March 4th, 2010 |
The Bob & Ray Show—Then And Now
Are any of my readers old enough to remember the Bob and Ray Show that aired on radio years ago? In case you don’t, they were comedians Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. I loved to listen to them do clever spoofs and parodies, satirizing radio and television interviews in a deadpan, serious style.
The other night I traveled to West Virginia State University to hear a new version of the Bob and Ray Show. Not the comedians, but Bob Parry and Ray McGovern.
Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran CIA analyst who served under seven presidents— presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many of them. Now retired, he’s hell-bent, perhaps I should say heaven-sent, on his mission to unmask the innocuously biased, often dishonest reporting that passes as news. McGovern has become a political activist and writer, committed to factual based reporting and analysis. He serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization comprised mostly of retired intelligence officers who speak out on the use of U.S. intelligence to justify war.
Bob Parry has a long history of truth-telling reporting. Back in the 1980’s, he broke many of the Iran-Contra stories while writing as an investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Newsweek. Frustrated, even thwarted by corporate media from getting the facts to people, he and Ray McGovern turned to the Internet and founded Consortium News (www.consortiumnews.com) as a way to deliver reliable information and analysis to people searching for the truth.
“I was distressed,” says Parry, “by the silliness and downright creepiness that had pervaded American journalism by the mid-1990’s. I feared, too, that the decline of the U.S. press corps foreshadowed disasters that would come when journalists failed to alert the public about impending dangers.”
Parry told a story which went right to my heart. How a person finds his or her way to conviction—particularly when there is a cost to pay for expressing it—always goes straight to my heart. A disheartened heart can get recharged by such stories.
A wise Jew, Rabbi Nacham of Bratzlev, once said “God loves man because he loves stories.” How true that is. Powerfully inspiring narrative has a way of reawakening slumbering conviction. It can inspire people to make changes in their personal lives. Stories can motivate human beings to bring about change inside the institutions in which they live, and move, and have their being.
A Story About An Old Man Reading A Newspaper With A Magnifying Glass
Bob Parry told us about his first wife’s elderly grandfather, who was nearly blind and hungry for news. Every morning, he would walk downtown to purchase a copy of the Boston Globe. Returning home, he’d pick up a magnifying glass and read the paper.
Parry said that watching this old man, he came to the realization that, as a newspaper reporter he had a responsibility to people like this man. He decided that he should commit himself to exposing the lies that our government tells the public, and the news that gets suppressed by the media. He would dedicate himself to the task of giving his readers truthful reporting and analysis—the kind so often hidden from them.
I don’t know if others in the audience heard Ray McGovern say that he was a member of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, but I did. He works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of this marvelous socially active church, whose mission is to “unleash into our hungry world the healing power of the Spirit-given Word by making it as widely and freely available as possible.”(www.telltheword.org/)
After the Bob and Ray Show—on my way home—I thought about the work these men are doing—their effort to speak the truth to power—the risks and the rewards associated with their calling to become truth-tellers.
Perhaps I should be wary about talking about calling, for fear that I might confuse my readers by lapsing over into the vocabulary of religious-speak. Religious or not, I do believe all human beings are drawn to a vocational destiny—driven by some deep awareness—an inner voice, if you will, that spurs a person on toward a meaningful life and purposeful work.
Jeannette Walls, in her new book, “Half Broke Horses,” has Lily Casey reflecting on the lesson her father taught her about Purpose—spelled with a capital P. “”Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody’s time.”
Purpose—a meaningful life—a desire for truth—and a willingness to speak the truth to power. The West Virginia version of the Bob and Ray Show has me thinking, and now writing, about those very things.
A Choice—Get A Gun Or A Baseball Bat
I shall never forget my conversation with a man on the Delmarva Peninsula just after I arrived there in 1995, hired by the Diocese of Delaware to do a specialized ministry. That ministry was to connect as many Episcopal churches, as I possible could, with people who were living on the fringe of life in that region—the poor and disenfranchised.
I was called to engage the churches with prisoners in the local prison—blacks, feeling the effects of poverty—gay and lesbian folks, alienated by ecclesiastical and political structures—and predominately white farmers along with a newly-arrived and growing Latino population, all of them exploited by the large poultry industry housed on the Eastern Shore.
If you will take a moment to consider this work a brave bishop and diocese called me to undertake, you will understand the complexity and the difficulty of the task—the task of speaking truth to power alongside of people feeling the pain and injustice of personal and institutional power. I was excited about this work. It was meaningful work and I knew what the Purpose was when I arrived on the Delmarva Peninsula.
Now, for my story about the conversation I had with a man just after I arrived on the Peninsula in 1995. Because sometimes, in order to tell a true story, it is necessary to invent a fictitious name, I shall call this man Bob.
Bob had deep generational roots there. He knew a multitude of folks, and he knew all about the power wielded by the poultry industry, particularly the power of the Perdue family—the owners of the huge poultry company.
At a Burger King in Georgetown, Delaware, Bob asked me if I owned a gun. I told him that I did not own a gun. His advice? You’d better buy one, because the poultry industry plays for keeps. And if you don’t have a gun, he said, you’d better carry a baseball bat in your car.
Needless to say, I bought neither a gun nor a baseball bat. But I did understand what Bob meant by giving me that advice. If you are going to speak truth about the injustice in the poultry industry, you’d better understand that these companies play for keeps. When it comes to the huge economic interests of any industry, and the task of educating the public about the injustice within the industry, and when you are called to help folks organize to address these injustices, speaking the truth may result in conflict.
I do not wish to over dramatize my work on the Delmarva Peninsula. What I do understand is that all of us live in relationship with various institutional powers—powers that can reward or harm us.
That’s why all of us—because we all live inside of institutions and sometimes up against them—would do well to examine the power they have over our lives, and what the cost might be if we attempt to speak truth to those powers. And what it might mean if we don’t.
Living A Purposeful Life Doing Meaningful Work
Spending time with workers over the years—white collar and blue collar alike—I have come to the conclusion that human beings have a deep desire to do meaningful, purposeful work. When someone gets locked into a job in which they are treated poorly, even unjustly, that person becomes depleted of energy, hope and Purpose. Purposeless jobs create passionless people. As we attempt now to create jobs, we should keep that in mind—not just jobs, but meaningful, purposeful jobs.
On top of that, workers like to feel they work for a company they can feel proud of—a company that has moral Purpose and creates a valuable product. When the Bhopal, India, chemical explosion killed thousands of people in India and the details of the company negligence were unveiled, many Union Carbide workers around the world experienced a loss of morale.
I see some people who merely go through the motions when it comes to their job—and that includes folks on both the high-end and the low-end of the pay scale.
Me, I’m in the church business. Oh, I know, we label it a “calling” and mystify the work by bringing God into the picture. But, in case you didn’t know it, we operate under business-like conditions. We’d better show the church board an increase in members, and a budgetary bottom-line that spills out black and not red on the financial report. And be careful not to challenge a traditional church doctrine, particularly when your bishop is the “defender of the faith.”
And speak the truth to power—the congregation, bishop, other clergy, and the community? Are you kidding? A number of us who dress up like kings to preside over the Solemn Assemblies are as timid about that as people who work behind the counter at McDonald’s, sit in the governor’s cabinet, manage the local Macy’s, write stories for the newspaper, or deliver the news on television.
Hey, telling the truth to the boss or living it our daily on the job, be it the church or otherwise, might cause us to fall out of favor with the powers-that-be. It might cost us a ladder step on the stairway to success—whatever that means when you’re in the God-business.
And don’t forget, we’ve got bills to pay, a life-style to perpetuate and some old rules that still clunk around in our heads about being nice, saving-face, being tactful, even at the expense of telling the truth. The old Shakespearean line becomes our motto: “The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.” And just how does that message fit with the Christian imperative that we are to lay down our lives, not save them?
Two quick thoughts that make sense, even though I might try to disconnect them from each other. First, when I speak of truth, I mean truth as I perceive and understand it. That’s all I really do have when it comes to the subject of truth. I may be informed by great pearls of wisdom taught to me by wise tutors and religious tradition, combined with my own personal experiences, but in the end I must remember it is my truth, hopefully shared by some, but, nevertheless, my truth.
And the second thought is merely this: Other people, as well as me, have their truth to tell—even my enemies and those I do not like, and those who don’t view the world as I do. And in the end, they will have to live their truth as I must live mine. And in the living, one can only hope some other words from Shakespeare come into play: “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” I smile while writing these words. They are from the play, “All’s Well That Ends Well.” And all may end well if ambition and violence do not prevail
Speaking of Shakespeare…
Macbeth With Mac And Beth
Last weekend, Judy and I drove to Durham, North Carolina, to visit daughter Beth and son-in-law Mac. A Beth-Mac visit. Yes, but also a Macbeth visit. We were there to see grandson Lewis play Macbeth.
I was thrilled to see a high school stage such a play—such a difficult play. The director displayed courage, and the students rose to the occasion, proving again that young people can appreciate Shakespeare when teachers take risks. I must also add that—please a grandfather’s pride—Lewis was a magnificent Macbeth.
Studying the play before I saw it, and watching it performed, I couldn’t help but think about how relevant this play is for us today. It is a play about how a man, Macbeth, is driven to violence and bloodshed by ruthless ambition. It brings to mind the politicians who have taken us to war, and business leaders driven by the forces of greedy ambition. It forces us to recognize how much pain and death is left behind when human beings give way to blind, self-serving ambition.
The play begins with the Three Witches predicting that Macbeth will, without any doubt, be the King of Scotland. We are led to believe that this outcome is inevitable. But the inevitability brings with it a heavy cost. In the end, Macbeth will not be able to overcome his own ambivalence about becoming the King. And, in the end, he and everyone around him, will be mired in violence, bloodshed and death.
Shakespeare could have very well saved Macbeth from this tragic finale. He might even have brought comic relief to this dark play. But he didn’t. He refused to fall back on the old theatrical trick of introducing a deus ex machina. Don’t we all long for, even pray for a deus ex machina. What fools we mortals be.
In Search Of A God To Bail Us Out
Deus ex machina (“God from the machine”)—is the introduction into a play of a God-like character who will rescue the characters from a terrible fate. It’s a cheap trick—cheap grace. It is a mechanical way to bypass, even undermine, the freedom and integrity of the characters the playwright has created. It says he does not trust the characters he has created.
Sometimes I feel like prayer becomes a cheap trick—a plea for a deus ex machina—the introduction of God onto the scene to rescue us from whatever ails us. And so frequently what ails us is what has arrived on our doorstep, compliments of our human freedom, both personal and political—the result of individual and corporate action or inaction.
Last week marked the anniversary of the 1972, Buffalo Creek disaster. On that day a coal sludge broke open spilling over 132 million gallons of water, destroying 17 little towns, killing 125 people, and swallowing 500 homes. The Pittston Coal Company was responsible for this tragedy, but blasphemers were ready in the wings to play the deus ex machina card. The governor, Arch Moore, and the insurance companies came onto the scene trying to save the coal company by calling the flood “an act of God.”
The situation has not changed here in West Virginia. In fact, things have gotten worse. People still live in communities threatened by an even more egregious threat than existed back in 1972. That threat is mountaintop removal, the decapitation of our precious mountains. Thank God, and I do mean God, for the courageous folks who are fighting for these mountains and refusing to hand their freedom over to those who blaspheme the name of God every time a community is flooded or a coal miner dies.
Lily Casey, from Jeannette Walls book, lives in dirt-poor poverty in a cave-like mud dugout. (Walls actually lived, as a child, in Welch, WV). During a flood, her mother begs the family to pray when the water threatens their home—a cave-like mud dugout. Lily cries out: “To heck with praying! Bail, dammit bail.” After the flood, Lily says: “I was pretty aggravated with Mom. She kept saying that the flood was God’s will and we had to submit to it. But I didn’t see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail—the gumption to try to save ourselves—isn’t that what he wanted us to do?”
Julian of Norwich wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Right on sister! But only if folks use their God-given freedom to make things well by resisting the ambitious greed that would harm creation and the people who live here.
March 4th, 2010
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.
February 11th, 2010
January 22nd, 2010 |
His And Her Nightmare
Is it a parent’s nightmare, or is it a child’s nightmare? Perhaps you can answer that question.
The parent has had a long and stressful day. With no job, and the economy in the trash, she wonders if she will ever find work. With so many rejections, she feels like a reject.
How will she pay the bills, feed her son, and escape sleepless nights? And then, as a gift from some celestial angel, sleep arrives on the scene – she drifts off into a sound sleep. But not for long.
It’s not the alarm clock on the bedside table that blasts her out of bed – the alarm clock that used to buzz her into a new day, breakfast with her son, and a trip to deposit her son at school before heading off to work. It’s the bloodcurdling screams she hears from the room just across the hall.
The child has fallen victim to one of those terrible nightmares that is still very real for him, even though his mother is holding him in her arms, rubbing his back, and trying to comfort him with her presence. Between the sobbing and the tears, he tells his mother that a fire-breathing monster is chasing him.
Like any good parent, she knows what to do first when nightmares show up to haunt her child. She turns on all the lights in the room. A well-lit room will help her son see that there is no fire-breathing monster anywhere in sight
Along with the light, she offers him what she hopes will be comforting words: It’s okay, mama is here. Nothing’s going to hurt you. You just had a bad dream. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise.”
What else is there to do? If light and promises don’t work, and the child’s fears rage on, perhaps she will climb into bed with him or take him to her bed, which by now has grown cold.
This good woman knows what’s needed when nightmares ambush a weary human being, no matter how young or old. She might even wish that there was someone next to her, holding her, comforting her, reassuring her that nothing is going to hurt her, that her life isn’t in fact a bad dream – that everything is going to be all right. Someone close who will utter those promises to her so that she can sleep in peace, and get up in the morning to, as a civil rights leader used to say, “keep on keepin’ on.”
But the next day, when she takes time to record her deepest thoughts and feelings in a dog-eared journal filled with daily entries, this good mother scribbles something so honestly confessional that it scares her. It’s as if the words had volcanically erupted onto the page from that place where fire-breathing monsters might live.
Last night I told my hysterical son that the boogie man chasing him wasn’t real. It was only a dream—a bad dream. I told him mama was there with him, and that nothing would hurt him, and everything would be alright. I know he needed to hear those words, as much as I needed to hear myself say them say them, so that both of us could get back to sleep, and get on with our lives, no matter what.
But there is a lie lurking beneath those words, and if ever there was a need to tell a lie, that was the time for me to tell it. I know the truth, and my son will come to know it later in his life. I only hope he will not blame me for misleading him. He’s too young to face the truth—the truth that there are some things that WILL hurt him—that life is OFTEN a bad dream, that everything ISN’T going to be alright, that mama WON’T always be around with a promised reassurance—that the boogie man is really death- in- disguise and WILL catch up with him sooner-or-later.
When The Earth Moves Under Our Feet
In times past, I have run from a hurricane closing in on a North Carolina beach, and, on another occasion, taken shelter in a motel basement in Tennessee as a series of monster tornados threatened the city of Nashville.
Miles away from that hurricane in North Carolina, and deep in the basement of that Nashville motel, I felt less vulnerable, more secure from nature’s pursuit of me. Running away from a storm or hiding from a tornado lessens one’s feelings of vulnerability, for sure.
But that was nothing like the time when I was eating in a hotel restaurant in El Salvador and felt the building shake and saw dishes begin to slide across the table. A waiter told us, at that point, to leave the building and go out into the street. Fortunately, the earthquake registered low on the seismometer so I was able to finish my meal inside.
But when the earth moves under your feet, you can run but you can’t hide. Wherever you are, the earth may crack open and swallow you. You feel totally out of control and powerless. I may have felt more secure standing in that street in El Salvador but that was only an illusion. Sure, the building wouldn’t bury me, had the numbers gone up on the seismometer, but the shifting fault beneath my feet could just as easily have swallowed the asphalt street and me with it.
An earthquake is a reminder, nature’s alarm clock, a wake-up call to the reality that no matter how many layers of security we have cocooned around ourselves, when the earth claims us it will be on the earth’s terms and not ours. Whatever security we may buy in our lifetime, it has a limited shelf life.
Which brings me to the recent earthquake and aftershocks in Haiti, and to some thoughts I’ve had about the earth beneath our feet and the nightmarish visions of death that chase after us and, thereby, threaten the human desire for security.
Haiti—A Descent Into Hell
On Tuesday, January 12, the people in Haiti had no idea that the earth would quake and spilt open under their feet, crushing and burying God knows how many people. Since then, watching the news coverage of the devastation and suffering has become a journey into the depths of Hell. Haiti, by anyone’s definition, is Hell. Hell on earth, having been swallowed up by the earth.
The word “unbelievable” is perhaps the most over-used word in modern speech. Everything these days is “unbelievable.” It’s gotten so that when I hear some radio or TV announcer use the word to describe some event, I often say, “That’s not unbelievable at all.”
I suspect I should understand that the word unbelievable has become our way of defining something when we have bumped into the limitations of reason and speech. It’s our way of gaining control over an unexplainable event by dredging up the adjective unbelievable to rescue us from being no more than inarticulate creatures. And if unbelievable won’t work, then perhaps science or God can give us language to deliver us from silence.
Describing the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti becomes one of those places where reason and speech reach their limitations. Whenever I hear voices blaming God for the seismic waves that brought disaster and suffering into the world, or voices like Pat Robertson’s blasphemous words giving credit to God for punishing the Haitians with an earthquake, I know that reason and speech have reached their limits.
I don’t like revisiting my own writings, but in this case I can’t resist myself. All I can hope for is that redundancy has value.
In my last issue, the final one for 2009, I made reference to Rebecca Solnit’s new book, “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” She quotes Dorothy Day, a survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
“What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward. Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed…While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.”
The situation in Haiti seems not only unbelievable, it seems to be impossible. And watching something which seems impossible has a way of stretching all human definitions of what, indeed, is possible. The human heart cannot bear very much impossibility, with its shadow of despair. Empathy and compassion look for ways to trump the impossible with acts of human charity. The national and international response, in terms of money and relief work, has been heartening. A crisis has a way of touching people’s hearts and charitable instincts. Thanks to a multitude of fundraisers and appeals from business and nonprofits, human generosity has once again been on display.
Christians hold a rather strange belief about Jesus, a belief which defies rational explanation. It’s found in the Bible and is affirmed in the Nicene Creed. It is said that Jesus, after he died, descended to Hell and visited the dead with his presence and a saving word. I translate that in expansive liberal terms. Haitians and foreign relief workers on the ground in Haiti have indeed descended into Hell. By their presence and their life-saving gifts of food and medical care, they are doing a Godly thing among the dead.
Unbelievable? Impossible? Only for those at a loss for words.
Our Military Involvement In Relief Efforts
It is sad but true that we Americans don’t really get to know a country’s history or its people until after we have fought a war with them. The same seems to be true about a crisis. More times than enough, understanding comes on the other side of a crisis, not before it takes place..
With the earth still quaking in Haiti and people still suffering and in need of more help than anyone or any nation can get to them quickly enough, it may not seem appropriate to talk much about who the people are who live on the 10,714 square miles of land called Haiti, nor how they got to be the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, I do believe a couple of preliminary observations are worth sharing, particularly about the military involvement in relief efforts.
Within hours of the earthquake, President Obama mobilized the U.S. military and National Guard units. It was Hurricane Katrina all over again, only this time more swiftly and capably. A steady stream of troops and planes carrying supplies, even a military hospital ship, were hustled off to Haiti. It has been an effort applauded by most Americans, but I have mixed feelings about the military involvement.
I applaud the charitable goodwill being displayed by Americans, but the military involvement in the delivery system concerns me. It’s a public witness to the good will that surfaces when a crisis rears its ugly head. But we need to understand more fully the history of our military involvement with the countries we choose to assist with aide, particularly given our so-called “national interests.”
Haiti has a long history of being occupied by colonial powers –Spain, France, England and the United States. U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934. We have a blemished history when it comes to Haiti. Only six years ago, U.S. military forces were involved in replacing the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
As I write, our military forces, which may soon number as many as 30,000 (4,000 Marines), are already being criticized for the lack of supplies not reaching the injured and dying. I fear that troops heavily armed may find themselves using those weapons.
Here’s my bottom line on military troops being used to do humanitarian efforts in war-torn places.
To begin with, troops, at the direction of the President, are commissioned to fight and kill people, not do social work.
On top of that, the very fact that we have to send the military to do this work illustrates quite clearly that we have no U.S government humanitarian “army,” unarmed and with the expressed mission to bring help to people around the world in trouble. Even the National Guard, trained to do humanitarian work, has been compromised by the diversion and expansion of their mission in fighting wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
And finally, it’s confusing to our men and women in the military, trained to shoot and kill, when they are asked to hand out bags of rice rather than fire bullets, drop water bottles from a helicopter to people dying of thirst rather than bombs on people our country has labels as the enemy. I would add also that the bifurcated assignment of warrior and welfare worker is confusing to the people on the other end of our military relief efforts.
The Link Between The Terrorist And Those Who Are Terrorized
The recent episode involving a suicide bomber, with underpants full of explosives, didn’t succeed in blowing a plane out of the air, but it sure blew the cover off our quest for security and revealed people’s terror over terrorism.
A recent New York Times column titled, “The Terrorist Mind: An Update,” attempted to explore what lies hidden behind such attacks. I was struck by this observation: “Paradoxically, anxiety about death plays a significant role in the indoctrination of terrorists and suicide bombers – unconscious fear of mortality, of leaving no legacy.”
There is another paradox at work here, one that links potential victims of terror to those who choose to play the role of terrorist. You see, both the potential targets of terrorism – that’s you and me – and the one inflicting the terror, are driven by the underlying power of death. The man with a pant’s full of explosives wants to be in control of his destiny out of his fear of death, while the rest of us search for fool-proof, technologically driven security devices that will protect us from our death.
No matter how hard we work at protecting ourselves and those around us, and we should work at that for sure, we cannot achieve the security that will guarantee us deliverance from the terror that might overtake us. We might outrun it in our nightmares but there is no assurance that it will not catch up with us in the real world in which we live.
On Martin Luther King Day Jr. Day, I delivered an address in a local church. I spoke to the congregation about terror and terrorism. I reminded people that terror is not a new subject, or one defined merely by our present world struggle.
Dr. King, like all African Americans in this country, knew all about terror, long before Osama bin Laden arrived on the scene, or the 9/11 bombers. Ground into the terrors associated with the Black experience was a recollection of the whip, chains, lynching, decapitation, torture, and bombings. To be Black was to know exactly what terrorism was all about.
But even with the terrors associated with the Black experience, Dr. King, like other African Americans, knew about the beauties of the black experience. Even with the terror, Dr. King held on to a spirituality that says: “Knowing all there is to know about terrorism, I also know that all human beings are one.”
A verse in Palm 91 reads like this: “You shall not be afraid of any terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by the day.”
Translated into a modern idiom, and taking a bit of liberty with the intent of the passage, it might read like this:
Don’t be afraid of whatever terror you are exposed to – whether it be a cancerous growth, murder by an intruder, the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, growing old, a terrorist attack, or whatever else might threaten your health or welfare. And if you are fearful, don’t fear your fright. It comes with being a human being. Overcoming your fear is not what’s important. Finding a way through your fear – a way to keep on keepin’ on – that’s what counts.
January 22nd, 2010
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