Breaking News—Exclusive Interviews

February 11th, 2010  |   

Faithful readers of Notes From Under the Fig Tree know that I study the news media—printed as well as radio and television. Right now I’m reading “Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy” by Alex S. Jones. 

Here’s a tidbit from that excellent book: “Do you eat sensibly? Based on our national history of succumbing to temptation despite our knowledge of what we should be eating, it is easy to imagine the media equivalent of chronic obesity. We seem poised to be a nation overfed but undernourished, a culture of people waddling around, swollen with media exposure, and headed toward an epidemic of social diabetes. It is in this environment that accountability news must find a way to survive.”

Of late I have noticed that television news—major network as well as cable news—tries to capture viewers with two phrases. I am speaking of the terms “breaking news” and “exclusive interview.”

News programs want us to believe they are both hot and cool.

Breaking news means they are hot on the spot when something is happening—first-hand news—as they say, “eye-witness-news.”

An exclusive interview means they are cool because they are able to chum-up to a celebrity or a news-maker. They want us to believe we are right there in the studio with the person-of-interest, or in their home, getting intimate details.

Since this is my Valentine’s Day issue, I thought I’d be playful and design a fun-kind-of valentine for my readers. I thought I’d have fun by having Mr. Alter Ego give an exclusive interview with yours truly about the subject of love.

An Interview On The Subject Of Love

Alter Ego: It’s Valentine’s Day—that time of the year when romance has the stage all to itself. Would you consider yourself a romantic?

Jim Lewis: No question about that. When I hear the song “Autumn Leaves,” I’m transported back to the 1950’s when Judy and I danced to that tune. I may have been studying philosophy and ancient history at Washington & Lee back in those days, but Plato and Socrates had to take a backseat when Judy and I parked, and as they used to say, “necked,” out by the railroad tracks near her school. 

Q: Back in those    days—the 50’s—Frank Sinatra was singing “Love and Marriage.” I’ll bet you can even remember some of the lyrics, like: “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.”

Jim: You’re right about that. You want me to sing it for you? How about: “This I tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other. Love and marriage, love and marriage, it’s an institute you can’t disparage.” I don’t think there’s a better song to illustrate the cultural view that was prevalent about love and marriage back in those days. And let’s not forget sex!

Q: Are you suggesting that perhaps the words should read, “Sex and marriage…you can’t have one without the other?”

Jim: I knew that if we talked about love, we’d eventually get around to talking about sex. Sure, take a look at the last lines of that song: “Dad was told by mother, you can’t have one without the other.” What dad and mother were saying, in code language, is that you can’t have sex without marriage. Sure, heavy petting, but to “go all the way” wasn’t the cultural norm. But I must remind you that Playboy magazine came along with its first issue in 1953 and it featured a nude picture of Marilyn Monroe. By the time the 1960’s arrived, Playboy was publishing monthly installments of what they called “The Playboy Philosophy.”

Q: The Playboy Philosophy?

Jim: You got it. They were lengthy articles—page after page—later publish in booklet form—in which Playboy editor Hugh Hefner challenged the love-and-marriage connection. In those days, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox wrote “The Secular City,” a seminal book in the important discussion about how God is present in the secular as well as the religious realms of life. Would you believe that Hefner hired a guy, Anson Mount, to pick the Playboy All American football team and—get this—to be the religious editor of Playboy. I mentioned Anson Mount in a previous issue of Notes. He and I became friends, and on a number of occasions he would invite me to a campus where we would have a dialogue around The Playboy Philosophy.

Q: Wearing that collar around your neck makes you an easy target for folks who say the church has been the enemy when it comes to marriage and sex. Paul, the primary early church theologian, advised Christians not to marry, that is, only if they got so horny they couldn’t think straight. No pun intended on the word straight. St. Augustine thought sex, and the thought of it, was a sin and celibacy was the goal for a true believer.

Jim: All of us have to acknowledge the lies that have crept into religious history, theology and practice. My God, the church has oppressed women, justified slavery, and supported violent crusades against Jews and Muslims. And don’t forget the people the church felt needed to be “saved” and “civilized” by missionaries who preached a Jesus I’d never follow. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered folks have now become the most noticeable targets for Bible-carrying Christians. This is hardly in keeping with a God who is love, and a Jesus who railed against exclusion and hatred of human beings. In the 60’s, some theologians kicked off a “God is Dead” movement. One of them was from Charleston—Tom Altizer. What they were saying was that this old view of God was dead. Unfortunately, the old view has an extended shelf-life. It still haunts us.

Q: You sound like you have given up on Paul, Augustine and the traditions of your own church when it comes to love, sex and marriage.

Jim: Not so. History must be seen in the context in which it was lived and written. Look, Paul was trying to address the greed, gluttony and sexual debauchery in the Roman Empire—in places like Corinth. Substitute for Corinth the name of any city in the world today where people are treated as meat, and women and children are the victims of sexual predators, and Paul might make sense to you. He also thought the world was coming to an end very soon—Jesus was coming back—so folks should give sex and marriage secondary status. I might see that differently today. For example, I know a man who will die very soon from cancer, yet last weekend he married the woman who has been his partner for years. I’d like to think an immediate death sentence on me would result in spending as much time as I could holding Judy in bed and living out the final chapter of our wedding vows—“until death us do part.” Pretty traditional, don’t you think?

Q: So the vows aren’t some kind of anachronistic leftover from bygone days, irrelevant to modern people?

Jim: Look, I’d never say that someone must get married in order to be a whole person, and I wouldn’t say that the vows Christians take are the only authentic vows a couple should choose. But those vows work for me because they are full of blood and guts. By that I mean that the words don’t just point to the sunny side of the street. They transport a couple up to a mountain peak and also down into the valley of the shadow of death. The words refuse to abandon the full human condition: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until we are parted by death.” Living is up and down—peaks and valleys—don’t you think?

Q: Recently there’s been a spate of philandering men who monopolize media time—Tiger Woods, John Edwards, James McGreevey, Eliot Spitzer, Ted Haggard, and now Mark Sanford—a star golfer, three governors, a senator, and an evangelist. Is monogamy an unrealistic goal? Given the fact that between 40 and 50 percent of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce, shouldn’t the wedding promise, “until we are parted by death” be dropped from the wedding vows?

Jim: Divorce rates are high but the interesting thing to me is how many people come back for a second time around. The couples I see want the words “faithful” and “until we are parted by death” included in the ceremony. I think those are words that many couples want to live into. They want the bar set high when it comes to commitment. The vows speak to a deep spirituality yearning—a wonderful lust for a power-filled relationship between two people—an ambition for higher things, as Paul puts it in the letter he wrote to Christians in Corinth.
 

Q: Jenny Sanford, South Carolina’s First Lady—Governor Mark Sanford’s wife, has written a book and is giving numerous television interviews about her husband’s affair with a woman in Argentina. She says that when she married Sanford he refused to allow the word “faithful” to be included in his wedding vow. What’s your take on that?

Jim: It’s hard to believe. Cut the F-word out? I’ve performed hundreds of marriages for couples who stood up in front of family and friends and said they’d be faithful to one another as long as they both lived. What gives with the minister who counseled them prior to the wedding and performed the service? In church weddings, the minister asks the congregation and the couple if they know any reason why the marriage should not take place. The way I look at it, the preacher knew a reason, and Jenny had probable cause for walking away from that wedding. Dropping the F-word from the vows, in my view, would be like dropping all mention of the word love from the service.

Q: Since 1976, you’ve gotten into trouble by blessing gay relationships. How do you view the political scene now around the issue of gay marriage?

Jim: It’s really quite simple. Gay folks should have the opportunity to formalize a state-sanctioned, legalized relationship with all the rights and privileges that Judy and I have. It’s only a matter of time before gay marriage is a reality in every state. If a religious denomination or a religious community doesn’t want to bless a gay relationship in a sanctuary, that’s their business. The church-state linkage—unconstitutional in my view—is getting in the way of address this inequity. As far as the church is concerned, I see a person’s sexuality, no matter how it is culturally defined, as a gift from God. And the state can just stay away from God-talk. Leave that to the religious community, for better or for worse.

Q: Let’s get back to Valentine’s Day. I understand that what is now a secular celebration has some Christian connection. Is that true?

Jim: Christian tradition carries a lovely story about a priest named Valentine. He lived in Rome in the third century while Emperor Claudius II reigned. Now Claudius, like all emperors, wanted a huge army in order to expand the empire. When he discovered that military recruitment was down, he outlawed marriage. You see, young men wanted to stay at home with their wives. It was that love-bug thing. So Valentine began to marry couples on the sly. Claudius threw him into prison, tortured him and sentenced him to a beheading. It came to pass that the daughter of one of the jailers visited Valentine on a regular basis. When it came time for Valentine to be executed, he sent a note to her which read, “Love from your Valentine!” I say hats off to Valentine. He’s as good an antiwar saint as you will ever find.

Q: That’s just like you, I do believe. You make a social statement about everything, don’t you?

Jim: You got that right. It’s my way of addressing the narcissism that pervades the world we live in. Narcissism takes root when me is separated from we, and I forgets that there’s an us. In terms of love and marriage it means that if lovers just see a me-and-thee thing going on, they miss out on the fullest and most fulfilling aspect of love—the connection to the larger community. Take war for an example. War has a history of snatching men away from their families and devouring them. Warfare has destroyed more loving relationships, broken more families and dumped more broken veterans back into the communities from which they’ve come, than most natural disasters. Speaking of nature, She has a way of making us face up to our connectedness. An earthquake, like the one in Haiti, or a massive snow storm, like we are in the midst of now, makes us face up to how much we need one another, and how much we depend on the larger community. A broken water pipe, a power outage, a bag of groceries from the Kroger, a fire truck screaming on its way to a fire, remind me that whatever freedoms I count as independently mine are, in reality, dependent upon a network of people larger than my own family.

Q: You have written that justice is connected with love. How so?

Jim: Justice is love with its working clothes on. If love doesn’t roll up its sleeves and get down to work addressing the pain and suffering in the world—beginning at one’s front door—especially the inequities and injustice in the systems that control people’s lives—then, as the old song says, “what is this thing called love?” If love isn’t willing to get down and dirty with something more than one’s own laundry, then it’s nothing more than a shallow romanticism.

Q: If you were to direct me to one passage in the Bible where love is best described, where would it be?

Jim: Certainly I would have you read the Jesus stories because they are all about love—love for the excluded, isolated and mistreated folks—love even for enemies. One passage from Paul’s letters, however, stands out—a passage that some couples choose to have read at their wedding. In Paul’s first letter to the Christians in Corinth, he advises them to be ambitious for the higher things. To paraphrase the thirteenth chapter from that letter, a person may be the greatest speaker in the world, have enormous insight into the future, even put his or her body on the line for social justice, but if the person doesn’t have love, it won’t be worth a hill of beans. The earth may pass away, says Paul, but three things will remain—Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. The great theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who lived through the darkness of WW II and into the nuclear threat of the Cold War, and who understood power politics, translated Paul’s words in a wonderfully helpful way for all generations: “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

Q: The Internet is full of romantic suggestions for lovers searching for an aphrodisiac. Have you found one?

Jim: Hey, some folks search for the promised-land—like a country or neighborhood where they can be happy. Others look for the fountain of youth—like a face-lift or a cream that wipes away hard-earned wrinkles. Plenty of people hunt for the Golden Goose—a job or a lottery ticket to Easy Street. Any way you cut it, it all boils down to power—the search for power. Maybe the pot-of-gold, whatever we search for it, can be found right here at our feet among the people we live with.—where we spend our time. Back to our philandering politicians—and perhaps their wives who may have desired to hook themselves to a star—it seems to me that sex and power were joined at the hip, as they so often are. And certainly not in a playful way but in a warped narcissistic way. Political power may well head the list of aphrodisiacs. I’d advise everyone to figure out what their aphrodisiac is—what drives their passion. Is it driven toward higher things, like love and justice? Want a laugh? Recent studies indicate that garlic and oysters arouse sexual passion, and, of course chocolate. And smells: some men are turned on by the scent of donuts mingled with licorice while many women go for the smell of baby powder. Hey, don’t forget figs. Figs, along with asparagus and cucumbers, have long been seen as erotic because of their resemblance to the male and female sex organs.

Q: And finally, how will you spend your Valentine’s Day?

Jim: Having talked about aphrodisiacs, I think I’ll spend my waking hours beneath my fig tree meditating on those lovely fruits while I eat my fill of chocolates. For dinner I’d like a plate full of asparagus and cucumbers by candle light. Maybe the Yankee Candles store in the Mall has a baby-powder scented candle. Romantic, don’t you think? As for the remainder of the day, I’ll hold out for what few of us have anymore—a bit of privacy. It certainly will be someplace outside the range of security cameras and those dreaded cell-phone cameras.

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