Living without lying

Pravda (Truth). Cropped from source.

"One of the hallmarks of the former president was his ability to turn any accusations against him into an attack on his opponents. True to form, this morning he set out to appropriate the term 'the Big Lie' for his own. Rather than meaning his refusal to admit he lost the election, he wants to use the phrase to mean the opposite: that it refers to 'The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020.'" Heather Cox Richardson.

"But they have softer ways, more therapeutic ways of implementing a totalitarianism. And so that's why we don't see it coming, we Americans, because it's all happening under the guise of helping and of social justice and so forth. But these people who saw the same sort of thing happen in the Soviet Bloc, that's why they're trying to warn us." Rod Dreher, source, speaking about his recent book, Live Not By Lies.

"Speaking as an agnostic, here's my question. How can you stand there on Easter with candle in hand, while simultaneously poisoning people and committing robbery on a cosmic scale?" Russian Twitter.

"What is truth?" -- Pontius Pilate.

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In the fall of 1973, many of us at the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa were following the fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had just given permission for his GULag Archipelago to be published abroad. Some of us eagerly pre-ordered copies from the YMCA Press in Paris, and in January 1974 our copies arrived.

For Solzhenitsyn himself, the consequences of his decision to publish his book were not long in coming. On February 13, 1974, the world learned that he had been arrested the day before, and had been expelled that day to West Germany.

As a sort of final shot at his opponents, he had prepared an essay, "Live Not By Lies," and had left instructions that it was to be released in the event of his arrest or death. It was dated February 12 and released on the 13th, the day of his exile.

Solzhenitsyn was -- and is -- a problematic figure for many. A courageous and persistent champion of free speech and the rule of law, he also tended to romanticize the Russian state (not its rulers, especially not Peter the Great and his successor tsars) and bitterly criticized the cultural decline of the consumerist West. Many of Olesya Zakharova's observations in her article "A Linguistic Look at Russia's Human Rights Record" apply to Solzhenitsyn's criticisms.

Nevertheless, I continue to admire Solzhenitsyn and his essay, including its advice for life in a time where "truth" has become a flexible commodity. Judging by the Mohler/Dreher interview quoted above (note: I've not read Dreher's book), Solzhenitsyn's essay (or at least its provocative title) may be co-opted by those who are warning that militant leftists and atheists are waging war on Christian civilization -- and that we should therefore be preparing for a totalitarian future.

Unfortunately, a totalitarian future is not out of the question, and the degradation of truth would almost certainly contribute to it. Too many ideologues (some on the left, some on the right, some unclassifiable) insist on their own tissues of half-truth, innuendo, and gauzy mythology, as an adequate standard by which to indict their enemies' alleged lies and conspiracies. In all these blasts of propaganda I see no evidence that actual Marxists are behind critical race theory, for example, nor do I see much Gospel content among those claiming to stand for Christianity. Through all that fog, I still see great wisdom in Solzhenitsyn's advice to those who don't consider themselves militants but who nevertheless yearn to resist the bondage of any oppressive system. According to this advice in "Live Not By Lies" [English; Russian] such resisters will reject service to falsehood, in favor of a commitment that they:

• will not sign, write or print in any way a single phrase which in [their] opinion distorts the truth
• will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation nor in public, neither on [their] own behalf nor at the prompting of someone else, neither in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, nor as an actor
• will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea in which [they] can see a distortion of the truth, whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science or music
• will not cite out of context, either orally or in writing, a single quotation to please someone, to feather [their] own nest, to achieve success in [their] work, if [they do not] completely share the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue
• will not allow [themselves] to be compelled to attend demonstrations and meetings ... contrary to [their] desire
• will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film if [they hear] a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda
• will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.

I want to go a step further and think about the implications of Solzhenitsyn's advice for the church. On a theoretical level, could we agree that the church must be a place that doesn't require servile behavior within its community, and also shelters people who take risks for truth in the wider world?

To go beyond theory, I see two contradictory realities in the church communities I know:

• The church is the ONLY social institution that must, by its very nature, resist ideological conformity. Once we find our unity in Jesus, we may differ in our understanding of how to live as his disciples and what the ethical consequences of such a life might be, but we are united that we are in this adventure together, and we ultimately are for each other. In any Christ-centered church, there is room for the radical, the conservative, the evangelical, the socialist ... that is, in any church where people actually cherish each other more than than their own angle on the world. The church also has the capacity to distinguish vital theological conflicts from cultural, generational, and temperamental misunderstandings masquerading as theological issues -- should it choose to use that capacity.
• The church reflects the distortions and pressures of the larger society. This is inevitable in any church that is actually accessible to the larger community, where people come in with all levels of woundedness and/or maturity. Churches may be (consciously or unconsciously) tempted to build themselves up by forming their identities around something other than Jesus. Those false identities might involve mythologies and common enemy lists that are anti-Gospel, however masked they might be in vague Christian platitudes or stern biblical "teachings" that we're required to take on as a condition of being approved by the church's authority figures. Is it any coincidence that the Quaker meeting over here has practically zero Trump followers, while that one across the state line seems to have a Trumpian majority?

So: to answer Pilate's question, "what is truth?", can we start here? (I'm serious -- let's discuss!)

• Truth involves assertions and explanations that can be shared among people of goodwill who can freely make observations and ask awkward questions without fear of political or social rejection.
• Truth is never immediately and completely obvious to anyone based solely on their social status or claims of exclusive knowledge.
• Truth will never separate people from God's love. Where God's love prevails, truth will never separate people from each other.

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First Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, was probably a majority-Republican church in the late 1980's. It was a well-established and respectable institution in downtown Richmond, when its monthly meeting for business received a request to counsel and support several of us who were refusing to pay our income taxes, or part of them, in observance of the Quaker testimony against supporting war. First Friends prioritized Gospel obedience over conventional respectability and supported these law-breakers who insisted that, even when it comes to paying taxes, God, not Caesar, should have the last word. 

I'm sure that most members of First Friends did not plan to become tax resisters themselves. Probably the majority had never even heard of such a practice. Even so, they decided to support those who asked for counsel and accountability for their witness, minuting the church's readiness to accompany them to court if it should come to that, and to help them out in practical ways if the path led to financial hardship. For me, this story has always been a case study of a church's ability to accommodate dramatic differences in understanding of discipleship.

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Related posts:

Living without lying, part two.

Division of labor, part one, part two.

Love and truth and religion addiction.

Publishing Truth -- ethically!

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Olga Misik updates Solzhenitsyn for the year 2021.

Julia Duin on covering Pentecostals who exalt Trump: "... There's a lot of America that feels this way. And most journalists are utterly missing it."

Roger E. Olson asks where God is in this pandemic.

Bill Yoder interviews Peter Epp on Siberian Mennonites.

Steven Davison considers "that of God" -- and the language of Light -- in the gathered meeting.

Keith Richards removes a string.

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Billy Branch and friends in Chicago: "Help Me."

Abortion and the cost of rhetoric

Sources: baby bassinet; execution gurney

Last night on television, I heard another panel discussion on abortion. Rick Santorum defended Alabama's just-signed law practically banning abortion altogether -- his main point was that even pregnancies resulting from incest and rape represent innocent lives, however horrific the circumstances of their conception. His opponents on the panel objected to his imposition of his own religiously-based standards on others.

For much of my adult life, I've been in the perverse position of opposing abortion while at the same time opposing most anti-abortion rhetoric. Right now, as the controversy swirls around the Alabama law and similar attempts elsewhere, there are three reckless inconsistencies that gnaw at me:

First: the new "heartbeat laws" are far more extreme than most anti-abortion advocates have advanced in the past. The new laws seem to represent a calculated tactic: their dramatic clash with the relatively moderate U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision would (they hope) inevitably lead to a chance to reverse it. According to polls, even Americans who oppose abortion still wish to reserve that option for rape and incest cases, but in Alabama's case, the law could punish abortion providers more severely than rapists. (It's logical, says Santorum; rapists rape while abortion providers kill.)

In any case, tactical extremism just adds to the impression that brass-knuckle politics will, once again, make dialogue all but impossible. It makes me see double: are the bill's supporters being truly idealistic in their maximalist stance, or are they cynically exaggerating their true positions for a political gain?

Second: while both pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates count many women among their participants, a large percentage of anti-abortion legislators are men. For example, every Alabama state senator who voted for their new law was male; the state's four women senators opposed the bill. It seems beyond strange that so much veto power over women's health decisions is still exercised by men -- and those men seem, as a group, to be unembarrassed by this discrepancy and unenthusiastic about working for a more representative politics.

Third: both sides exploit the Bible. This is also an old story -- abortion opponents have one way of looking at Scripture; pro-choice advocates have another. The cost of this proof-texting approach: the secular observer concludes, in the words of the ancient cliche, "You can make the Bible say whatever you want." The "orthodox" and "progressives" of James Davison Hunter, or George Lakoff's "strict fathers" and "nurturant parents" -- all can find what they pragmatically need in the Bible to bash opponents and thereby gratify their main audiences.

The actual Bible is achingly ambiguous about the "sanctity" of life. My serious summary: life is precious, except when it isn't. Babies are precious, except when they're not. My opposition to abortion is not based on any specific Bible verse, but on the whole tradition of interpretation that is summed up by the "consistent life ethic" -- which opposes abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, militarism, social and economic injustice, violence in all its devious and addictive forms. Are there other traditions of biblical interpretation? Yes, of course. Can I prove that the "consistent life" interpretation is more correct? No! Does it even command the respect of most Christians? I doubt it.

However, for me there's a persuasive consistency of this "seamless garment" approach to following the Prince of Peace. It's internally consistent: the unborn life is important, but its survival is no more guaranteed than that of the life that has emerged into the world. Just as we ask for sacrifices and communal responses in situations where conception was unanticipated, we ask for sacrificial and communal responses to injustice. We ought to be just as diligent in caring for the born as for the unborn, knowing that all our outward fortunes are uncertain, all of us require care and mercy. It's consistent with the loving kindness and mercy of the God of the Bible. And, just as Jesus and Paul demand, it rejects the hypocrisy of forms for the countercultural reality of the Good News.

This persuasive consistency, I think, would go a long way toward subverting the rigid categories of anti-abortion and pro-choice campaign mentalities. As a first practical step of mercy, we could gain the capacity to describe those we disagree with in terms that they themselves would recognize. (See Katelyn Beaty's "The Abortion Conversation Needs New Language.") And while we slowly build friendships around the complex shared challenge of reducing abortions, we may also find new allies for those other consistent life challenges: injustice, militarism, and all other threats to life.

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Part two: Does your morality measure up?

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Elesha Coffman on the legacy of Rachel Held Evans.

The silent significance of British Quaker meeting houses.

Cathedrals "should unite, not divide people": the case of Yekaterinburg.

Victory Day, and again Stalin looms over the scene, not necessarily to Putin's advantage.

Russia without Putin: Sean Guillory interviews Tony Wood.

"...[T]he more Putin becomes indispensable to any description of Russia, the more every successive description of Russia has to have him in there. Otherwise people won’t understand what you’re talking about because you imagine every news report about Russia, even if it’s about reindeer herders in Yakutia, has to have some reference to how this relates to Putin and his power system. Is he in control of this remote outpost or not? And I think that’s really counterproductive. It just narrows the horizon within which people are framing what’s happening in Russia."

Project Artemis: crash program or modest proposal?

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Ray Manzarek describes the creation of "Riders On the Storm."

Jesus is condemned to death by ...

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, source (PDF)  

I responded to a Twitter survey yesterday:

Okay friends. If you identify as christian, christian-ish, christian mystic, christian adjacent, etc. what aspect of the accounts of Jesus' life is most formative for you?

(and if you want to add why in the thread, then you deserve a sticker)

— Megan Westra (@mwestramke) April 17, 2019

All of these aspects are urgent and compelling to me. Somewhat to my own surprise, the answer I was immediately drawn to was "crucifixion."

Spoiler alert: the crucifixion isn't the end of the story. God showed definitively that "the Way" which Jesus invited us to walk with him had not reached a dead end at all. I want to stay committed to remaining on this path -- and what good company I'm in!! This daily reality is a constant refreshment to my idealistic side.

The sour, skeptical, cynical pre-conversion voice in my head reminds me that the "cannibals" mentioned by Ilya Grits, the torturers and executioners of the world's systems, still roam our globe, two millennia after Easter, seeking whom they can coerce or eliminate. Often they seek to persuade us to cooperate, or at least remain passive: they warn us that our civilization is under threat from migrants, or we must deter some threat, or just "trust us, we know better. Just keep minding your own business."

In some cases, they can point to an actual danger. Someone else attacked first. After all, demonic systems feed on each other; it's not surprising that violence in turn begets violence. My father's father was a lieutenant in the Norwegian resistance army (Milorg) in World War II. This army was, of course, responding to the violence of the German occupation of Norway, but, ironically, part of my grandfather's task was to dissuade grassroots Norwegians from acts of terrorism and sabotage against the occupation forces. Those acts would simply provoke retribution.

If you followed my family-history tour in Japan last fall, you might remember that I found my mother's childhood home through the Nazi membership list, where their street address was listed along with her father's membership enrollment date: April 1, 1934. I would love to know what my two grandfathers said to each other when they first met. They were both courteous gentlemen with no obvious violent tendencies at all, but both of them became dramatically enmeshed in systems of cyclical violence.

The princes of Jesus' time didn't know what to do with him. They traded Jesus back and forth ("I can't find anything to charge him with" -- "Crucify him; we have no king but Caesar"), but, in the end, nobody stepped forward to prevent that same old imperial solution: death to the troublemaker. Peter couldn't even admit to being his disciple! Jesus, the son of God, did not evade the corrupt will of the empire, but on the Cross he asked God to forgive his tormentors because "they don't know what they are doing."

Jesus, the humiliated victim of a kangaroo court, completely defies the cycle of violence. Forgive them! We, the Body of Christ and his ministers of reconciliation, are authorized to commit the same defiance. We don't always know when we're being invited or seduced or deceived into washing our hands of responsibility for each other's fate, but it's worth learning how it happens. Good Friday is a good day to recall and refresh this commitment.

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John Woolman gave us some tools for discernment in his essay, "A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich" (written shortly before his death in 1772).

... When that spirit works which loves riches, and in its working gathers wealth and cleaves to customs which have their root in self-pleasing, whatever name it hath it still desires to defend the treasures thus gotten.

This is like a chain in which the end of one link encloseth the end of another. The rising up of a desire to obtain wealth is the beginning ; this desire being cherished, moves to action; and riches thus gotten please self; and while self has a life in them it desires to have them defended. Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings contrary to universal righteousness are supported; and hence oppression carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul. And as a spirit which wanders from the pure habitation prevails, so the seeds of war swell and sprout and grow and become strong until much fruit is ripened. Then cometh the harvest spoken of by the prophet, which “is a heap in the day of grief and desperate sorrows.” Oh that we who declare against wars, and acknowledge our trust to be in God only, may walk in the light, and therein examine our foundation and motives in holding great estates! May we look upon our treasures, the furniture of our houses and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions. Holding treasures in the self-pleasing spirit is a strong plant, the fruit whereof ripens fast. A day of outward distress is coming, and Divine love calls to prepare against it.

The honest acknowledgment of our own complicity in systems that depend on violence should not paralyze us with shame, nor should it prevent us from confronting those systems. It just reminds us that we can't fight this Lamb's War in our own discernment alone; and the call to forgive our enemies also applies to ourselves, and should be very effective in preserving us from arrogance.

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Here's a concrete example of helping each other in our discipleship: this month's Quaker Religious Education Collaborative "conversation circles" are on "Quaker Parenting: Supporting parents and other caregivers on the spiritual journey of parenting." April 23 and 25; you can register using the links on the Conversation Circles site.

And on May 3: a retirement celebration for a long-time collaborator in discernment, Ron Sider.

Yet another co-worker in Quaker discipleship: Ashley M. Wilcox spoke at Guilford College on Quakers, the prophetic tradition, and the recording of ministers.

Too good to hold over for a year: Palm Sunday and the gift of disillusionment.

Joanna Stingray and her new book on her involvement with Soviet rock music: the Meduza interview. (And here's a video of a presentation -- half in Russian and half in English -- of this book with Joanna and her daughter and co-author Madison.)

Around that same time, Jim and Nancy Forest began their "pilgrimage to the Russian church." You can read their book, now out of print, right on their Web site. (My own copy is still in a box in my garage. Bookshelves coming in two weeks!)

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Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan reach back for a slow one, "Blues at Sunrise."

Smoking gun with silencer

April 29, 1974: At first, Nixon offers transcripts rather than tapes. Source.

Today, Elizabeth Drew's article, "Holding a President Accountable," was published on the New Republic's Web site. Just seeing her name reminded me of the Watergate case which she chronicled in her book Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall. In today's article, Drew lists the factors that make removal of Donald Trump from the presidency highly unlikely, despite the strong case she makes that Trump's mischief against the accountability process far exceeds what Nixon attempted.

Drew is also one of the many voices of the Watergate era that are featured in Slate's podcast Slow Burn (season one), devoted to that high drama. A couple of nights ago I listened to the final podcast of the Watergate epic. As the podcast documents, one of the turning points for some of Nixon's staunchest supporters was a voice artifact from the last batch of tapes demanded by the independent prosecutor's office -- a recording of Nixon ordering that the CIA be told to contact the FBI with a request to back off. The release of that incriminating tape led to the collapse of Nixon's remaining support and his resignation just days later.

Source.  

That recording has been nicknamed the "smoking gun." In the comparison between Watergate and the Trump presidency, some have noted the absence of a similarly dramatic moment of shock in the current situation. However, the full contexts, then and now, are not comparable. Part of Watergate's shock was the dramatic contrast between the respectability of Nixon and his family and his political party, on the one hand, and his cynical manipulation of power behind the scenes, along with the [expletive deleted] language on the recordings that so shocked Billy Graham and others invested in all that respectability.

Today there is nothing but shock. The news cycle is an unending chronicle of insults, innuendos, power struggles, dog whistles. At the center of this chaos is the "chaos president," whose sole point of reference seems to be himself. We search in vain for a single smoking gun because the whole edifice of normal governmental accountability is on fire.

The differences between Watergate and today are dramatic, but the underlying moral dramas may not be so different. This is where the smoking-gun metaphor breaks down. Maybe "poison gas" might be a better metaphor. Slow Burn quotes Republican senator Hugh Scott, minority leader, in 1974, reacting to the Watergate transcripts: "a shabby, disgusting, immoral performance by all those involved." The podcast then gives us these comments from Elizabeth Holtzman, then a member of the House Judiciary Committee, as she now looks back at the totality of those recordings:

And you never heard him (him, meaning the President) say, "What's the right thing to do for the country? What's the right thing to do under the law?" It was always kind of "how do you get away with this" and "how can we stonewall here?" It was just, you know, like thieves conspiring and plotting and scheming.

Of course we cannot conclude that Nixon never agonized over the ideals he seemed to be trashing, just because he never did so on tape. Similarly, we can't know for certain that the private Donald Trump does not at least occasionally wonder whether he is fully living up to the high expectations of his office. But the public silence is deafening.

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More suggestive points of comparison between the two eras: Here's Elizabeth Drew, in her book, Washington Journal, describing her thoughts on Chuck Colson's plea-bargain in Federal court, June 3, 1974:

The people who surrounded Richard Nixon probably do and did love their country, and had their own peculiar sense of what that meant. It is still not clear that Colson understands why his country is being "torn apart." It is as if these people were utterly detached from what they did. And, having manipulated the symbols -- country, flag, religion -- they are inevitably suspected of continuing to do so. When Colson turned to religion, he was seen as engaging in the ultimate manipulation. That he then talked as enthusiastically about Jesus as he had once talked about Richard Nixon does not mean that he has not believed firmly in both. The religiosity of the men around Nixon was and is a striking thing, and it is something very hard to deal with. It is not polite to mock or suspect people's religious beliefs, and these men used that on us. They made their patriotism and their piety part of their politics. All of which gives fresh meaning to the point that we have a government of laws.

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I spent the Watergate years in Canada. Back in 2005, I briefly recalled some of my memories of that era.

During those years I was getting my undergraduate degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. When the famous Saturday Night Massacre occurred, I dropped everything and took a bus to Montreal and a train to Washington, DC, blinking in the morning light outside Union Station and finding my way to the White House fence, where I found others from all over the country who had been drawn by the elemental currents of history to gather at that spot.

The eve of Nixon's resignation, National Arts Center, Ottawa ... Ottawa's own Rich Little performed as part of a four-day engagement (if I remember correctly). Rich Little was well-known for his Nixon impression. He obliged again that evening. I was there for that apparently historic performance—I'm told that the next day he dropped that part of his act.

Someday I'm going to have to look at my diaries from those years and see what I noted on a day-to-day basis about Watergate. After all, I was a political science student ... although my focus was the Soviet Union.

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Craig Thompson: I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase "disenfranchised grief" before I came back from living overseas.

Morgan Lee conducts an amazing interview with Rachael Denhollander on Larry Nasser, the Gospel, forgiveness, and justice.

Mary Elmes, a Quaker heroine who chose obscurity: a profile and book review in The Times of Israel.

Is the white, middle-class, well-educated sector of American Quakers facing "a steady slide of downward mobility"? Chuck Fager presents the evidence.

V.V. Putin, the short course -- from oligarch to kleptocrat. Author Ruth May necessarily leaves out a lot of details, both positive and negative. The biggest positive omission: the stabilization of the country's economic life after the chaos of privatization and default. Maybe the biggest negative is here.

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Despite their fame and enduring importance, the Rolling Stones have been almost invisible to the Grammy voters. But this year they won the Grammy for traditional blues, for their Blue and Lonesome album. (Two tracks below.) The album is a great romp, but the best of a whole year of blues? Really?

"Hate To See You Go." Nice music, but couldn't they have done better than this cliche-ridden "urban" collage of a video?



"Ride 'Em On Down"

St Petersburg shorts

Crossing St Petersburg's Fontanka River (Lomonosov Bridge)

Soul Kitchen Hostel (recommended!), on the Moika River embankment

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Study in Dostoevsky's final home

The high point of this visit to St Petersburg was, for me, a return to Dostoevsky's final home, his apartment on Kuznechny pereulok.

Looking in on the room where he slept and worked -- the room where The Brothers Karamazov was written -- brought back vivid memories of my only previous peek into this same room. It was 42 years ago. At the time, this study and the attached living room were practically all there was of Leningrad's new Dostoevsky Museum, which had been established in 1971, four years earlier. The museum as it exists now has been carefully developed into a first-rate cultural landmark, with lots of explanatory resources in many languages.

Dostoevsky is not necessarily Russians' favorite novelist. I remember our doctor in Noginsk expressing surprise at my admiration for him; she said, "We consider him rather morbid." I can see her point.  He's a total bundle of contradictions, often rambling and disorganized, prejudiced, cranky. His voices argue with his characters, with each other, with the reader. Maybe it was these somewhat shambolic qualities that attracted me as a reader in my teens; he wasn't just telling stories, he seemed to reach through the printed page and demand my response. I enjoyed reading these comments by Himadri Chatterjee, who expresses some of the same wonderment I feel at liking a writer who's not a predictably perfect fit for our own views.

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Being on the road has not stopped me from following events in the USA. Yesterday was Jeff Sessions's turn to be questioned by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. This particular bit caught my attention:

[Sen. Tom] COTTON: Do you like spy fiction: John le Carre, Daniel Silva, Jason Matthews?

SESSIONS: Yeah, Alan Furst, David Ignatius’ books.

COTTON: Do you like Jason Bourne or James Bond movies?

SESSIONS: No, yes, I do.

COTTON: Have you ever ever in any of these fantastical situations heard of a plot line so ridiculous that a sitting United States senator and an ambassador of a foreign government colluded at an open setting with hundreds of other people to pull off the greatest caper in the history of espionage?

SESSIONS: Thank you for saying that, Senator Cotton. It's just like Through the Looking Glass. I mean, what is this? I explained how in good faith I said I had not met with Russians, because they were suggesting I as a surrogate had been meeting continuously with Russians. I said I didn't meet with them and now, the next thing you know I'm accused of some reception plotting some sort of influence campaign for the American election. It's just beyond my capability to understand, and I really appreciate, Mr. Chairman, the opportunity to at least to be able to say publicly I didn't participate in that and know nothing about it.

COTTON: And I gather that's one reason why you wanted to testify today in public.

(From this transcript, with my unlicensed italicization.)

As much as I suspect that a lot of the Red Threat of Russian mischief is a Red Herring, I understand the need to get a full picture of the situation -- the actual Russian interference (as distinct from sloppy attributions connected with various hackers who also bear tracking down but who might have nothing to do with Russia), and the breakdowns in cyber-discipline and vigilance on the U.S. side.

I also understand how some might look at this whole five-ring circus of Russia-related investigations with incredulity. The Cotton-Sessions exchange is a bit theatrical, given how Cotton presents such a cartoonish summary ("the greatest caper in the history of espionage"). Even so, it seems bizarre that this theme dominates U.S. political news day after day, week after week.

Why all this attention? The answer is relatively simple, and it doesn't primarily involve the supposed danger from Russia. The country is confronted by a challenge that is in itself not provided for by the Constitution or any federal statute: dangerous incompetence at the top of the executive branch, complicated by cowardice in the legislative branch. Neither incompetence nor cowardice are themselves indictable. At the policy level, cruel legislation (health care financing legislation) and devious legislative processes (secret health care financing legislation) are also not statutory crimes. Efforts to change the regime legally and peacefully must necessarily find handles for effective response -- so it is no wonder that those who are alarmed for American democracy have latched onto the Russian scandals.

Thankfully, another track has also developed: lawsuits alleging that the U.S. president has violated his oath of office by not staying clear of foreign emoluments that haven't been approved by Congress. On this track, there is no need to resort to villainous Russian operatives. The villains are mainly domestic. Here, too, however, efforts at changing the regime (either its practices or, failing that, its personnel) may be defeated by venality and cowardice among the Republicans. (Inaccurate scare tactics by Democrats and others don't help.)

The stakes are high; we risk (1) wholesale degradation of ethical standards in government; (2) major damage to social safety nets, environmental regulation, voting rights, and other areas of concern to progressive evangelicals; and (3) disconnection from the global community, including those many millions of actual Russians who have no desire to hack our elections!

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D.L. Mayfield asks whether we are seeking "the welfare of the city," or just our own?

Writer Nate J. Lee, responding to a video put out by Hillsong church to announce their intention to plant a church in San Francisco (including the phrases “God has great plans for this city” and “San Fran, the best is yet to come!”), wrote this: “Any kind of language that implies that God’s work or God’s plan starts when we arrive … is indicative not only of terrible theology, but of white Christian exceptionalism, the oppressive belief that the correct kind salvation and healing can only be facilitated through us, on our terms with our methods—and us always happens to be white missionaries, white pastors, and white churches.”

The same critiques can be said of gentrification in general. The problem is not an influx of resources or more diversity (both of which can be very beneficial to everyone, including long-term residents). The problem is the belief that dominant culture is best—so that people move in and change a neighborhood to look just like the last one they left.

What would you ask the Russian president? And does he now lack a compelling story?

Who benefits from transborder corruption -- and who pays for it?

J.R.R. Tolkien's love story.

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We've often admired the quality of music education in Russia. And here's a bit of the output! ... performers on Nevsky Prospekt we encountered totally randomly earlier today. (If anyone knows the name of this group or its members, I would really like to give credit.)