February shorts

In last week's post, "Smoking gun with silencer," my comments included a charge that Donald Trump had conned his way into the U.S. presidency. (See the full set of comments for the context.) Keith Saylor wanted me to say more precisely what I meant by "conned" ... a fair request. I'd like to repeat a part of my reply here:

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You [Keith Saylor] charitably summarize my "con" argument this way: "It seems to me you are suggesting that Donald Trump conned his way to the Presidency by misusing or abusing the confidence in electoral process and the office of the Presidency to degrade the political culture for personal and general economic interest."

I don't think that Trump set out to degrade the political process. My argument is slightly simpler: He tricked a significant number of voters into believing that he would be a more competent leader than Hillary Clinton. Her case depended at least in part on her resume (activist, Senator, Secretary of State, etc.) and, consequently, her familiarity with how things are done, along with her policy priorities, which were standard-issue centrist reforms.

Trump's case was dramatically different. He denounced the political and financial establishment ("the swamp") and said, basically, "Rely on my intelligence and intuition as a get-it-done businessman who gives it to you straight." His utter disdain for political correctness simply reinforces this impression as someone who is not controlled by convention or the establishment.

Now I'm sure that a certain segment of his base has in fact gotten what he promised and demonstrated before the election: a transgressive figure with no verbal filter. This bull-in-a-china-shop behavior continues to delight them. This may be a function of their extreme alienation from the politics of the past; I just don't know. But it would be wrong for me to say that this specific segment was conned into voting for Trump.

I simply cannot believe that this segment accounts for all 60 million of his voters. Among those voters must be millions who actually believed his promises to clean out the swamp and who took his claims of expertise at face value. They surely hoped that his brutish behavior would cause a creative upset, not a destructive one. These are the people who were conned, in my opinion. They did NOT expect the degradation, collapse of worthwhile norms, administrative incompetence, chaotic and contradictory political signals, and exaltation of wealth that have marked his tenure so far. They may have made a comparison between Candidate Trump as intuitive genius and Hillary Clinton as the "swamp" candidate, but not between her and the rolling crisis we're experiencing now.

PS: It's not a "con" if he didn't intend to deceive, so my argument above is a bit incomplete. What really seems deceptive to me are two things: the "drain the swamp" claim, when in reality his regime is marked by very wealthy and well-connected Cabinet members and others; and the claim of being more intelligent and better-informed than others (in some cases FAR better), when he apparently counted on being able to operate by feel and fiat.

It doesn't seem quite fair to charge that he fully intended to make such a mess of things, or to wander so close to authoritarianism. But, whatever he intended, his actions, compromises, and inadequacies have led us into crisis territory. And all that is without considering whether he is so beholden to actors in Russia that he cannot act to secure our electronic borders.

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The Winter Olympics have started! It's the one recurring event of the sports news cycle where the country of my birth, Norway, plays an outsize role on the world stage, so pardon me for any temporary inconsistencies in my conceit that I'm a world citizen!

Ellen looks at ski jumping coverage.

Norway's first curling matches of this year's games (mixed doubles) came up with wins. However, curling wasn't one of my childhood fascinations at Olympics time. The two sports that I loved following were ski jumping and biathlon. This remains true.

One other early victory for the 2018 Norwegian team: they managed to return 13,500 eggs ordered by mistake for the team's kitchen.

This year politics will play a larger than normal role in the games. North and South Korea will field a combined team for women's ice hockey, presumably without USA permission. On a sadder note, 47 Russian athletes and coaches lost an appeal to be included in these games. As a result of the doping scandal, those Russians who were found eligible will compete under the banner of the Olympic Athletes from Russia, rather than the Russian national flag.

Source.  

In general (with exceptions!), the Russians I've talked to about this scandal have two responses, often given together although they may seem contradictory:

First, the penalties imposed on Russian athletes reflect anti-Russian attitudes in the West; and secondly: yes, doping happens -- it's just part of the normal culture of corruption in Russia. (Also, some ask "what about" the doping that goes on elsewhere in the world? Back to the first point: their claim is that since doping goes on everywhere, only politics can explain why Russia is singled out.)

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Back in March 2017, did you see opposition politician Alexei Navalny's video "He's not Dimon to you!"? That expose of Russian prime minister Medvedev's allegedly ill-gotten real estate began with the tiniest initial clue: finding out who owned the location where the prime minister's online purchases of sneakers were delivered.

Screenshot from today's video. Outside Navalny's HQ.

Today's sensational new video from Navalny's anti-corruption team, which alleges connections between Russian deputy prime minister Sergei Prikhodko, oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, describes another investigation that also began with a minor and apparently unrelated incident. A group of provocatively-dressed young women, accompanied by a film crew from Lifenews (specializing in yellow journalism favorable to Russian authorities, now defunct), showed up at Navalny's Moscow campaign offices in an apparent attempt to embarrass his team. Curiosity about these women and their mission led to a chain of further discoveries. (For more, see the video, which has English subtitles. See this evening's Washington Post article here.)

By the time I saw the new video, nine hours after its YouTube debut, it already had half a million viewers. At the end of the day, it has 1,145,000 views on Navalny's own YouTube channel alone.

Friday PS: Oleg Deripaska is not happy. Fresh summary on RFERL.

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Jen Zamzow asks whether churches should handle sexual abuse allegations internally.

That "evangelical" label, again: Jonathan Merritt with John Stackhouse.

Rapper NF: where Christian hip-hop and Eminem meet. (Some NF tracks included.)

More on Russia's upcoming presidential elections: Alexander Kynev. Natalia Antonova.

With the U.S. Pentagon being force-fed yet more money, what happens to the money they already have? Here's a bit of probing by Nick Turse.

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Buddy Guy's "Skin Deep" gets the Playing for Change treatment. (Thanks to Bill Denham for the link.)

Intentions and results

Today: Back to the Moscow district after our brief trip to Klaipeda and Riga. On the train to Elektrostal, we look out the window and see station after snowy station, each neatly swept, surrounded by a seemingly permanent glistening white carpet of snow. Home again! And in the evening, we enjoy a fresh snowfall. Photo: Judy Maurer.

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Back in 1990, when I was working for Right Sharing of World Resources, I toured our partner organizations in south India. On one of my first stops, I visited a non-governmental organization outside Chennai (then Madras), and got some valuable lessons from the organization's director.

He was blunt and honest about the pitfalls of doing development through transfers of money. Some examples: (1) Transparency is vital—money can get siphoned off at all levels; or even if it is being spent honestly, local participants can suspect that it is being siphoned off, especially when the funding seems fitful and capricious. (2) Funders must get to know the "target" communities in depth, not relying on intermediaries, who can become power-brokers, even selling "successful" applications for others to copy. (3) Never believe (or allow people to convince you) that you are indispensable. The communities were there before you ever showed up and will be there after you leave.

He said a lot more—and hopefully it's all preserved in the Right Sharing archives, along with more recent learnings. That session, and the 30 subsequent meetings that followed during my time in India provided lessons that no book could have supplied—especially not the books of nearly impenetrable prose that I was struggling to read in order to stay abreast, if that were possible, of the changing fashions in economic development.

One of the reasons that I enjoyed reading Brian Fikkert's and Steve Corbett's book When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Ourselves was its refreshing lack of jargon. It wasn't written for the guild, it was written for the church as a whole—and especially for those whose desire to help exceeds their exposure to the real-life results of such well-intentioned "help" in the past.

Along with keeping their writing crisp and simple, Fikkert and Corbett accomplish a great balancing act: they tell the awkward truths about harmful help ... while avoiding shaming the reader, who may have (or whose church may have) done exactly the sorts of things that the book advises not to do. As the authors candidly admit, they themselves made these same errors!

This balancing act is important, because the very thesis of the book is that poverty is a disruption of right relationships—so, presumably, the authors should keep a right relationship with us, the readers! Part of their balancing act is avoiding categorical rules—for example, their conclusions about the limits and dangers of short-term missions might give many of us pause after all the white elephants and pancake breakfasts we've paid for, to help raise money for such missions, and all the sentimental slideshows we've seen afterwards. But the authors don't totally lower the boom on short-term missions; instead, they list concrete ways to make them as productive as possible. This non-categorical, non-shaming approach (so different from the high-stakes games sometimes played in politicized development circles and their one-upping theoreticians) is reinforced by the exercises and discussion questions carefully placed throughout the book.

Some teasers:

[Bryant] Myers notes that the Triune God is inherently a relational being .... Being made in God's image, human beings are inherently relational as well. Myers explains that before the fall, God established four foundational relationships for each person: a relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation....

One of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich—their god-complexes—and the poverty of being of the ecoomically poor—their feelings of inferiority and shame. The way that we act toward the economically poor often communicates—albeit unintentionally—that we are superior and they are inferior. In the process we hurt the poor and ourselves. And here is the clincher: this dynamic is likely to be particularly strong whenever middle-to-upper-class, North American Christians try to help the poor, given these Christians' tendencies toward a Western, materialistic perspective of the nature of poverty. [Emphasis in original.]

[Commenting on an inner-city case study:] The fall [i.e., Genesis 3] really happened, affecting both Alisa and the systems into which she was born. Unfortunately, as recent research has demonstrated, Caucasian evangelicals in the United States, for whom the systems have worked well, are particularly blind to the systemic causes of poverty and are quick to blame the poor for their plight.

When considering bringing in outside resources, we must always ask two questions: (1) Is it too much? (2) Is it too early? It would be far better to let a nonemergency need go unmet than to meet that need with outside resources and cripple local initiative in the process. Again, poverty alleviation is about reconciling people's relationships, not about putting bandages over particular manifestations of the underlying brokenness.

Unfortunately, while public policy has historically encouraged wealth accumulation for middle-to-upper-class people, it has often discouraged wealth accumulation for the poor. Middle-to-upper-class people are encouraged to accumulate wealth through such things as tax-deferred (and often employer-matched) retirement savings (IRAs, 401Ks, 403bs [these are USA-specific examples]), and mortgage-interest tax deductions. At the same time, poor people have been forced to deplete their assets before qualifying for welfare assistance and have been penalized with the loss of benefits if they somehow manage to save and invest too much! The end result is that many poor families are highly vulnerable to economic shocks and unable to even think about their financial futures.

For those who want to examine and critique the authors' underlying homework, there are numerous footnotes, but the book itself never drags. I'm grateful that this book has the potential to open up deeper conversations about poverty, justice, and discipleship within a much wider audience than the experts who too often stay at footnote level.

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Righteous links:

Here's the online dot.org supplement to the book: When Helping Hurts.

Friends World Committee for Consultation publicizes a worthwhile appeal for a mental health project in Russia. I heard details about this project at the Friends House Moscow board meeting last fall—it sounds exciting.

Radio Free Europe on "Defending Disabled Children in Russia."

OpenDemocracy presents a level-headed analysis of the Ukrainian elections.

What's behind the decline in religious observance in the USA? New atheists, or "everydayishness"?

Could "Love your enemies" become the new trend in mission? At least it's a major theme in the latest (March-April 2010) issue of Mission Frontiers. (If you see this link after a couple of months, you may have to look in the archive listing here—something you should do anyway if you're not familiar with this fascinating and category-bending publication.)

Jim Wallis will be in Beaverton, Oregon, in a few days. His book-tour dates are here.

Jonathan Edwards, "Great Divider"—a controversial American theologian gets another look.

In the permanent-war-watch department: Tom Engelhardt addresses "Fear Inc."

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The Winter Olympics are a great season for all of us with Norwegian roots. The rest of the time we can pretend to be global citizens, but every four years, for a brief couple of weeks, we can bask in the reflected glory of these amazing athletes who, on a medals-per-capita basis, leave the rest of the planet in the dust.

Tora Berger, biathlon gold medalist, wins Norway's 100th gold medal in the history of the Winter Games. Source.

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And here's a story combining Norway, ice, and ... music.

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A belated Valentine's Day card for all blues lovers:

Shorts in February?

Patriotism II. Friends have had honest struggles with patriotism and its symbolism for a long time. In my chapter for the book Friends and the Vietnam War, edited by Chuck Fager, I wrote about Keith Sarver:

Keith Sarver, who was for many years the superintendent of California Yearly Meeting, one of the most conservative in FUM [Friends United Meeting, known in those years as Five Years Meeting of Friends] at the time, wrote to me: 

“... My personal experience was more traumatic during the Second World War than was the Vietnam War. That was because I was a new Christian and a new, inexperienced pastor during that time. Soon after I was converted I attended a Quarterly Meeting in Iowa Yearly Meeting and heard two men speak about the Friends position on war and was convinced that very day that I could not serve in the military, and I certainly could not take the life of another person. I had previously registered for the draft and when it was learned in the community that I had become a conscientious objector that spelled trouble. There were former friends in the community who would no longer speak to me. The draft board was informed of my intention to go to school to prepare for the ministry and without even asking me to meet with them they sent to me a 4-D classification.

“We went to Chicago and after school started I got a part time job with Railway Express at 95 cents per hour. When I went to collect my first paycheck I was met by a union steward who wanted to know why I was not having anything taken out of my check for War Bonds I told him I could not in good conscience buy war bonds and he informed me that I could not work there.... I then went to work for the school at thirty cents per hour toward our school expenses. 

“The Lord opened the way for us to take a pastorate in Watseka, Illinois, which we did not want to do, but when we were convinced that the call was from the Lord, we went. There was a large American flag fastened on the wall immediately behind the pulpit and I quietly expressed my discomfort with the location and when the church was redecorated the chairman of the trustees left the flag down. There were boys from the church in the military and their names were listed in a board on the wall. I never mentioned this but it became a center of controversy[,] but when I pointed out from the discipline what the Friends testimony had been and still was for me, even some of the parents accepted the rightness of our position as the Friends testimony and there was no longer outward opposition.”

Keith mentioned the U.S. flag in the meetinghouse. I never kept track of the numbers of meetinghouses I've visited in the USA that have or don't have flags, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were 50/50. In honor of both halves of that universe, I present this PDF link.

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A fragile patriotism is any patriotism that depends on superiority. One slip, on any important scale, and what happens? Germany after World War I reached for demagogues and scapegoats. In the case of the USA, I have no idea what might happen if an economic collapse or similar large-scale catastrophe deprived us of global superiority. Could we take demotion from empire status as gracefully as the UK has tried to? 

How can Norway hold its head up in the community of nations after having slipped from first to sixth place in the Winter Olympics medal count?

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Is there a healthy patriotism? To borrow from the language of marketing, perhaps patriotism is brand loyalty raised to a national level. If a whole nation of people participate in a web of common governance and invest legitimacy in that web, their sense of unity and common affection might be a healthy form of patriotism. For me, the clue to its health would be that to be patriotic would not require feeling superior to others.

How is it possible to be proud without being superior? Maybe it is risky. But I'm proud of my children even though I objectively know that other parents are equally proud of their children. It doesn't diminish their children for me to be proud of mine. The reasons I'm proud of my children involves values and measures that we hold dear within our family, and in my mind I can believe that other families have values and scales they apply that on some larger plane are as valid as mine. Similarly, I can value the USA's (imperfectly expressed) heritage of freedom, equality, anti-elitism, while leaving open the possibility that other countries have either (1) also managed to construct societies with similar values, or (2) have found ways to cherish life and relationships that aren't the same as my country's but are still to be respected.

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But what if we really are superior? I honestly believe that not every nation or even every culture is equally good. The terrible reality is that our species, in its great variety, seems to have organized itself in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of dysfunctions—including patriarchy, racism, nationalism, elitism and false social distinctions of all kinds. These phenomena aren't evenly spread out among all societies and organizations as if by some cosmic distribution mechanism. Some societies seem objectively (if that were possible!) more oppressive than others, no matter how I try to contort myself into believing that perhaps oppression somehow works for them, that there is a hidden richness in those lives that makes up for the apparent cruelty and corruption.

So, it is theoretically possible that the USA is far better than some possible alternative societies even now, centuries after the American experiment was started in the face of a world mostly governed by despots. However, as soon as we Americans organize ourselves around this belief, namely that we are superior to another society, we seem to be inclined to choose one of two equally tragic paths: first, we ignore that more oppressive society, giving a long train of excuses: we respect their boundaries; we say it is not our problem; we have no strategic interest; etc. On the other hand, if we DO discover that in fact we DO have a strategic interest, well, in that case we're spreading democracy; supporting our allies; only killing terrorists or insurgents or perhaps even a few innocent people, but please keep it in perspective. We don't want to count, but how many corpses have to pile up before it is apparent that we haven't eliminated oppression by our beautiful and superior system, we've merely exported it? And if we only shift the oppression from one side of a boundary to another, how superior are we?

I'm not arguing that intervention should never happen. I just wish that our "interventions" could be nonviolent, nondelusional, constant (not limited to crisis), creative, and based on every human being's right to make an effort to communicate, trade, negotiate, offer relationship with every other human being anywhere, anytime, and no government's ultimate right to define another people, another society, as off limits.

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Speaking of oppression, one of the twentieth century's turning-point speeches happened fifty years ago. Sean's Russia Blog has a series of posts, starting with this one, commemorating Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956 denouncing Joseph Stalin's "cult of personality."

Patriotism and grief

"Patriotism" has been a difficult concept for me. Maybe it's because I've not lived in the country of my birth and original citizenship for most of my life; or because I've lived in six countries at one time or another; or because I've read too much pop psychology and pop anthropology, not to mention Kant and Kierkegaard, so that all the mysticism has drained out of concepts such as "nations" and "borders." Maybe it is because as a Christian I have an allegiance that trumps all others.

But I can't live on some smug, abstract plane of superiority. We all live in webs of relationships that have cumulative caches of obligation and custom, encouragement and inhibition, good and evil—and those relationships have helped make me who I am. If I cherish freedom of speech and the independence of the church, that's partly a result of the nation whose air I've breathed most of my life.

My double-mindedness about patriotism has come to a head this week. For better or for worse, national leaders often become national symbols, even presidents elected by roughly half of the voters, in turn who are roughly half of an adult population. The behavior of our current national leaders has just pushed me over a threshold. They no longer inhabit that position of symbolic national headship for me—and, unexpectedly, I feel strangely mournful, empty, as if there's been a death in the family.

This goes deeper than simply having a visceral dislike of Bush/Cheney policies, or distress with their class warfare, or disgust with corruption and bullying. All of that has something to do with it, of course. What pushed me over the edge was the renewed attention to Abu Ghraib that resulted from the release of more photos from the scandal that immortalized that name. (Photos our "leaders" do not want us to see.) I do not feel any national commonality with the power structure that is responsible for tolerating torture, for hiding it, for justifying it, for twisting and spinning and sneering and name-calling when faced with demands for accountability. The heads of the executive branch are responsible for executive operations in this country—and the more "unitary" power they claim, the more responsible they are. This is their mess, but I helped finance it with my taxes, and I fear that I signal approval if I can't find a way to emigrate from their false America.

So, I have a country—a country with a heritage of democracy, although who knows what will remain of that heritage tomorrow. I have a country which, at least today, still allows me to express outrage and rejection in the face of its corrupt leadership. I have a country—but I have no president. The headship is vacant.

(See Patriotism II)

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Source.  

On a lighter note about patriotism, my world-citizen pretensions are exposed every four years when the Winter Olympics roll around. Normally, rankings of countries mean nothing to me, but when I see the land of my birth, little Norway, sitting at the top of a list of mostly world powers—Russia, the USA, Germany—how can I not feel proud?

Norway finished the 2002 Winter Olympics in third place in the medal count, but if you count medals per capita, they trounced the rest of the world many times over. (I'm not above spinning the results in their favor, too: they had more GOLD medals than any other country.) This year, as of this morning, they were on top of the total medal count.

Perhaps the more important list where Norway perennially appears at or near the top is the list of countries ranked by contributions to aid and development in the economically distressed world. If only my adopted country, the USA, normally soooo competitive on the world stage, could be stirred into a competitive fever in that contest.

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From Maxine in Baghdad:

13 February 2006 in Baghdad

Dearest friends-

A friend wrote and told me about the snowstorm on the east coast today. It's funny, because I had kind of forgotten about snow here in the desert of Iraq. After I got done dancing around the room in joy that I didn't have to shovel it or drive in it, I got to thinking about the good qualities of snow.

Snow has a marvelous effect on the place where it falls. It muffles the noise of everday life, and covers everything in a downy blanket of white. For me, snow has always been a spiritual experience. I feel somehow like it's God's way of making me slow down for a bit, to silence the clatter and clamor of the usual things so I can feel God's presence. I find it to be a very peaceful feeling.

I'm missing snow here in Iraq, because there's very little that silences the noise and the chaos here. Daily I'm barraged with sirens, generators, bombs, gunfire and helicopters. There's precious little time when there's not some (if not all) of that going on. It jangles my nerves and makes it hard to hear the voice of God among the din.

I've been trying to find that sacred space, mostly by manufacturing it myself. I've been practicing meditation techniques that, by disciplining by own senses, produce the quiet I desire. It's not easy; in fact, it's a lot of hard work. It seems there is always something that wants to steal my focus, to draw me away from God. I'm a novice at this and each day I struggle with the sense that I'm not getting much further in my development, but I keep trying.

My colleagues are still being held by those who took them. Daily I pray for their safe return and work in any way I can think of to convince those who hold them that now is the time to release them. It's been nearly two and a half months now. I wonder how much more they can take of being held captive. I pray for their families and ask God to help them remain hopeful.

I'm also praying that Tom, Jim, Norman and Harmeet can find a peaceful place with God in the middle of their captivity. I don't think it will be a snowstorm here in Iraq, but I'm counting on God to find the next best thing.

God's peace to you this week-

Maxine