friend hastened to explain to the others that "That's a very different kind of Friend."

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September 2005: Books and crosscultural hunger

Judy and I have been attending a Hispanic Mennonite congregation that has been a huge blessing to me. This has been my most sustained exposure to the Spanish-speaking dimension of today's United States. To help me reflect on what I'm learning through that experience, I was eager to read Hector Tobar's Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). As recently as a decade or two ago, the "Spanish-speaking United States" could have been principally defined as a few specific regions within the USA. Now all that has changed. If the Bloomington-Muscatine Friends Church in Iowa can have a significant Hispanic outreach, our reliance on regional assumptions is shaky. It is this reality that Tobar's book presents clearly and engagingly. This excerpt is a great example:

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now—North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere. Juan's smile turns a little mischievous as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet, searching for something stuck between his driver's license and his Alabama gun license. It is picture slightly larger than a postage stamp of a line of marching rebels on horseback, the portrait of Che Guevara looming behind them.

(read full post)

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October 2005: Evil and Islamo-fascism

Evil is back in the news, thanks to President Bush's latest rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

At the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush outlined an analysis of Islamo-fascism (one of the names for the "evil, but not insane" phenomenon he's describing). This is an important speech. It is as close as I've seen him come to a detailed description of the assumptions behind his lethal adventure in Iraq. It is important for the administration's critics to read and respond to such material, because at the very least, the President is absolutely right concerning the global importance of the issues and trends he's addressing. Just to work the Christian angle for a second: we can neither love nor confront our enemies if we are not willing to look at them straight in the eyes and take in the full measure of their actions, motives, and capabilities.

Unfortunately, the speech does not measure up to what I'd hoped and yearned for—an intelligent, respectful engagement with the claims and grievances (justified and unjustified) and assertions of the presumed enemy. It is a rhetorical hatchet job—frankly, low-grade demagoguery—that does not respect the intelligence of observers either in America or in the rest of the world. Why can't our leaders manage better? Surely Bush and his speechwriters are more intelligent than this—do they think that a more dispassionate, thoughtful, self-reflective analysis would signal weakness? In my mind, this sort of sloganeering presented as leadership is far more damaging.

Some examples: ...

(read full post)

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November 2005: Nancy's questions

We live in an age of consumer spirituality, where people love to display their sophistication by saying that they're spiritual, not religious. People seem to want just enough spiritualness to be cozy, but not enough to overcome the twin idols of affluence and autonomy. These poisons are by no means unique to Quakers, but we have a peculiarly attractive version of them: a sort of delicious antiquarian progressiveness that can deceive us into think we're going deeper than we really are. This cultish quakerishness adulterates the spiritual power of both evangelicals and liberals, and has led to the near-extinction of the precious conservative witness among Friends.

By making our choices a matter of enhancing our own spirituality, and by becoming ultra-squeamish about our corporate biblical roots and our Puritan-era apostolic revival history, we have left GOD out. God desires joy and liberation for us and, through us (as in the early days of Israel), for our neighbors throughout the world.

The way that this joy is shared and liberation accomplished is not by our subtle cleverness, our middle-class politics, by carefully-calibrated "outreach" and transfers of wealth from us to those others lucky enough to know us. It is by relationship: first of all, our relationship with God, then our relationship with each other, and the way we provide access to that relational community by our physical and attitudinal open doors ... for example, adequate meeting space in your [Nancy's] case.

But to get there, we have to give up our cool, our autonomy, our intellectual pride, and confront the twin experiences of conversion and convincement.

(read full post) 

(read R.W. Tucker's "Revolutionary Faithfulness," which inspired much of this post.)

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December 2005: All of me

A couple of Sundays ago, back in Portland, at Reedwood Friends Church, we sang a chorus that went more or less like this:

I want to be a servant, Lord
Please take all of me
I want to be a servant, Lord
Please take all of me....

When programmed meetings and Protestant congregations in general get into the full swing of Advent and Christmas programming, it feels very hard for a prophetic word to wedge its way in. For one thing, a lot of the church culture is riding on the glow of Christmas, the cuteness of kids, the familiar warmth of all the Advent paraphernalia, all of which has undoubted community-building power. But on this particular Sunday, this particular chorus, and this particular sermon, gave my spirit a nudge to stand up during open worship and speak.

The opening was there, but that didn't make speaking easy. What struck me about the chorus (I said) was how little it matched my life. I should rather sing

I'd like to have the reputation of being a servant, Lord,
Please take 10% of me.

Musically, the chorus (as originally written!) swings very nicely. I could usually sing it, with at least an aspirational spin, quite enthusiastically. But as I told Friends that Sunday, the Christian Peacemaker Team members in Baghdad were not 10% servants or witnesses, and now they were certainly not 10% hostages. Their commitment as servants was 100%. We do not yet know what level of sacrifice will be required, and I would rather pray than speculate.

(read full post)

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Russia's Jehovah's Witnesses are not extremists.

Neither are the Memorial organizations. In defense of Memory. And: An attempt to erase my memory...

Seven Russian bloggers who will introduce you to their vast country.

How to make comics: a four-part series from the Museum of Modern Art, via openculture.com.

Christopher Stern finds a way to peace. (With thanks to quakerranter.org for the link.)

Saint Paul Meets a Quaker Lady.

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Ronnie Baker Brooks and Stacy Brooks -- thanks to 1AnitrasDance.

Digesting 2007, for better or for worse!

It's a great relief to be sorting through old material for today's blog post, especially after last week's sad and intense post. This time I'm putting together a selection of posts from the year 2007, the year I became an instructor at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, Russia.

There's just one problem: I'm not quite the same person that I was back in 2007. I'm not sure I would make the same judgments about Friends United Meeting's sexual ethics policy, for example. However, that old post really does represent my thinking at the time, and therefore must go into an honest time capsule. That, in general, was how I selected these items from that year: I looked for items that convey a sense of the time, whether it's my then-persistent defense of Friends United Meeting (a theme that has almost disappeared in recent years) or my naivete about working in Russia.

I'm aware that this occasional exercise of assembling annual digests is 100% self-indulgent, although I hope you'll find something that is interesting or amusing, or that reminds you of things that drew your attention that same year. Aside from the gratification and mortification involved in re-reading stuff I'd long since forgotten that I had written, it gives me a chance to clean up the formatting, replace some of the dead links and lost videos (where possible) and restore photos formerly hosted by Photobucket.

Before getting to the chronological part, here's an item out of order:

April 2007's Quaker Blog Carnival was my contribution to a tribute that a bunch of us Friendly bloggers paid to Martin Kelley and his quakerquaker.org hub, a service that expanded our audiences and promoted inter-Quaker conversation way beyond the traditional institutional channels.

Back when I was involved with Quaker Life magazine, I wrote an editorial nearly every month. [Now a quarterly, in those years Quaker Life was published ten times a year.] I didn't realize how addictive that form of expression would be! For me, maintaining a Friendly weblog has allowed me to indulge that need, with the very important added benefit of receiving almost immediate feedback.

Cherice and Chris have wonderfully summarized many of the blessings of the world of Quaker blogging and the Grand Central Water Cooler of the community, quakerquaker.org. I agree with everything they've said. Not only do we discuss important ideas and leadings that cumulatively help us be more faithful people, we also give each other glimpses of our personal worlds and generate new ties of mutual care. (I certainly experienced that when my mother died.)

More.

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January 2007: Worship seeking more understanding.

In part, I was confronting my inner curmudgeon: "I shouldn't pretend that my settled views on a subject have been settled all that long!"

...[I]f it were up to me, worship would be outwardly pure and austere. In my fantasies, the community gathers in subdued joy, simply and reverently sits and waits on the Holy Spirit, responds with sincerity and mutual forbearance to the Spirit's inward and outward manifestations and our often fumbling attempts to be faithful, and at some ripe moment recognizes that meeting for worship is over. Before or after that adventurous hour (using the word "hour" loosely), we also gather for "education"--to help each other understand the issues of being a biblically-informed group of disciples who want our practice to match our faith, and who want to design processes of access for children and newcomers to be in possession of all the information, and all the models, that we have drawn upon for our encounters with God.

At our regular meetings for church governance, we would, as a community, prayerfully agree on what additional elements might be added to the worship period to serve our primary hunger to entrust our worship to the Holy Spirit.

More.

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February: The unbearable lightness of being Quaker.

I served as general secretary of Friends United Meeting for seven years, 1993-2000. During those years (and for many years later), I often found myself writing in defense of FUM and the ways Friends misunderstood or even misrepresented it. I've included a couple of examples of these essays in this digest, starting here:

Among its many other wonderful qualities and shadowy sins, FUM is still paying for the decades it spent trying to pretend that it was truly "united," served by a staff and a leadership caste that, by and large, was highly invested in presenting the best face to each end of the spectrum, trying to be good friends (and actually succeeding miraculously often) with people who were often not friends with each other. Among the survival tactics: publishing a magazine that was as inoffensive as possible, therefore hardly ever carrying any substantial news, and publishing two lines of Quaker curriculum, Living Light and Living Word, for a market that was so small that it could barely sustain one.

More.

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March: Rootless.

When my immigrant mother died in February 2007, I was in the midst of reading a series of books about immigrants.

Actually, I didn't plan this theme; I didn't see the connections until she died. Only then did I think of her story -- born in Japan, involuntarily exiled to Germany, choosing to emigrate to the USA, but never reconciled to American pluralism -- in light of those books.

All of these books are excellent; I'd be hard put to rank them. The first one is Philip Marsden's The Bronski House: A Return to the Borderlands. It is a part biography and part travelogue, but as a hybrid it is seamless, with the wholeness of a wonderful novel....

Dubravka Ugresic's edgy but deeply humane novel The Ministry of Pain is superb at portraying the cost of separation from one's homeland, coupled with the aching confusion of seeing one's homeland become a battle of violently competing identities--the situation faced by every refugee from the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia....

The last book I read was the one that affected me most deeply: Nikolai's Fortune by Solveig Torvik. Like The Bronski House, this book is based on fact: every major character of the five generations populating this historical novel actually existed, and all of the major events really happened....

More. 

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April: The hyphen within.

Frustratingly, I could not find the original blog post by "quakerboy" that kicked off these reflections. I hope I've included enough context to make up for that deficit.

Paradoxically, who we are is a people of hospitality and tender ears. This is precisely why some of our meetings and churches receive people who have allergies and grievances, or who are by nature skeptical. Those people are precious! Among other things, they keep us honest, they keep us from getting stagnant, and they deserve our attention. If we don't exercise a stewardship of our testimonies and learnings, obtained over the course of centuries, we have nothing to offer them but secondhand cliches (whether liberal or evangelical) delivered in a sort of quaint, antiquarian container. Our guests deserve generous hospitality, but they also deserve stable hosts -- hosts who provide loving access, but who maintain that stewardship, while not forgetting that the process of going from guest status to host status must be available and transparent.

More.

The hyphen within, part two.

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May: Why it's hard for me to criticize biblical literalists. [Even though I do!]

Here I'm reflecting how different cultures read the Bible in different ways, cutting across neat divisions of literalism vs liberalism.

Donald Miller and Joel Carpenter ... speak about the role of the Bible in specific social contexts, Miller in what he calls "new paradigm" churches in the USA, and Carpenter in what used to be called the Third World.

Many of us in North American and European Quaker circles are accustomed to arguing about the legitimacy of mining the Bible for rules and models and debating points. Some of us get devotional goosebumps from its ancient eloquence, and experience being drawn closer to the Holy Spirit by the experience of meditating on the Bible. Some of us are comfortably caught in a mesh of linkages between doctrine and Biblical passages. We may even assume from habit that a passage means a certain thing when on its textual face it may not. I gave an example here recently -- the passage that is often cited as proof of the Bible's plenary inspiration and inerrancy, 2 Timothy 3:15-17, makes no such claim. More than that, of course, our present Bible was not even assembled when Paul wrote those words, and literalists rarely seem to acknowledge that a lot of work by human committees had to be done before that assembly was completed -- with some variations in the resulting canon among different broad traditions of Christians.

More.

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June: Recording ministers, calling pastors.

Some questions and answers (?) on two separate (if often related) Quaker practices: recording ministers, and recruiting pastors.

In recording ministers, aren't you setting up a hierarchy, implying special status, or putting people on a pedestal? In theory, no. Our doctrine of the equality of all persons is not threatened by saying "this person has a public gift, and we feel led to confirm it publicly." However, if gender or social status or other irrelevant criteria entered into the process, smoothing the way for some and blocking others, that would compromise the practice of recording. Also, if recorded ministers were treated with undue deference, or were given any privilege other than being permitted to exercise their gifts, that undue deference would also be a problem.

The denial of recognition of public ministry, especially when denying people who by social stereotype are not seen as carrying spiritual authority, can represent the opposite problem--a form of marginalization. I remember one example of a modest but spiritually gifted woman being considered for recording, in the face of opposition by men who used the equality argument despite their own prestigious credentials in their work settings. Moreover, the absence of explicit recognition of public gifts does not prevent elitism and power plays. When criteria for recognition are not explicit, those who want recognition or influence for the sake of their own agendas will still find ways of getting it, but without transparent criteria and accountability.

More.

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July: Absurdly happy.

A blog post inspired by Colin Saxton and David Niyonzima at Northwest Yearly Meeting sessions.

Just as the brightest, most unfiltered light we can see comprehends all colors, the children of the Light must comprehend all conditions. Together, we must be ready to shine the light into places where unspeakable horror is hiding. We may be personally sheltered from those realities in ways that David Niyonzima has not been; as a teacher, he witnessed the massacre of all of his students. And, individually, we vary in our capacity to see those things, both by location and by temperament. But together we can see, and we can shine. For me, happiness and joy are names for that experience of shining together, and are subversive of the shadows in which the principalities and powers conceal themselves to do hideous things to God's beloved creation.

More.

Also ran: The FUM retreat: what did we accomplish?

Absurdly happy, part two.

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August: What is really wrong with Friends United Meeting.

A post that starts out (defensively?) with what is not wrong! How many of these alleged virtues and defects are still accurate? Which observations might you (or I) make differently almost a generation later? 

But now the walls of suspicion may simply be too high for such dialogues to be institutionalized in organizations such as FUM. When significant groups of Friends in the more liberal yearly meetings use the language of money (as in threatening to cut off funding) to communicate with FUM, and when individual meetings in the more evangelical yearly meetings threaten to leave their yearly meeting if it doesn't cut ties with FUM, then it's time to be honest about the alienation we're witnessing.

There were once substantial centrist groups that held FUM together, groups who believed that love is a bridge that doesn't require the opposite shore to be symmetrical to theirs. I don't know how much of that constituency still exists. From the liberal side, the most pro-FUM message that I hear seems to be that by staying engaged, "we" can change FUM. What qualifies them to change FUM is not specified--by all indications it's not passionate support for FUM's central goal, which is to energize and equip Friends for evangelism.

More, including many interesting comments.

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September: Gospel order revisited.

This post was originally written as a sermon, in response to a request to address accountability and discipline in the church.

Matthew’s Gospel and George Fox’s commentaries presuppose that these offenses occur among people who have roughly equivalent amounts of power, or the offenses involve a person’s public behavior that threatens the reputation of the church. When one person has power and control over another, the victim may not be at all in a position to confront the abuser privately. In the church, that’s what the elders are for—to provide the safety and healing that’s essential to keeping trust and obedience real. For anyone who has been betrayed, trust remains a nice abstraction until you—the church community—do what it takes to provide that healing and create that safety. That’s why the elders of that meeting with the sharp-tongued member could no longer dodge the issue. They appointed a pair of people who spoke with him, and he was also required to give up his church responsibilities for a season.

I love how Fox talks about the spirit in which we deal with offenders—“in the power of the Lord, and spirit of the Lamb, and in the wisdom and love of the truth.” That instruction to act “in the power of God” reflects how Gospel order constantly links back to the cosmic context, God’s purpose of unity in heaven and on earth. Just as the offender threatens that unity, a half-baked or politicized remedy may also threaten it.

More.

From 2019: Out of order.

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October: Gratitude.

Thoughts as my first Halloween and Thanksgiving  holidays in Russia approached.

One of my circuit breakers tripped the other day, and my neighbors didn't know what to do. I had no key for the breaker box. The owner of the apartment lives four hours away. After trying everything I could think of to get into the breakers, I thought I remembered some numbers stenciled onto the wall downstairs near the elevator. The stencils were inked onto a stucco-like surface and were almost unreadable, but if I looked at one of the words just the right way, it looked like it might say "Elect ..." Dubiously, I called the number, was given another number. I called that number and was given yet another. When I called that third number, success!! -- the dispatcher promised an electrician would visit me shortly. And so he did -- he fixed the ceiling fixture that had shorted, he reset the circuit breaker, and, after giving me a friendly lecture about not buying cheap fixtures, he charged me all of $4!

What if I'd succeeded in resetting the circuit breaker on my own? I probably would not have found out what caused the short in the first place.

In looking back over my many visits to Russia since 1975, giving up certainty and giving up control have been constant themes. For every loss of familiar procedures, familiar guarantees, there's been a gain: techniques and procedures are replaced by relationships and kindness. Both the exchange and the lesson have been invaluable. I'm sure that, before Thanksgiving rolls around, I'll have a fresh crop of examples.

More.

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November: The romance of war.

Putin's plan -- Russia's victory!

Patriotism Russia-style, or at least the tiny samples I got to see in Elektrostal.

My seven-year-old friend, who lives up Yalagin Street a short ways, is with his grandmother today. I can tell -- he's sending me a steady stream of text messages on her cellphone, asking me when I'll be stopping by again. I'll probably drop in on him and his brother this evening after my last class.

These days, whenever I visit, he's always eager to show me a new fighting technique. He loves to demonstrate how to slither along on the floor, holding his gun high so it doesn't touch the mud of his imaginary battlefield. He drops down from the top level of his bunk bed, cushioning his fall (as he solemnly explains to me) by bending his knees just right so that he lands soundlessly. His gun is slung over his back, his rubber knife is in his sock, his eyes sweep the bedroom for signs of the enemy. Now his back is to the wall and his toy grenade is in his hand as he edges toward the door, ready to peek into the corridor. His face is utterly serious as he sets out to capture singlehandedly the living room....

More.

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December: Elektrostal's hospitable artists.

An Edvard Grieg concert at the Paustovsky Central Library was a wonderful conclusion to my first semester in Elektrostal.

I sat there in the audience, simply marveling: here I was, a Norwegian-American and fan of Grieg's music, sitting in the obscure industrial city of Elektrostal, Russia, listening to this familiar music being played by Russian pianists and a noted violinist from Dagestan! Singer Antonina Yegorshina performed several of Grieg's songs, lovingly translated into Russian. And Zalmina Abueva, in her own remarks, praised the composer for his faithfulness to the spirit and natural surroundings of his native Norway. On the walls were my new friend Alexander Poroshin's paintings from his ongoing exhibition at the library.

More.

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I tried to pick an article or two from recent Russian Religion News postings to link here, but decided just to point out this resource once again.

Gary Abernathy: Why USA's conservatives should support reparations.

Friends World Committee for Consultation is conducting a search for a new general secretary to serve the World Office.

Margaret Fraser writes on receptivity, personality, transformation, and Eoin Stephenson's lecture at Ireland Yearly Meeting. She observes:

Saul/Paul was so filled with the righteousness of his efforts to persecute the followers of Jesus, that he needed a booming voice, a bright light and temporary blindness to stop him in his tracks. No gentle insistence to pack a spare tire for his chariot, or to rethink his mission; no invitation to breakfast would have stopped him in his tracks. He needed the entire works for transformation to happen. Fortunately, most of us can be reached by something gentler, if we are willing to open ourselves to listen.

More on Stephenson's lecture here.

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I've posted several individual clips from this Muddy Waters/Otis Spann appearance at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in October 1968. Here's the whole set, with Muddy Waters on vocals and slide guitar, Otis Spann on piano, Luther "Snake Boy" Johnson and Pee Wee Madison -- guitars, Paul Oscher -- harp, Sonny Wimberley -- bass guitar, and S.P. Leary -- drums. (Thanks to commenters for the lineup.)