New Year shorts

Here's how procrastination works. I've been meaning to use these vacation days to (1) grade exams, and (2) write a paper on using songs in the classrooms for our conference on the dialogue of languages and cultures scheduled for our institute in March. So far I've used them to read Anne Lamott and Jo Nesbø, not to mention a horrifying book on the rise and fall of the gas chamber; watch movies and TV with Judy; go shopping; enjoy guests; help make "Olivia" salad and carrot cake; and sleep. Here it is Thursday; Saturday is Christmas (in Russia) and Monday I go back to work. Hmmm.

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I have no comment on the Republican caucuses in Iowa, USA, two days ago. I do have a comment on the way the state of Iowa is often portrayed in the media, as a place where uneducated people walk around with their knuckles grazing the ground, with the exception of a few enlightened urbanites in four or five parts of the state. When I was on the Friends United Meeting staff, I visited Iowa a fair number of times--almost always in rural parts of the state. (Maybe metropolitan Oskaloosa doesn't qualify as rural.) I saw a lot of evidence that people in Iowa take education very seriously, seem unusually willing to receive new immigrants and refugees, and stay in touch with national and world events. Quakers, both pastoral and nonpastoral, are not numerous in the state--at last count there were about forty congregations--but they do have deep roots.

It was fun to see signs in Norwegian at the McDonalds restaurant in Decorah, Iowa. And I knew I was in Fairfield when I saw the golden domes of the Maharishi University of Management campus.

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Another thing I've successfully put off: writing an article about a genre or theme in Christian writing that might be called ... well, I'm at a loss for a catchphrase. Donald Miller and Anne Lamott are two of the authors I have in mind. Maybe you can name some others. These authors lace their prose with evocative and imaginative Christian references, with far more conversion power, luminosity, grace, sass, and miraculous potential than I associate with liberal Christianity. At the same time, they stick their tongues out at straitjacket variations of evangelical culture. It seems to me that their writings throb with more joy and sorrow and desire than most other Christian nonfiction.

Some other writers I like who are not far off from Miller and Lamott are Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Lauren Winner, and Kathleen Norris. (I'm sure you can name many more; one source for ideas would be people who've participated in Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing.) I just feel, fairly or unfairly, that these other writers are more invested, publicly, in their orthodoxy than Miller and Lamott, who basically leave it to us to decide whether we're gratified or scandalized by their lack of reassuring formulas.

Not that orthodoxy itself is boring. (Capon's Hunting the Divine Fox remains one of my all-time favorite invitations to Christian faith--hard to beat for sheer engaging delight.) But I remember my pre-conversion life over 37 years ago, when violence and betrayal had shattered all trust I'd ever had in self-proclaimed authorities, whether in family, government, or the religion industry. It's that shattered heart (still not forgotten) that writers like Anne Lamott and Donald Miller speak to. I don't think I'm alone.

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A heartfelt goodbye and thank-you to Gordon Hirabayashi, a Friend in Canadian Yearly Meeting whose persistent witness to idealism was important to me in my early years as a Friend. (I explained this a bit here.) Gordon died three days ago in Edmonton, Alberta. (New York Times; National Public Radio.)

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How to Save the USA from its own imperial messiah complex!!--learn to spot and absolutely distrust that rhetorical red flag four-letter word "must." As in this op-ed, "How to Save Iraq From Civil War."

Today's news brought word of more horrible acts of terrorism in Iraq; MSNBC's headline says "Iraq blasts kill at least 72, raise specter of civil war." Against this sort of background, the op-ed authors plead:

The United States must make clear that a power-sharing government is the only viable option for Iraq and that American support for Mr. Maliki is conditional on his fulfilling the Erbil agreement and dissolving the unconstitutional entities through which he now rules. Likewise, American assistance to Iraq’s army, police and intelligence services must be conditioned on those institutions being representative of the nation rather than one sect or party.

...

Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.

Once again, we're told that only our influence can prevent disaster. Never mind that a chain of U.S. interventions, at the cost of countless billions of U.S. tax dollars and thousands of precious lives, is interwoven with the preceding disasters. I recognize that the op-ed is not asking for military intervention, but rather political and financial pressures. But those "musts" continue to bother me; they're part of a drumbeat that we march to all too often: the USA must determine the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, the Korean peninsula, the Palestinian conflict, Central Asia.... Let me reword the plea: unless America acts rapidly to re-establish democratic control over the U.S. military, the intelligence services, the financial sector, and the national budget, our own republic is doomed.

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Rachel Held Evans, "Loving the Bible for what it is, not what I want it to be."

Books & Culture considers four important questions about the King James Version of the Bible.

Patricia Barber (and commenters): "Primitive Christianity Revived--but not by us."

Esther Choi sparks a vital discussion about the Occupy movement and its failures--particularly the accountability vacuum around class arrogance. (Thanks to Judy Goldberger @ Facebook/Quakers Talk About Racism.)

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In honor of Christmas (in two days here in Russia), here's a Christmas blues guitar jam from Denmark: "Silent Night." I'd like to think that Franz Xaver Gruber would approve of this version.

Suffering

The theme of "suffering" has been in my mind lately. It began last Sunday at North Valley Friends Church, where it was the theme of meeting for worship--in fact, of a series of meetings. (I admire a church located in affluent Western Oregon that is willing to devote a big chunk of attention to a theme that is unlikely to fit into any church-growth strategy.) A church member described her journey into the valley of addiction, arrests, and a slide to rock bottom that ended with God interrupting her suicide attempt. Concluding the meeting, Stan Thornburg suggested the church's goal: to become a community where it was safe to ask for help and healing in the midst of torment. The next evening, several of us gathered in a home to see a DVD that North Valley Friends recently bought, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the ending of the civil war in Liberia, the political campaign that ended with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's election as president, and the nonviolent women's movements behind both events.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Using contemporary news footage and low-fi on-the-run video clips from the civil war, the film gives us a glimpse of ordinary people's lives when bullets are flying--and all your child wants is just a little piece of doughnut, but you have nothing. We viewers are not sheltered from those scenes, but the film was produced with respect and dignity; there's no gratuitous disaster voyeurism.) There's a notorious link between suffering and passivity, and a lot of our post-film discussion revolved around the roles of faith and courageous leadership in mobilizing people to say enough is enough.

That same day the Christian Peacemaker Teams sent out a link to a video showing children in the Zharawa camp for internally displaced people, in Kurdish northern Iraq.

"These beautiful, wonderful, creative, joyful, talented and bright Iraqi-Kurdish children have been forced from their homes due to repeated bombing by Turkey and Iran," explains the caption. "They now live in a tent camp that offers no protection from the summer heat, the winter cold (yes, it does get cold), dust storms, or illness.  

"We asked them to tell us their stories and they did so by drawing pictures of their happy lives in their villages, attacks on their homes, and fleeing to the tent camp they live in now."

The accompanying CPT news bulletin tells the story of how CPT members have been trying to get permission for some of them to live within the camp itself. There's never a shortage of stories of suffering. Liberia's strong man, Charles Taylor, is right now on trial in Sierra Leone for contributing to that country's civil war, and on Tuesday, we heard his lawyer telling a BBC reporter about his humanitarian heart.

On Wednesday, Caspian Airlines flight 7908 crashes with the loss of all on board. On the same day, the Russian human rights organization Memorial loses its respected Grozny-based activist Natalia Estemirova, kidnapped outside her home and shot in the head, her body dumped out in nearby Ingushetia.

Today, the New York Times Web site included a moving video on the Cambodian atrocity tribunals. (Related article here.)

I don't have any special wisdom, just two thoughts.

First, I don't want to be sheltered from this raw data about the world's agonies and God's frequent (apparent) non-intervention, because denial would make a fraud of my faith. As I've probably said before, my mother saw the flash of Hiroshima, and therefore lived much of her life under the shadow (she was told) of leukemia statistics. In the city itself, thousands of innocents were vaporized, roasted, or lethally irradiated.

When the war finally ended, both her own country (Japan) and her parents' homeland (Germany), and huge swaths of the world, were pockmarked with smoking ruins and mass graves, as great-power politicians strategized to reassemble their empires, and the sober idealists among them cobbled together the new United Nations to slow down our perennial cycles of butchery. This is reality, every bit as real as the Bible. Zooming down to family scale, my mother also endured the kidnapping and murder of her own fourteen-year-old daughter in 1970--but Ellen was only one of 86 school-age young people murdered in Chicago that year. I study and pray and trust without pretending to understand. Through prayer, I can remain aware of suffering as a prod toward mindfulness, as a standing query about remaining oriented toward justice, without becoming morbid or paralyzed, without turning my back on God's equally pervasive provision of joy. (See the Zharawa camp kids!) 

Second, your sufferings and mine may seem mild compared to the Liberian civil war, Nazi atrocities, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. We should not inflate our own woes, but neither should we deny or suppress them--they may be the key to our ability to empathize with those whose trials are more dramatic.

Back when I was working with Right Sharing of World Resources, we had a partnership with a grassroots group in India that was developing a dairy cooperative. We provided seed money that was supposed to go into the bank to secure loans for 30 women. But as we found out, another dairy in town was selling watered-down milk. At first, this seemed great for marketing--"our" milk would be more attractive. But the owners of the rival dairy wanted to head off competition, so they told the women that if they went ahead with their plans, they would tell all their business friends to make sure that the co-op members' husbands would lose their jobs. They also pressured the bank to deny loans. Showing the photos from India, it was hard to convince some American audiences to see these co-op members and their husbands as neighbors, Biblically speaking--the outward differences were so stark. None of my audience members were depending on milk from one or two water buffalo to put food on the table. But who among us hasn't suffered some kind of analogous injustice? Who doesn't have a story of political corruption and discrimination somewhere in their past, or the past of their community? (Being from Chicago, I don't have to work my memory very hard!)

The hardships we acknowledge can build a human link to others far away, and we can become mutually supportive companions in building justice. (And we in Right Sharing had to learn to be far more systemic in understanding what grassroots-level development aid could and couldn't accomplish.)

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I took some time yesterday and today to listen to the Senate Judiciary hearings on Judge Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Just a few impressions: First, her opponents who criticize her for identity rhetoric, fearing subjectivity and bias (although I doubt they truly fear it; the worry is so blatantly ideological and contrived to score political points) can't have it both ways. They admit that diversity on the Court is a virtue, but seem to imply that the diversity must only skin-deep.

White males are still the gold standard for objectivity. One or two of her critics have said that if a white male had made a statement analogous to the "wise Latina" wording that they're hounding her with, he'd be out on his can. But that would not be a true analogy--unless white males represented a traditionally marginalized viewpoint. We white males seem to have fairly weak irony detectors, especially when we're in positions of power.

Friday PS: I have empathy, if that's allowed, for the New Haven firefighters whose case eventually prevailed (barely) in the current Supreme Court. Today, plaintiff Frank Ricci appeared as a witness at the Sotomayor hearing. According to the New York Times, he "call[ed] the Federal District Court ruling that rejected his and others’ claims of discrimination flawed. 'Americans have the right to go into our federal courts to have their cases judged based on the Constitution and our laws, not on politics or personal feelings,' he says. The lower-court ruling, he says, reduced them to racial statistics and served to divide people." Earlier, he talked about how hard he'd worked to prepare for the promotion exam.: "I was a virtual absentee father and husband," the Times quoted him as saying. (See, he wants empathy, too, and I'm not going to fault him for it.)

The confirmation issue, of course, is not whether we sympathize with his entirely understandable anger, it is whether Judge Sotomayor correctly navigated issues of law and precedent when the case reached her panel. The true villain in Ricci's case is the cumulative load of sin represented by Jim Crow. For that deep social poison there has never been a perfect antidote; and, sadly, the chosen correctives caused private pains for the public good. I'd argue that without those imperfect solutions and private pains, our national search for justice would be decades behind where we are now. There may be nothing but cynical politics in an attempt to pit Frank Ricci against Sonia Sotomayor, but when her approval process is over, I hope we can continue to talk as a country about the poison, the antidotes, and the human beings who are affected.

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A feast of theological links: From zoecarnate: "Theodicy (’the problem of evil’) is with us almost no matter what we believe, and panentheism does not come out unscathed – indeed, it’s even more vulnerable, I think, because (unlike Deism or a highly ‘Sovereign’ removed God concept), panentheism seems to implicate God rather intimately in life’s hurts as well as joys." ~~ Two items from the Pew Forum's Faith Angle conference: a "short course" on Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama's favorite philosopher, and a conversation on faith and science with Obama's NIH director nominee Francis Collins. ~~ From Sightings: "The radicalism of Caritas in veritate?" ~~ Are men from Mars and women from Venus?--the Christians for Biblical Equality are about to meet. Also: The courage of Natalia Estemirova. ~~ Tomgram: Are Afghan lives worth anything? ~~ Caritas in blues ... Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt alone and together.

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Mentioning Chicago gave me a serious case of nostalgia. The cure, at least for now: Chicago blues. This video from 1981 is fuzzy, but just listen: from the very first guitar notes you'll know that this is the one and only, the GREAT J.B. Hutto performing "Too Much Alcohol."

[The video I had here has been removed, but here's some documentary footage featuring this wonderful musician.]

It's not that simple

Involuntary simplification: In June, we stored our Portland, Oregon, furniture, and took ten suitcases to Maine. By July, we'd shrunk our necessities down to six suitcases, which we brought with us here to Elektrostal. (Luckily, we were moving into a mostly furnished apartment.) Now we are leaving for six weeks in the USA to get new visas, starting tomorrow, and have compressed our requirements down to two suitcases--including gifts.
Each transfer required me to review what I believe about what I need. Diary, Bible, computer, headphones, and enough clothes to keep warm and meet social requirements. Also, passport and other essential documents. As many other books as I can stuff into my onboard bag. That's it. Well, not exactly--camera, pens,extra glasses. Every time I start this list, a few more things work their way onto it.

One of our most interesting recent (involuntary) exercises in simplification vs accumulation comes about as a result of this new apartment we moved into in late August. We are the first tenants in this apartment, part of a new building on the southwest edge of Elektrostal. Apartments in this building are individually owned; each owner decides whether to occupy it or rent it out. Clearly, the builders assume that apartment owners will customize every inch themselves, because the apartments are sold as very bare shells. The wallpaper is absolutely minimal (and already peeling off); no light fixtures are supplied, and the sinks and faucets are bare minimum.

We don't have an unlimited budget, and we also have to consider that our lease is only for a year. It's an interesting process to think through each decision: what is required for reasonable comfort and to create a hospitable home, and what can we do without? How can beauty, simplicity, and economy be reconciled? (For example: Moscow's IKEA stores are tempting because of their low prices, but I've noticed that too much IKEA stuff creates a motel-like decor.) I'd like to think that I cared about these things before, but this is the first time we've had to create a home from scratch. It's not an easy exercise, but it is definitely worthwhile.

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(part two of Jon Stewart's interview)

What did September 11 change? I showed Jon Stewart's Daily Show interview with Tony Blair to one of my classes this morning. The segment was about three times as long as Stewart's usual interviews, and it provided my language students with a nice opportunity to compare American and British English. At one point, Blair says, "There was September 11, and, in my view, that changed everything." (At another point in the interview he says that September 11 changed the whole world.) I asked the students to tell me what exactly was changed by September 11. I was fascinated by the responses--one student said, "Exactly nothing," and pointed out that violence was a perennial reality among people and nations, whether we like it or not. Another student asked me where violence originates, providing me a chance to present several viewpoints, including nonviolence.

Intriguingly, Stewart mentioned that Blair is in the USA to teach a Yale course on "Faith and Globalization," so I talked about Blair's background as a Christian socialist--a political position with an honorable history in Britain, even if its US presence has usually been microscopic. All in all, lots of seeds for future conversations.

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Righteous links: For some fresh material on Christians affecting culture, explore this site. ~~ Christopher Priest's "Third Horseman," on a central irony of the U.S. election campaign in a time of credit meltdown. ~~ In praise of the talking stick.

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Blues from Arsen Shomakhov and Vadim Ivashchenko:

What do I know?

Almost as soon as I finished my last blog post, the bullets began flying in the disputed area of South Ossetia, where Russia and Georgia had in effect shared custody. The fog of war descended rapidly--the most frequent phrases I heard on Russian television on the first day were "conflicting reports" and "we can't yet confirm"--but that cloud of unknowing didn't prevent either politicians or pundits from making definitive statements.

I'm not a politician, and I am explicitly declining to be a pundit. For one thing, I am a guest in this country, claiming that I actually care about its people and its culture; making that claim real is my highest priority. Secondly, I will not pretend to know more than I actually do, which is practically nothing.

So, despite the example set for me by many other American figures, I am not about to comment glibly on Russian politics. There are some good commentators on Russian politics, both internally and externally; Sean's Russia Blog has a good listing of diverse sources. (Believe it or not, Russians are quite capable of speaking out about the strong and weak points of their own politicians; this is not something they depend solely on foreigners to do!)

Being an American voter, I feel much more freedom to comment on American politicians and pundits, and their apparently compulsive need to posture sanctimoniously at Russia's expense. The New York Times, who collectively should certainly know better, has provided two classic examples: William Kristol's juvenile "Will Russia Get Away With It?" and this editorial. I can't believe that the following points apparently still need to be made; since they were not made persuasively within the American establishment, it was left to Russian politicians to make some of them!!!

• First, it must be said of everyone involved, Russians and Americans and regional separatists alike: when will you ever learn to put as much effort and treasure into nonviolent solutions as you seem to be ready to put into killing? Maybe it's not surprising that someone whose church teaches peace argues for nonviolence, but just look at reality! Aside from generating untold numbers of heartbreaking individual tragedies for whom sooner or later heaven will demand an accounting, war is hideously expensive, sets off huge trains of unintended consequences, turns economies and stock markets upside down, lays the foundation for more intercommunal hatred, and causes politicians to get into the most absurd daring matches just when we need grown-up wisdom the most.


• "Will Russia get away with it?" After an introduction that seems to imply that Russian-Georgian relations date back no further than 1921, Kristol claims that moral influence is useless with the "Vladimir Putins" of the world. By what standard, through what filter, can he make that claim? The logic for Russian behavior in recent days was explained clearly by Dmitri Medvedev last week (from memory): "Russia has been and still is the primary guarantor of peace in the Caucasus." This is not the way I would run the world, but it is the logic of empires everywhere, including the American empire of the Monroe Doctrine and its recent pre-emptive corollaries. By the standards shared among "great powers," actions taken within this logic are not examples of moral depravity.
  
  Kristol asks, "Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of--and perhaps destabilizes all of--a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago." What kind of a friendly nation tries to resolve a longstanding dispute through unilateral military action and then attempts to drag the U.S. into the ensuing dangerous confrontation, even after being warned off this disastrous course by its American coaches? Who exactly was the source of destabilization? Did this democratic nation solicit its legislature's approval before beginning hostilities? And was the Russian response any stronger than the U.S. response would have been in an analogous situation? I am not arguing for sainthood or demonhood for anyone in particular here; I'm simply questioning as strongly as possible the tone of unreflective moral superiority pervading this argument.
  
  Kristol goes on: "For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine's." Exactly: consider the implications. Perhaps they would think twice before ignoring sober advice and giving into lethal expressions of nationalism. Perhaps they would put as much effort into developing a more mature relationship with the huge country right next door as they are tempted to put into exploiting their self-serving "friendships" with faraway USA. And, for that matter, maybe the USA would itself develop a more modest and constructive approach to Russia, as many American experts on Russia have been urging for years. None of these ideas depend on Russia and its leaders being perfect, but they do require abandoning the hypocrisy and cliches that dominate today's approaches.


• The Times editorial is, if anything, even more replete with useless bluster. The crescendo comes early: "Europe and the United States must make clear to Mr. Medvedev--and the real power player, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin--that more aggression and lies will not be tolerated. They must make clear that Russia will pay a price, in diplomatic standing and economic relations, if it does not immediately withdraw its troops, agree to international mediation and permit the deployment of truly neutral international peacekeepers to Georgia’s breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia." Let's overlook the unbecoming and gratuitous slap at Medvedev (he's not the "real power player"--as if they knew!) and consider the awesome trail of assumptions: who gets to decide what is aggression, and what is a lie? Who, after all, does the not-tolerating? That kind of rhetoric is simply another invitation to confrontation, a provocation which hopefully the actual "power players" will ignore, but the rule with nations as with parents is "don't threaten what you can't--or shouldn't--carry out." What kind of a price could Russia be required to pay that will actually net out as a benefit to the world as a whole? Who is hurt more by any attempt to isolate or humiliate Russia--Russians or the world as a whole? And to what ultimate end?
  

Years ago, Putin criticized the U.S. pre-emptive intervention in Iraq as the international application of the law of the jungle. What if he had gone further and said, "The U.S. will pay a price, in diplomatic standing and economic relations, if it does not immediately withdraw its troops..." and so on? Would we have slunk meekly away? Or was the case for our intervening half a world away on a tissue of lies so much stronger than Russia's case for imposing its own definition of stability on its own border? Ironically, we have in fact paid massively in both international credibility and in economic stability for our Iraqi attack and occupation and related human-rights abuses, and now is precisely when that lost credibility and economic strength could have been put to good use. But by "good use" I don't mean telling the rest of the world what we will or won't tolerate within the very same patterns of behavior that we ourselves display.

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Righteous links: The Pew Forum looks forward to this weekend's candidates' forum with Rick Warren. ~~ And Time paints an interesting portrait of Warren and his attempts to reframe evangelical activism--see the item in Monday Morning Insight and the magazine article itself. ~~ Edward Ericson writes about Solzhenitsyn the optimist. (Thanks to Books and Culture for the reference.) ~~ A fascinating visit with Doris Lessing. ~~ Thanks to David Finke for pointing me to the Illinois Yearly Meeting's peace resources pages, including the personal peace statements here.

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By this time next week, Judy and I should be deep into our visit to Orenburg Oblast' to visit the sites of Friends' relief work of 1917-18 and the 1920's. If we can't get online there, I'll post shortly after we get back. In the meantime, feel free to fill the silence with some Taj Mahal:

"You can't divide the country up..."

I don't expect the dawning of the Age of Aquarius on Inauguration Day, January 20. I expect that if the people make the best choice for U.S. president, the result on a policy level might be 5% better, or 10% better, than if they make the "wrong" choice.

But if Barack Obama wins, and his vision of a more united country, a "more perfect Union," is vindicated, part of our gain would be something other than immediate, miraculous payoffs in improved policies. Instead, it would be a wonderful defeat for divisive wedge campaigning, and a victory for his biggest moral priority--closing our country's "empathy gap." In the long term, closing that gap is a key element of opening up the political space for better policies.

I vividly remember an interview on public radio after the 1994 Republican congressional tidal wave. One of the Republican consultants said triumphantly that "born-again" Christians had voted 65% for the Republicans. When you play that wedge game, 65% seems equivalent to 100%, but what about the millions represented by the remaining 35%--aren't they people, too?

That memory came back to me when I listened to commentators talking about Hillary Clinton's successes in rural Indiana counties in the May 6 primary elections. Almost none of them talked about even the remote possibility that Hillary had simply done a better job making her case locally, and had therefore earned her county-by-county victories fair and square. Instead, her 60% or 65% majorities were interpreted as if it were physically and mentally impossible for a white farmer (or name your glib category) to vote for Barack Obama, even though many of them--in the thousands--actually did.

Again, when Paul Begala says that "eggheads and African Americans" can't carry the Democrats to the presidency, he perhaps unintentionally marginalizes those people (just think how African American eggheads might feel!) and at the same time marginalizes people who are NOT in those categories. Blue collar and rural white people can't be trusted to do the right thing, nor can eggheads of all colors and languages, when presented with wide-spectrum candidates and their programs; everything has to be targeted with narrow symbolism and clever rhetorical crowbars.

I vaguely remembered some delicious quotations from Harry S Truman and once again looted our partially boxed-up library for the Merle Miller oral biography, Plain Speaking, that contained them. (I know this book has been partially discredited for its apparent deviations from the original tape recordings, but these quotations are not from the weaker chapters, and furthermore are consistent with speeches and documents available from the online Truman archives for 1948.)

When 1948 was coming along, they said that if I didn't let up with my asking for a Fair Employment Practice Commission and asking for a permanent commission on civil rights and things of that kind, why, some of the Southerners would walk out.

I said if that happened, it would be a pity, but I had no intention of running on a watered-down platform that said one thing and meant another. And the platform I did run on and was elected on went straight down the line on civil rights.

...

People said I ought to pussyfoot around, that I shouldn't say anything that would lose the Wallace vote and nothing that would lose the Southern vote.

But I didn't pay any attention to that. I said what I thought had to be said. You can't divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can't encourage people's prejudices. You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

I want to be clear that I'm not for sentimentalizing people any more than I am for marginalizing them. Sometimes eggheads are wrong (or are right for the wrong reasons!) and sometimes outwardly unsophisticated rural people or blue-collar people are wrong. And when unethical media consultants want to sway these different audiences, they can use different counterfeits for different audiences. So you talk about Hillary's "cojones" to the Reagan Democrats, to choose one particularly idiotic example, or you hint that Obama, judged by the company he keeps, is "too radical "for our kind of people.

But I think Obama put it very well on Tuesday: "...while we may have different stories, we hold common hopes. We may not look the same or come from the same place, but we want to move in the same direction...." Counterfeits have to be calibrated for the audience; an authentic message, as Truman implied, will be the same everywhere.

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I don't know whether it is useful to extend these reflections into the Quaker arena. Certainly no politician is trying to divide us (at least not in the USA--Kenya is a different story). But counterfeit Quakerisms do exist, and they come in many boutique varieties--from individualistic New Age spirituality make-overs with selected antiquarian accents, all the way to cliche-ridden generic evangelicalism. But the genuine thing is the same in every culture, every worship mode, every language, every socio-economic class: "Jesus Christ has come to teach his people himself."

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Was the previous statement too categorical? I admit it; I do believe in the reality of error. Not wrong people so much as distorted or dead-end ideas. Or am I in error about that?

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Righteous links:

Veteran political observer Joe Klein reinforces some of what I said above (or vice versa...) in his Time magazine commentary on the Clinton/Obama campaign, and what it may mean for the upcoming presidential contest. "In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain."

Presidential campaign politics sixty years ago: The Truman Library's online documents treasury from the 1948 campaign. And a Helen Thomas book review provides more pithy quotes.

Speaking of inaugurations: Moscow, Kremlin, May 7.

Joe Volk writes to President Bush concerning "this use of airpower against a civilian population" in Sadr City.

Are you spending or wasting your cognitive surplus?

Should the Christian Peacemaker Teams stay in northern Iraq? Some visionaries weigh in.

Ekklesia: Christian leaders mark Israel's anniversary with 'just peace' call. (Related text and signers.)

"Christian leaders are catching a vision that group discernment is an integral congregational skill for the empowered work of the church. At George Fox University, May 19-23: Leadership Institute for Group Discernment.

Laugh and cry at these Postcards from Yo Momma. Having had a very disconnected mother (to put it one way...), I read these "postcards" with a wistful sort of reverse nostalgia--for the mother I never had. (Thanks to the Newsweek Web site for the reference.)

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Basic blues: Floyd Lee at Full Moon Lightnin's Clarksdale sessions. For more session clips, click on the poster's link.

Nine more months of this?

Nobody loves watching the political scene more than I do, and I even retain a touchingly naïve belief that politics can lead to a better world. But even as I avidly read the analyses of the columnists I enjoy--particularly my current favorites, David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times--I've been paying less and less attention to the daily coverage of the current U.S. presidential primary season. I've not even watched a single debate. Shocking!

From what I hear, I'm not the only one who's had enough of the bookmaking approach to political journalism: who's one-upping whom, who's playing identity politics most effectively (or the question's more jaundiced variant, who's best at pandering to whom*), and who's gaming the system best? Jay Rosen's article, "Mindlessness in the Media, Campaign 2008," reassures me that it's not just me getting cranky--there's something seriously wrong. But, sadly, it's not likely to get better soon. Rosen's analysis points to a combination of factors, but prime among them, the constant insecurity of the genre's practitioners.

As Rosen says, the media really might have better things to do than to tell us how we're supposed to behave based on polls and political tacticians' calculations--for example, to reveal how the candidates understand the limits of presidential power. This Boston Globe candidate survey, mentioned in Rosen's article, is exactly what we should have more of. How hard could it be to take a crucial issue ("What is the proper scope of the president's executive power?") and press the candidates to answer the question and explain their answers? And it's all the more important to do that in full view of a planetary community that is visibly rearranging itself (and discounting the global economy) in part to compensate for a renegade United States of America.

Whew, I feel better. Good enough, in fact, to recommend this Lynn Gazis-Sax post on whether it makes sense to prefer a candidate based on electability.

* Apologies to those suffering from jaundice.

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This past Tuesday evening, Judy and I attended the weekly Ministerios Restauración prayer meeting. The pastor, Samuel Morán, led a lectio divina on John 21:1-19, the seaside breakfast with the risen Lord. For me, it was a revelatory experience. Every time I've read that passage, I've concentrated on the edgy exchange between Jesus and Peter: "Do you love me more than these?" "Lord, you know I do." "Then feed my sheep."

This time, several other moments flashed out at me in the silence:

It is the Lord!
None of the disciples dared to ask him, 'Who are you?'
Cast the net to the right side of the boat.
Follow me.

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Several e-mails directed my attention to the American Friends Service Committee's "Cost of War" video. I agree with the video's sentiment, but the argument is unpersuasive. The money being burned to prosecute this immoral and criminal campaign (I refuse even the pseudo-dignity of the word "war") would never have been available for those thousands of teachers and other good things. Those $720 million per day were extorted from our pockets by manipulating the Congress (which, let's remember, bowed down in fear), by cooking the books (so much for balanced budgets) and by wholesale deception and scare tactics unworthy of the leadership of a great democracy.

If we are ever going to fund social justice, we'll have to figure out how to make a powerful enough case to overcome the natural class solidarity of the very wealthy, who too often remain shortsighted enough to believe we can be a great country with a great future despite an unsustainable, corrosive gulf between the richest and the poorest; and the understandable skepticism of those who no longer believe that government can be trusted with fiscal wisdom. One thing is sure: The money for education, health care, and environmental stewardship won't come from the kind of corrupt leadership that somehow spent $5 million on "democracy-building" by trial and (fatal) error in Iraq during the minutes it took me to write these words.

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Righteous links: On hope and despair: John Dear writes about Dr. King's final refusal to give up. ~/~ Reedwood Friends Church's Center for Christian Studies offers "The Language of God": a six-week class on God’s creation and the place of human beings in it. ~/~ Be part of the Friends Committee on National Legislation legislative priorities discernment--and invite your church or meeting to participate as well. ~/~ A treasure trove of Quaker writing: Illinois Yearly Meeting's speaker archives are available online. (Thanks to David Finke.)

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Just when I needed something like this: A group of musicians from St Petersburg, the Chill Out Blues Band! Listen to the lead singer's accent!

Friday PS: "Surge" is not a failure, part two

. . . but the PR surge is a failure.

The visit of David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker to Capitol Hill earlier this week was presented to us taxpayers as a progress report on U.S. involvement in Iraq, a reality check on the so-called "surge" from objective experts. For months, administration officials urged Congress and us to defer our questions until these men reported to us.

They have reported, but over and over again during the testimony, my mind went back to the assertion purportedly made by British intelligence leader Richard Dearlove, of U.S. preparations to invade Iraq, that "...the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (Source.) I could not shake the impression that these men's true assignment was the same as every other public representative of the Bush administration: to fix the testimony around the policy, to present whatever short-term details it took to deflect genuine accountability for the overall situation we're in. Almost every critical exchange followed one of these patterns:

Q: this benchmark has not been achieved
A1: in a formal sense, no, but informally, it sometimes works
A2: it's a slow process; we think chances are fair that it will work eventually

Q: when can we leave?
A1: we can go back to pre-"surge" levels sooner than we said at first [note that this is like discounting a retail price rather than a crisp indicator of success; how generous was the original margin?]
A2: we can't in good conscience answer that

Q: polls indicate that the Iraqis feel the surge has made things worse
A: I've not seen those polls

Q: what's the rationale for Iraq in a global context?
A: that's beyond my brief

(Excerpts from the House and Senate hearings.)

To be fair, there was an important moment of candor: The witnesses agreed plainly that there was no connection between the 9/11 attacks and the nation of Iraq. Demanding accountability for the connection between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq would have been, of course, beyond their brief.

Petraeus and Crocker are no doubt conscientious to a fault: they carry a huge burden of administrative stewardship that gives them no incentive to deceive us. It is not their overall strategic vision, as individual public servants, that is in play or in question. For that reason, I don't blame them for trying to limit themselves to testifying, in effect, that a larger occupation force can sometimes make more good things happen than a smaller occupation force, at least while that force is there. It was our president who deliberately set them up to absorb criticism and defend policy at the ground level, where they have some expertise and credibility, while he steadfastly avoids strategic reality: this unsustainable occupation is a moral disaster of global proportions.

And occupation it is. At this week's hearings, there was little pretense that Iraq is a sovereign nation. Every major decision affecting Iraq's future seems to be an American decision; every favorable outcome is presented as depending on either our direct intervention or our forceful advocacy. If there was any mention at the hearings of Iraq's right to terminate the occupation, it didn't come up. When our forces and contractors are not shooting, they're cajoling, improvising, training, untraining, hectoring, intervening, recruiting unsavory allies, subsidizing, and otherwise distorting every dimension of a society they don't understand. Iraqis see it all: Americans who represent the finest values of Yankee generosity and sheer human kindness; and Americans who are playing every crooked angle, earning billions of dollars, losing billions more in unauditable twilight zones, and misplacing many thousands of weapons (even as we accuse the Iranians of smuggling them in--why would they need to?).

Ultimate withdrawal of those occupation forces seems to be dependent upon a shifting set of criteria that cannot be known or committed to in advance, that can at any convenient moment be shown as improving but not quite there, and that can constantly divert our attention from the larger question: What has George Bush done with his stewardship of American resources in the light of global realities and our national values? What has Congress done to oversee or enable him? Those are questions that Crocker and Petraeus were not in a position to address. But all of us who care about our nation's soul are duty bound to keep pressing for answers.

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Several members of Congress used their hearing time to denounce moveon.org's full-page "General Betray Us" ad. I don't think an ad that can be seen as a personal attack on a loyal underling is a particularly effective or even ethical advocacy tactic, when the true problem is the supervisor. But I cringed when those normally dignified members of Congress made their insufferably fawning remarks about their witnesses; I was much happier when the questioners asked Petraeus and Crocker about the very incongruities documented by moveon.org as the context for the "despicable" ad.

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Thanks for the film suggestions that I've already received in response to yesterday's post. More suggestions are welcome!

Friday PS: The "surge" is not a failure!

I keep getting e-mails from political action groups urging me to sign petitions about the failure of the Bush-inspired "surge" of occupation forces in Iraq, and the consequent need to pull forces out quickly.

For God's sake, don't give in to this oversimplified and easily countered rhetoric. The failure is not in the escalation at all, based on the military logic involved. Wherever troop levels have been increased, it may well be possible to show an increase in security. Militarily, the surge has accomplished all that it can do. The soldiers have not failed to do what is in their power to do. Yes, the statistics have been spun wildly, as many pundits argue, but whether the overall Iraqi death toll is somewhat up or somewhat down, it is hard to argue with the U.S. administration when they say things are better than they would have been without those additional soldiers.

Arguing about the success or failure of the escalation traps us critics within the rhetorical frame of the administration. The issue has always been that the war itself, and the ongoing occupation, are utterly flawed--in philosophy, morality, legitimacy, implementation, and lack of exit strategy. The surge itself has succeeded brilliantly in buying President Bush half a year or more of stalling time. As with each phase of his previous stalling tactics, the realities of logistics and security impose a double-ratchet logic: We cannot leave until numerous intermediate conditions are right, and assessing or implementing those intermediate conditions can be postponed by any number of short-term political maneuvers, so the actual exit can continue to be postponed indefinitely. Even the Pentagon, by all accounts, is beginning to lose patience with this reality (red flag: after all, the rumored attack on Iran will require some of the assets now trapped in Iraq!).

For example, the administration absurdly maintains that the Iraqi government must achieve certain criteria of viability before we can withdraw. Why should we assume that any sane centrist Iraqi politician would definitely wish for his or her government to meet those criteria if the alternative is to allow the USA to continue pouring its resources into the country? Well, in fact, there are reasons for Iraqi centrists to wish for our departure, but the point is that the incentives on the Iraqi side to help us out are not clear at all.

Some argue that the early stages of a withdrawal should be marked by a change in occupation force mission from combat to support. What does that mean? I have never believed that American forces are so much more skilled at soldiering that they are indispensable as "support." Are there not Iraqis who know how to teach both military skills and military discipline? (If not, what have we been doing all these years? Who will account for all the resources we've already poured in to date?) The only legitimate mission for American forces in Iraq is to carry out an orderly and secure withdrawal; let the politicians in Iraq decide how to configure their own country and how to come to terms with the post-occupation insurgents.

After all, barring the use of wholesale slaughter and massive increases in imprisonment, the surge can, in the long run, only succeed in pushing opposition forces into a waiting mode. Even a new Iraqi military and police force will be no stronger or more stable than the political forces controlling them, and there is no guarantee that those forces will embrace values congenial to today's White House. In any case, that White House has not demonstrated:

• any willingness to be candid with us critics, or do anything other than talk down to us
• readiness to submit to public accountability for the disastrous deployment of precious national resources or the compromise of Constitutional values
• the capacity to assess conditions in Iraq competently or even to argue intelligently (depending for that mostly on pro-administration pundits);

and therefore, any continuation of the surge, or of the occupation generally, that depends on the President's good judgment, should be rejected.

Don't blame the surge; blame the surgeon. (And all those who've abdicated civilian oversight of the military, congressional oversight over the executive, and the people's oversight over the whole show. Hey, that's US.)

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Afternoon PS: I'm not the only one who feels this way.

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As a Christian pacifist, I have very mixed feelings about wading into a discussion of how to deploy or withdraw military forces. But soldiers are people, too. Family members of readers of this blog are serving in Iraq. Those soldiers deserve our full and active attention as citizens. We, the people they are presumably defending, must do our part--exerting our rightful accountability over those who sent our soldiers into danger.

What is really wrong with Friends United Meeting

Source.  

. . . but first, what is NOT wrong!

What is not wrong with FUM as FUM is the controversial policy on hiring and personal ethics (which says that FUM personnel and volunteers should reserve sexual intimacy for heterosexual marriage). This is why: that policy is an accurate reflection of God's will as understood by the FUM board at the time the policy was adopted. Any other more "liberal" policy would have marginalized (and would still marginalize) the majority of the constituency, in favor of the preferences of Friends with arguably the least amount of love and care for FUM.

And the way some of FUM's recent critics have demonstrated casual attitudes toward history, their negative assumptions about FUM's narrowness, and the meanness of the way they have treated even FUM staff members (including non-Friends on the staff)--all that does not give the volunteer leadership of FUM much of an incentive to go back into the process of discussing those policies once again. When someone demonstrates little or no affection for an organization and its central purposes, why should that organization grant them power over its life and death?

The blunt reality: only by changing that majority will Friends succeed in changing FUM policies, and I see little likelihood that FUM's critics will invite African and Caribbean Quakers, not to mention Iowa Yearly Meeting, into a serious and costly and trustfully-conducted dialogue on sexuality and biblical ethics, with equal attention to the themes that their conversation partners also consider vitally important.

Here's the post on Quaker Pagan Reflections that set off these thoughts. I was so distracted by Peter's characterization of some attitudes toward FUM that my comments there, presented again here, did not include a proper thank-you for his gracious description of Eden Grace's presentation. Here's what I said:

I had a very hard time wrestling with these words: "We are outraged by what we feel is a narrow minded and hateful stance FUM has taken on sexual ethics, but we have never come to any unity ourselves—have never even considered—making a statement of our own about sexual ethics."

I appreciate the candor of the statement, and realize that it is a general description, not a manifesto. But I was there when the FUM personnel policy was adopted, and there was nothing at all going on remotely similar to "taking a stance," nor was the context narrow-minded or hateful.

In fact, I keep wanting to challenge the apparent idea that "FUM" as an organization is somehow a black box in which narrow-minded, hateful things go on and "stances" are taken. What actually happened was that months of consultations and study led to a General Board meeting, clerked humbly and carefully by Paul Enyart, in which a decision was made almost regretfully by a roomful of people practicing mutual submission. Many people had to give up something desired by their home constituencies, including those Friends who still felt that homosexuality was criminal or should at least be socially disadvantaged. The actual policy goes directly against those points of view, and upholds the civil rights of all people regardless of sexual orientation. I don't remember how many New England YM Friends were at that meeting, but I do remember the one who said "This is as far as God has taken us at this time." (Not an exact quotation.)

My main point is that Friends United Meeting isn't an organization that takes actions by running roughshod over its members. It IS its members. You may know that in your head, but if people keep objectifying the connection point, pretty soon newcomers and outside observers can be excused for believing that the problem lies solely in that narrow-minded, hateful connection point.

If a YM breaks the tie with FUM, it's not the relationship with an organization that they're severing (formally), it's with the other Friends in other parts of the world for whom FUM was that connection point. We can certainly have ties only with Friends who never differ with us on anything that is important to us (and perhaps it is sufficient only to have bilateral connections with just one other yearly meeting at a time) but let's admit that that's what we're doing, not breaking ties with some mean-spirited group that doesn't, in any compact sense, actually exist.

I am not at all sure that biblical faithfulness requires the policy that FUM adopted, but I can verify that FUM did the process right. Just a few years earlier, I'd seen an anti-homosexual policy pushed through Indiana Yearly Meeting in the face of substantial and visible opposition, so I knew what bad process could look like. FUM's process was nothing like that.

Most of my adult life, I believed that Friends who were radically different in theology and culture could have fruitful dialogues, and could thereby create and model effective evangelism and peacemaking for the larger world. Not that every Friend would have such dialogues as their primary mission--evangelical Friends are right to say that the world's need for the Gospel should outweigh our internal fascinations. But it would always be useful for us to challenge each other to a more complete and faithful harvesting of our own three and a half centuries of discipleship.

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.

Here are some queries for Friends:

• When did our discussions of ethical ideals become subject to the veto of the most brittle or wounded or angry among us? Liberal communities sometimes don't want to discuss limitations on behavior that might affect someone in the room, or even affiliations that include the idea of limitations, because those people will object to being made invisible or disadvantaged. In some evangelical circles, there's often an almost irresistible compulsion not to say anything that might be mistaken for "liberal." In both cases, the truncated range of permissibility kills genuine dialogue, especially when people start trumping each other by comparing the pain they feel when their theology or their sexuality, or other aspects of their identity, are supposedly attacked. You mustn't compare pain, neither for therapeutic benefit nor for rhetorical advantage!
• Do you believe that Christians should have boundaries on behavior, and that those boundaries should be derived from, or at least not be in conflict with, the Bible? Do you believe that those boundaries should ever actually involve the behavior of people present at your yearly meeting sessions, or should those boundaries only involve people who are at a safe distance from your deliberations? Do you believe that you should or should not have meaningful organizational connections with Friends who disagree with you on issues of behavioral boundaries?
  
• Should FUM give up its ancient conceit of being a denomination (complete with responsibility for maintaining a denominational identity), and simply stick to being a program and resource network for evangelism? Those yearly meetings who need a wider association for identity purposes would still have Evangelical Friends International to affiliate with, and (in North America at least) Friends General Conference. And the great Quaker post office, Friends World Committee for Consultation, would remain available for worldwide communication and ... well ... consultation. Those yearly meetings whose members are simply too prickly to behave themselves in a larger context of mutual accountability would have to get used to life without the FUM scapegoat.
  
  This proposal is different from the old realignment controversy in that FUM would not be broken apart in favor of the other associations; it would remain active, and maybe even grow stronger, but with only the participation of those who actually care about its core mission. There would still be controversies--perhaps even some of the same ones--but they would be controversies among people voluntarily connected by an overarching priority.
• Do you personally believe that FUM's purpose is valid? How has your agreement or lack of agreement with FUM's purpose played a role in how you've supported, criticized, or ignored FUM? If you agree with the importance of FUM's purpose, but don't agree with the policy on hiring and personal ethics, is there another wider affiliation for your yearly meeting that would better serve this purpose of energizing and equipping Friends for evangelism?
• Regardless of your beliefs about sexuality, if your yearly meeting is in FUM but does not share FUM's purpose, then why is it in FUM? Would your yearly meeting allow FUM (that is, those members of FUM who do support its purpose) to challenge your yearly meeting's understanding of Quaker priorities as strongly as your yearly meeting would like to challenge those pro-FUM Friends on FUM's policies?
• Do social, cultural, or political prejudices cause some in your yearly meeting to hold FUM to higher standards than they hold their own yearly meeting or their local meeting or church?

One more list--here are some aspects of what I think is really wrong with FUM--its frustrating passivity and maintenance mentality:

• Most of Friends United Meeting's long-time supporters have overvalued old-fashioned denominational loyalty, and underestimated FUM's need to earn its right to exist by virtue of creatively designed and ardently advocated programming. There's been a huge shift in the larger culture, especially in North America, away from uncritical denominational loyalty--and one evidence of this is the rapid decline in the numbers of Friends in the FUM-only yearly meetings.
  
  In 1993, FUM adopted the present excellent purpose statement. That purpose statement should be not only the core of FUM's programming, but FUM's public voice should be consistently implementing, defending and promoting this purpose in season and out of season. As it is now, much of the North American constituency of FUM isn't even on board with the purpose statement. As for FUM's vital international work, much of it probably relates to the purpose statement but it is almost exclusively described in terms of maintenance. For example, Kenya absorbs a huge amount of FUM's attention, but Kenya is a highly evangelized country. How does FUM's work there reflect FUM's purpose? I think it does in many ways, but I can't point to evidence of this in Quaker Life or on the FUM Web site.
• A related point: FUM's traditional loyalists have feared controversy. When the realignment controversy first erupted around 1990, many of them did their best to smother it, right before my very eyes. (In those years I was Midwest field staff for Friends World Committee for Consultation and attended many FUM Board meetings.) Quaker Life acted as if this life-and-death issue didn't exist. Pro-realignment dissidents operated mostly in secrecy. When they conducted a conference on realignment, FUM's entire leadership caste should have embraced the event as a vital conversation on the future of "Orthodox" Quakerism. Rather than being cynical about the motives of the conference organizers (and a certain amount of cynicism might have been justified), they should have rejoiced that long-suppressed tensions and resentments were finally being vented and could at last be addressed.
  
  Even earlier, when Kara Newell ended her service at FUM in the mid-1980's, she challenged the board with the "lie" of the word "United" in the name "Friends United Meeting." The untruthfulness of that word has been a huge flaw in the organization--an irritant to those who believed that they were "unequally yoked" with unbelievers through the affiliation of overlap yearly meetings, and a constant incentive to smooth over the awkward truth through bland happy-talk at the leadership level. Bland happy-talk is still in fashion: earlier this year I received fundraising materials in the mail that used the tagline, "United? Yes! To Learn. To Care. To Love. To Serve." It came into my mailbox around the time of the divisive Board meeting in Kenya and the subsequent withdrawal of Southeastern Yearly Meeting. You can't just assert a claim, you have to demonstrate that the claim is (a) worth making, and (b) true. The claim of unity is simply not true.
• The dead hand of fearful loyalty continues to suppress open conversations about FUM's errors and encounters with corruption. We tried to break through some of those inhibitions when (during Ben Richmond's and my stewardship of Quaker Life) we reported on (for example) the collapse of the National Friends Insurance Trust and the Productions Plus scheme, and the visa sales scam operated by some Nairobi Yearly Meeting leaders back in 1999, but by and large FUM has not operated with the kind of transparency that befits the "Children of the Light." In some cases, FUM has confronted corruption successfully but has never publicly told the story and has therefore never received the credit (along with the awkward questions that should be welcomed as evidence of an engaged constituency).

A re-engaged constituency, attracted by lively advocacy and good purposeful programming, is FUM's only chance at revival. Come to think of it, that is probably true for every one of the 19th-century and early 20th-century organizations still claiming our resources. When our whole world-wide constituency amounts to the Catholic population of Philadelphia, it doesn't become any of us to look at any of our institutions with a one-upping spirit.

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Over the past year, I've written a number of posts about FUM on this weblog, and a number of related comments on others' weblogs. For those of you who have no interest at all in this area of Quaker politics or history, these comments must seem strangely gnarly and trivial in comparison to the great themes of the Christian good news and Quaker discipleship. For me, it's a matter of stewardship of a long heritage of relationships and ministry, but I know this isn't true for everyone. And I admit my ego is mixed in here, too; I poured seven years into being the head of the FUM staff, and my highest priority in that job--trying to restore trust between organization and constituency--was only very partially achieved. Anyway, if you've gotten this far, thanks for your patience!

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For convenience, here's the purpose statement of FUM, dating back to 1993:

Friends United Meeting commits itself to energize and equip Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved and obeyed as Teacher and Lord.

And here's the FUM policy on hiring and personal ethics, as stated at the time I left the staff in 2000. (If it has changed, I hope someone will provide the revision.)

Friends United Meeting holds to the traditional Friends testimonies of peace (nonviolence), simplicity, truth speaking, community, gender and racial equality, chastity, and fidelity in marriage. It is expected that the lifestyle of all staff and volunteer appointees of Friends United Meeting will be in accordance with these testimonies.

Friends United Meeting affirms the civil rights of all people. Staff and volunteer appointments and promotions are made without regard to sex, race, national origin, age, physical disability, or sexual orientation. It is expected that intimate sexual behavior should be confined to marriage, understood to be between one man and one woman.

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Righteous links:

Mark Keiley's courteous meditation, "In defense of the institutional church," is a pleasure to read. Interestingly, he doesn't himself attend an institutional church.

The convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to an outsider like me, has seemed more like a conference of Veterans of False Dichotomies. Two days ago, almost-candidate Fred Thompson was reported to have said, "We know that Iraq is an important front in this war. We also know if we appear to be divided and weak in this nation, it will enable the enemy and make our country more dangerous, and therefore the world more dangerous, than ever before." So: when a democracy is genuinely divided, that's a sign of weakness? Maybe it's a sign that a bad policy has caused dissension--which is a sign of strength! The world is arguably more dangerous when a superpower lets a provably flawed leadership team do its thinking for it.

And while we're arguing flawed historical analogies, Juan Cole cites the interesting analogy of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Here's a scary teaser:

From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics -- and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)

For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.

Mark Lilla, in his otherwise useful NYT article on "The Politics of God," provokes major frustration when he says, "Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s [letter to George Bush], we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics." Give me a break; the letter was not that strange. What was strange was that Bush and his colleagues did not have the elemental courtesy, not to mention strategic sagacity, to take the letter seriously and use the occasion to reply, both to the truths and to the perceived errors in the Iranian president's letter.

Instead, our administration continues to treat Iran as a semi-pariah, criticizing them for "meddling" in the affairs of the country with whom they share a risky border (implying that we would never meddle in another country's affairs?) and lecturing our allies with public condescension when they dare say Iran is a friend of theirs: "Now if the signal [from Maliki] is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart to heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don't believe they are constructive." [source]

One more item from Tom Engelhardt's site: "American on the downward slope," by Dilip Hiro. I don't welcome news of the USA's decreasing influence worldwide. The world still needs our ideals; it's our arrogance it can do without.

Angels rush in where fools fear to tread

We are approaching the second anniversary of Marla Ruzicka's death on the Baghdad airport road. She was the founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) and an almost instant legend among human rights activists, journalists, and NGO workers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands of people all over the world were captivated by the story of this young American who threw herself into the struggle for relief for innocent war victims and their families, apparently oblivious to her appearance of total naivete and headstrong, foolish idealism. Sadly, many of us were only captivated after we found out she was gone.

Veteran reporters and politicians were shaken by her death, and were not ashamed to say so. Many of their reflections and reminiscences are collected on CIVIC's "Marla's Memorial" Web page. The first impressions I got from their stunned comments two years ago was of a young woman all of whose energy seemed to go into two activities--helping those who were injured, or whose loved ones were killed, by accident or error in the process of American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq; and arranging and animating wild and wonderful parties in improbably locations for the internationalists among whom she ceaselessly networked on behalf of her cause. In short, she seemed like an angel with a difference--a party angel, both stubbornly earthy and improbably ethereal.

In an early reflection on the Slate site, Jennifer Abrahamson warned that this was not a full picture: "Over the past few days I have seen many descriptions of Marla, including those likening her to an angel or a saint. Neither of those words do her justice. She was driven by a passion I have never encountered before, and she had a boundless heart. But she was also consumed by extreme lows as well as highs, tears along with laughter. In discussing plans for a book, she wanted to be depicted as the rich and complex woman that she was."

Abrahamson eventually completed that book, Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story, and I've just read it. Now I see what she meant. That same young woman who could barge up to Donald Rumsfeld at a news conference and talk his ear off all the way to his car, or introduce herself to a whole roomful of experienced journalists she'd never met before with serene assurance that they would all totally be her friends, also suffered from depression and incredible self-doubt, didn't eat well or enough, pushed herself hard physically and emotionally, went into an unsustainable marriage, leaned too heavily on alcohol--while frequently trying to break this habit ... in short seemed incapable of sustained moderation.

Her complicated story also includes her evolution, or perhaps reorientation, from passionate American dissident to a sharply-focused organizer who was less concerned to find villains than to do whatever it took to obtain justice for victims--even if it meant building cooperative relationships with the U.S. military. Sadly, as a result she fell out of synch with some of her early collaborators.

Abrahamson's book itself feels a bit out of synch--shifting gears, rushing forward and braking, now reflective and now a breathless intercontinental itinerary. Maybe, given her subject, that scattered style is not entirely inappropriate. I also looked in vain for any understanding of the role of faith in Marla's story--the only tiny hint comes in the descriptions of her funeral at St. Mary's Catholic Church, Lakeport, California--for example the statement that the priest had known her all her life. The narrative includes her time at the Friends World program at Long Island University, but doesn't mention the Quaker background of that program.

It was not disillusioning to have my initial party-angel impression stripped away by Sweet Relief. To tell us what it cost for the world to receive her unique blessings is a deeper honor. It also challenges our conventional wisdom about what true effectiveness means, and what is required of us in community to support those who are led into unusually visible and risky confrontations with injustice.

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The CIVIC site also includes a page honoring Marla Ruzicka's colleague Faiz Ali Salim, who died with her on April 16, 2005.

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The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained the first, very partial, report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq compiled from U.S. military reports. (ACLU announcement. CIVIC commentary. AP article.)

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Friends United Meeting and symbolic politics, continued:

From several sources I've heard about the decision of Southeastern Yearly Meeting to suspend its membership in Friends United Meeting, for two years, after which, without a definite decision to reactivate it, it would be discontinued. Without discounting the pain involved, this feels to me like a decision that honors truth.

I have experienced convergence among Friends as we meet and mix in all sorts of informal ways, building new patterns of dialogue and mutual aid. I experience divergence as formal relationships seem less and less reflective of spiritual reality. Uniquely among North American yearly meetings of Friends, Southeastern was "united" in relating to Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting almost right from its very origins, partly because of the natural mixing that resulted from snowbird and retirement patterns. That original vision, and the influence of Miami Friends from Cuba, have not proved spiritually persuasive for some critical minimum number of Friends. As was made clear to me in my own visits to Southeastern, many perceive FUM as something alien, external, something that causes pain. There is no theory worth subjecting people to pain.

More about all this later. May God bless Southeastern Yearly Meeting and also the remaining yearly meetings of Friends United Meeting. And may FUM remain faithful to its purpose of energizing and equipping Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved, and obeyed as Teacher and Lord. And more than that: may FUM become far more powerfully persuasive in advocating for itself and may it (we) become ever more transparent in its governance, programs, and finances.

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Righteous links:

Elizabeth Bwayo and Carol Briggs, victims of a violent carjacking in Nairobi that killed Elizabeth's husband Jacob, were visited in Portland, Oregon, at Eastertime, by their Kenyan surgeon, Eric Kahugu. KGW-TV's story here; the Oregonian's here.

PC World reports that "Google Earth has added a Global Awareness layer to its maps program that lets you learn about the crisis in Darfur." I tried it and found this feature profoundly helpful and disturbing.

Wander around in Susan Jeffers' Peace Church Bible Study Home Page. You may experience a strange urge to learn biblical languages!

The Guardian presents two (at least!) different viewpoints on blogosphere civility: Jonathan Freedland "The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males" and Brian Whitaker "Blog and be damned: Today's argument over the tone of online debate would be familiar to the pamphleteers of 18th-century Britain."

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Buddy Guy does have a quiet side, and not just when he's shushing his band. Here's a nice clip of "Lucy Mae Blues."

Buddy Guy - Lucy (live)
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A new commandment

My favorite icon, one that overlooks the stairs down to my home office, is a very plain paper-on-board icon I bought in Zagorsk, USSR (now Sergiev Posad, Russia) in 1975. Jesus is holding the Gospel open at the words, "I give you a new commandment, to love one another."

As I searched for redemptive meaning in the vindictive death-scenes of Saddam Hussein's execution, the words of Jesus came to me with fresh force. The particular scripture (John 13:34) is addressed to his closest friends, but there's no doubt in my mind that the love we practice among those in our community truly is practice, so that we can love in wider and wider circles, even to our "enemy."

Almost anyone who talks about Saddam Hussein in the context of peacemaking feels bound to stipulate to his numerous crimes, including mass murder, not to mention summary executions of his political enemies. Where does love fit in? Just as C.S. Lewis advised not tackling the Gestapo as lesson one in learning to forgive, we do not have to lapse into sentimentality in considering how to love a tyrant. But how is this for a start? Resist the ancient temptation to kill him!

Why resist when the target is so juicy? Why not just let the drumbeat of "duly constituted authorities," the soothing rhetoric of "this young democracy" lull us into shrugging off another deliberate extinguishing of a human life?

Here's what I'm starting to realize. As a species, we have so little practice in resisting this ancient temptation. It's time to advocate and spread a "new" ethic: turn away from that urge to kill. Resist! When the desire to turn a human being into a sack of bones and guts arises, turn within and ask where that impulse is coming from.

Those of us who are protected by the buffers of middle-class gentility from the world's bloody reality still need to be in on this campaign. Our passivity too easily licenses our government's participation in the Saddam Hussein debacle; we can pretend not to see that the legal fiction of his execution is only a few steps removed from the common practice, in that same country, of methodically sawing off the heads of one's militia's enemies. (Clips of these "executions" are also provided on Internet video sites.) Neat distinctions between the gallows (that death facility in Baghdad that was made so notorious by Saddam himself) and the less formal executions only serve to obscure this imperative: even when we feel fully entitled to kill, we need to put an end to this practice. We need to demand that our foreign policy not bless others' willingness to continue practicing the ways of death. We need to oppose militarism, capital punishment, abortion, and every other deadly compromise, not from sentimentality, but because every time we end a life, it makes the next time easier.

Dale Aukerman, among others, has written movingly of the impulse to kill as a persistent reflection of the Fall. In Darkening Valley, he wrote these words (pp. 21-22):

Jesus said in one of his most drastic images, "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell" (Mt. 5:29). As we sense the incipient dynamism of sin within ourselves, we must, rather than yielding any further, make the most determined move imaginable for breaking with it. It can be seen throughout our world how much that call and warning of Jesus applies to readiness for war. Where there is not the determined plucking out of the eye that looks, however hesitatingly, toward killing, the whole person and the whole society are plunged toward the inferno of thermonuclear murdering and being murdered.

Theologians who have reiterated a just war or a war-of-liberation position have not adequately reckoned with this dynamism. For them a limited sinning (for which grace abounds) is permissible when a preponderantly good outcome is to be expected. Such positions have often been elaborated in the context of declaring with great emphasis the sin and guilt of all human beings. Because the sin and guilt are so encompassing, it is supposedly necessary, proper, and forgivable to add to them at times by going to war. Such positions are possible only for those who have no real comprehension of the biblical understanding that in sin and sinning a mighty dynamism strives for total dominion over those who in any way choose to commit sin and that God's grace moves not only to blot out guilt but, even more crucial, to hurl back that dominion. The history of our [20th] century, probably more than that of any other, corroborates the biblical awareness of sin's dynamism. Jesus said to the adulteress, "Go, and do not sin again." Only as we strive to hear and obey that directive with regard to our readiness to kill, can we be freed from this aspect of sin's dominion.

A prominent American clergyman asked me once, "What's the matter? Are you afraid of getting a little blood on your hands?" I am--not because I'm so good, but precisely because I'm not. I am in jeopardy, exposed before the power of evil impinging upon me and lurking within me, the little blood on my hands would inevitably become much, much blood.

The hard work of obeying Jesus' commandments concerning love does not involve getting misty-eyed over murderers and tyrants. It involves inner work: building the capacity to resist objectifying anyone who bears the image of God, and then confronting the dilemmas involved with organizing alternative approaches. Not killing the murderer is just the first step. We still need to find out what makes people into murderers, how to safeguard society from future danger, and how to heal the wounds their crimes have left. But wait a minute--we had those same challenges before, even when we felt free to obliterate our enemies. But too often we just dealt with the symptom and, apparently, made no progress with the disease.

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To what extent is advocacy of nonviolence a luxury for me? As I said once before on this blog, when I was an editor with Quaker Life, I checked the subscription records once to see if any copies of the magazine went to the zip codes around the area where my sister Ellen was murdered. After coming to the USA, our family lived in Evanston, Illinois, and that was where my sister lived nearly up to the time she was kidnapped and killed. Quite a few copies of the magazine went to Evanston's zip codes. But not a single copy went to the area where Ellen died. True, I grew up in an alcoholic and occasionally violent family, and my mother reinforced that I was from "officer class" stock on my German side. Some of my warmest childhood memories were the times I'd sit with my father while he cleaned and oiled his guns. I can still remember the smell of the oilcloth. Still, my own survival never appeared to depend on willingness to use force.

What I long to do is to withdraw my consent from the conventional wisdom that blesses killing under the "right circumstances," which functionally means anytime we as a society don't have the will or imagination to find another way. I really hope that the worldwide revulsion at the the Saddam Hussein spectacle might be a moment of conversion for human beings--this is what it does to our soul to choose deliberately to end a life.

There's plenty for all of us to do who want this conversion. Those of us who live in relative safety don't need to feel guilty or useless; let's work to expand the zones of safety. Those of us who love to use words should consider whether we enjoy killing the reputations of others; let's not drop one syllable of our opposition to bad policies, but without trashing the human beings behind those policies. Some of us are gifted to discern the forces that link militarism, economic exploitation, and racism; please help the rest of us get a handle on the implications for the way we live, vote, and spend. But sooner or later, a few of us will actually know when a life is literally in our hands. Maybe the ancient temptation will have lost its force.

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I'm history. I was looking at some photos that my German grandparents, my mother's parents, kept in a cigar box. It's odd to think that these ancient black and white pictures are of me and my family. They look almost like they're from shortly after the U.S. Civil War. Have I really been around that long?

Even more startling: here's a picture that looks like it dates back to the invention of photography. Taken in Versailles, France, this postcard photo can't really be all that old: the people standing second and fourth from the right edge are my mother's parents, Paul and Emma Schmitz. And they're not, apparently, all that young.

They were living in Japan at the time the photo was taken. True, they had their one and only child, my mother, when they were already middle-aged.

A little further down in the cigar box, I found a photo of me dressed up far more elegantly than I've ever been dressed as an adult. It must have been taken in Stuttgart shortly before I left Europe for the USA.

And here's a photo of Ellen and me on the deck of the S.S. United States in 1963, with the Atlantic Ocean behind us. Our first port of call was Southampton, England, after which we disembarked at Bremerhaven. I vividly remember that trip, but it has now been decades since there was routine transatlantic passenger service by ship between New York and Europe. (However, all is not lost. Cunard's Queen Mary 2 provides several transatlantic passages each year, and other lines provide repositioning cruises that cross the Atlantic.) 

1963 was the year my father's father, Knut Maurer, retired as captain of the M.S. Meteor after bringing it into Oslo harbor one last time. After watching that beautiful little cruise ship dock right in front of Oslo City Hall, I clambered on board and roamed the ship, telling anyone who would listen that my grandfather was the captain.

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Righteous links:

Just in case another sea travel enthusiast happens upon this post, Google led me to this page dedicated to the history of the M.S. Meteor, with links to several photos of the ship under various names and flags. In the years immediately after World War II, my grandfather also served on the famous M.S. Stella Polaris, the subject of this page.

2007 King Holiday Observance information is here.

Has the weather changed where you live? Karen Street's A Musing Environment links to a discussion of apparent changes in climate and weather, with (at tonight's count) 230 comments. Today she added another post, inviting us to test our knowledge of relative dangers of energy sources.

Here's a site, The Simple Way, that has been mentioned in blog comments but I want to give it more prominence now that I'm reading Shane Claiborne's thoughtful and delightful book, The Irresistible Revolution.

If I don't say anything about the bogus controversy over new Congressman Keith Ellison and his desire to take his ceremonial oath of office on a Koran, it's not because I don't have opinions. But Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, who also appears in our local newspaper, the Oregonian, has said it better than I could.

Similarly, Friends Committee on National Legislation provides abundant resources for responding to the U.S. president's call for escalation in Iraq. I partly disagree with FCNL on only one major point--"Underwriting of Reconstruction with U.S. Dollars." It's not that I want the U.S. to withhold resources needed for reconstruction, especially since we're so notoriously stingy whenever it comes to helping repair the damage we've caused--witness the vindictive way we treated Viet Nam after the war there. However, I have a queasy feeling about the corruption that would accompany massive official aid unless there were significant reforms and safeguards. I guess an approach that would rely on widely-disbursed grassroots-oriented aid efforts is not likely. For now I would rather the U.S. simply stopped meddling in Iraq entirely, and focused on (1) a respectful but assertive debate with anti-American opinion-leaders in the region; and (2) restoring the semblance of an honest-broker role in Israel and Palestine.

Andrew Sullivan is just one of many who point out that Bush's military escalation in Iraq is support for a fictional partner--that is, a functioning government in Baghdad. The plan appears to me to be a tripod with two missing legs--an Iraqi partner and a credible civilian-aid component.

A Quaker in the Vatican: George Fox University professor Paul Anderson meets Pope Benedict XVI and augments the Pope's library with good Quaker ecclesiology and christology. And while I'm in an ecumenical mood, I read with interest Bradley Nassif's article in Christianity Today, "Will the 21st Be the Orthodox Century?" I appreciated Nassif's enumeration of helpful mutual influences between evangelical and Eastern Orthodox Christians, but he doesn't touch on some Orthodox weaknesses that may well be exacerbated if Orthodox Christians don't challenge the growing movements of nationalism and pseudo-Christian fascism in some Orthodox quarters. See this article, "The Russian Orthodox Church and Social Doctrine" (Word .doc file) by Charles West on the Religion in Eastern Europe site at George Fox University. It's nice to be able to speak from a position of superiority, knowing that American Christians never confuse piety with nationalism.