Daddy Moments

Owen is getting to an age where he is starting to string words and sounds together as a way to tell Clara and I stories. It is incredibly fun. The first story he started to tell was about seeing two military helicopters when he was at the grocery store with his mom. To tell this story he makes his helicopter noise (alas, he cannot yet say helicopter), a sort of tucka-tucka-tucka to imitate the propeller, and then he says two (and he holds up all of his fingers on one hand), and then he says "mama." He saw helicopters, two of them, with his mama. 

A week or so ago there was a spider in our basement. Typically he likes bugs so we called him over to see it and for some reason it scared him. I killed it and threw it away. To my son I was St George slaying the dragon. He tells the story multiple times every day. He makes his bug noise, "bzzzz," and then his scared noise, a sort of low whine. I then ask him what happened to the bug. He says, "Dada! Yes!" And does the 80s style fist pump as he says yes. 

He loves giraffes. He has a few books with giraffes in them and a puzzle with a giraffe as one of the pieces. Whenever we come across a giraffe in one of his books he has to get up and get the puzzle piece to show us. Clara was at work the other night and we watched a youtube video of a baby giraffe. It was pretty cute, but I wasn't sure it had made an impression. When she got home she asked what we had done and I told her we had played outside, read books, ate dinner, listened to music, and we had watched a video. Owen lit up and said "raffe." He then copied the way it had been eating with its long tongue and said "beby," his current cutest word.

I know kids can be a burden and that you have more free time and money and stuff if you don't have them. Sometimes I wish I could just come home and relax instead of coming home and playing with him until he goes to bed. But then he goes to bed and ten minutes later I miss him and want to sneak in and look at him. Nothing in my life--no achievement or job or book on my shelf--is worth more than my time with him. He is a gift, a treasure, an immense responsibility, a burden, an article of grace, and my little man. 

Identity Politics and Criticism, part two

My last post was on the way contemporary criticism functions primarily as personal criticism, and not merely criticism of ideas and the way this has infected discourse. I find that this all flows from a basic lack of charity toward people who think differently, believe differently, or see the world differently than you do. And this tendency is reinforced by a refusal to actually engage with the ideas of the best thinkers on the other side. The left treats all gun-rights advocates as if they are the unhinged nutball Alex Jones, and the right treats all pro-choice advocates as if they are the writer of this absolutely batshit crazy article. By refusing to deal with articulate representatives, allowing nuance into the conversation, we are confirmed in our own biases.

We conservatives make fun of Chris Matthews and the tingle in his leg over Obama or Keith Olberman's splenetic rants or pretty much anything written by Thomas Friedman or Maureen Dowd (and rightfully so). And we treat the left as if these are its representative members. 

The left, of course, does this with conservatives as well. Rush Limbaugh, the birther movement, the idiotic statement by Todd Akin, Glenn Beck's pseudo-history all comprise for them the substance of conservative ideas.

Bill O'Reilly doesn't interview Ezra Klein, and Chris Matthews doesn't interview Daniel Larison. That might murky the waters a bit for the base, showing humane and reasoned insights from the other side. Far too generous of a notion for cable news. Better to have fringe people on and yell at them. (CNN, for its part, tries to have both sides represented and is the only network my wife and I can stand to watch.)

I read an excellent article this past week by Maria Bustillos about the unintended effects of reading authors with whom you disagree. Bustillos, a committed liberal, read Edmund Burke, English philosopher, critic of the French revolution, and the grandfather of modern conservatism. She loved him. Loved his style, loved his turns of phrase. And she found this surprising. Wouldn't Burke, believing such wrong things, also write like an idiot?

I think conservatives who read a lot are apt to be less surprised by what Bustillos encountered in Burke, if only because most renowned authors of the past couple centuries have been liberals and conservatives are thus used to reading liberals having profound insights in beautiful prose. I am not shocked that I love Dickens or George Eliot or Tim O'Brien or others whom I would have disagreements with. The surprise might be more acute for a liberal to find out that Wallace Stevens was conservative, merely because successful poets are assumed to be liberal, than it is for me to find out that Yeats was a liberal. 

But not a lot of people read books, as a percentage of the general population that is, and I would guess that of those who do there are not many conservatives who have read Marx or Rousseau nor liberals who have read Burke or Oakeshotte. I remember in college reading Nietzsche and someone from my church asking me why I would bother taking the time to read the work of a godless heathen for pleasure (that is a paraphrase). Before you scoff, if you are of a liberal bent, how would one of your friends react to you reading The Purpose Driven Life for the plain old fun of it? 

We cloister ourselves in these little communities of like-minded people and like hothouse flowers in winter are unable to survive outside of that environment. I have a number of friends from graduate school who I cannot imagine having a life outside of the university. Everyone outside of their extremely liberal bubble they are likely to find a homophobic, misogynistic, racist, Bible-thumping hardliner. The way they talked about students, 18 year old kids out in the world for the first time just trying to figure stuff out, was disgraceful. People find it easy to berate homeschooling parents for sheltering their children from the world, but what in the hell other purpose does the modern English department serve for a different breed of fundamentalist? (This comparison is pretty apt. Most homeschooled kids turn out just great--I'm married to one--as do most graduates of English departments. However, there is the select breed that cannot leave home, only reads material on the approved list, wears weird clothing, and who no one outside of their small circle can understand.)

The effect this cloistering has on us is that we do not know how to communicate with each other because we have no meaningful interaction with each other. Since we have no meaningful interaction and conversely have been taught that the Other is Everything That is Wrong With the World, every ounce of criticism however benign becomes hyper-personal and we respond by challenging the humanity of the people opposing our views. That is how restrictions on abortion supported by over half of our country (including half of women) are turned into a Republican War on Women. And why every liberal call for even modest gun restriction is met with the you-can-pry-my-guns-from-my-cold-dead-fingers response. It is as if every political or personal disagreement presents an existential crisis. And that is just no good in terms of debate or in terms of the political future of our country. 

Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton engaged in a series of debates in 1928. They traded vicious personal barbs (at one point proceedings were interrupted because Chesterton was laughing so hard at one of Shaw's barbs directed against him), but they walked off the stage friends, and remained lifelong friends regularly pillorying the other in their works. This same spirit doesn't seem to exist today. A century ago even personal attacks could be laughed off, but now even the most benign attacks (remember that the genesis for this post was a blogger's mild disapproval of a poem) take on a sharp personal edge.

I don't really have a solution to this problem. The simplest thing would be to try and avoid this tendency yourself. To treat the other side with charity and dignity for, if no other reason, the sake of common humanity. This doesn't mean divesting oneself of passion, only making sure it stays in check and doesn't completely color the way you see other people who might disagree with you. It certainly doesn't mean divesting oneself of belief--Chesterton and Shaw certainly believed vastly different things--but not allowing belief to demonize others. 

And reach out across the aisle. I saw an article today by a gay activist who spent time with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-a, and he talks about how impressed he was by the character of Cathy and the genuine love and respect he has for the traditional family. They still wildly disagree with one another, but it is impossible now for either Cathy or Windmeyer to glibly characterize the other side as a bunch of people dragging us to Sodom or hateful bigots. When you actually know someone and what motivates them it is generally not as black and white as our dualist media tends to make it seem.

Identity Politics and Criticism

I am linking to a video of the inaugural poem written by Richard Blanco. Poetry is a difficult thing to evaluate, always has been. No one read John Donne until he was resurrected by T.S. Eliot 100 years ago, and by my lights he is the best (short) poet of all time. Yet he went unnoticed and unappreciated for 300 years. That's how it works. Tough to judge.

About Mr. Blanco's poem the most I can say is that it was, mercifully, better than Maya Angelou'spoem from Clinton's inauguration. But so were most of the poems I heard at the Manhattan dive bar's dismal weekly poetry night. Apart from that, I can't get too excited about it. There is a difference, after all, from being like WaltWhitman and being Walt Whitman. All in all, just not my thing.

It was also not RodDreher's thing. Dreher is a blogger at The American Conservative, one of the world's best magazines, and one of my favorite writers. Here was his most scathing comment, following an excerpt: "Yadda yadda. Bleah. Why do we even have inaugural poems? JFK had one written for him by Robert Frost, but after him, only Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have had them. I prefer the Republican strategy." He prefaced the excerpt with the equally odious "I just can't bring myself to enjoy [the poem]." That was all he said. 

He then issued a challenge to his readers to write their own inaugural limerick in the comments section so, disregarding my standard refusal to read blog comments, I decided to see what people came up with. Instead of good-natured response to his challenge, the comments section had been hijacked by liberal commenters charging Dreher with homophobia and anti-gay bias for not just love, love, loving the poem. Dreher's response was that he didn't even know the poet was gay, he just didn't like the poem. (Cards on the table: I did know Blanco was gay before I heard the poem, AND still found it wanting; surefire evidence of my bigotry.)

What I noticed in these critiques of Dreher's assumed homophobia was that no one was defending the merits of the poem (except for repeating the ad infinitum comparisons to Whitman), they were merely arguing that the only reason one could have for not approving was hate. And I was struck by how monumentally ridiculous that was. And then I was reminded of a clip from an episode of last year's Parks and Rec, when Leslie Knope is being interviewed by the dry host of a public radio program. After her segment she is asked to introduce the musical group the station will be playing next: Nefertiti's Fjord, a Norwegian lesbian duo. She takes off her headphones and complains about how terrible the music is. The host agrees, "Yes, it is quite awful. But they are lesbians." It is a perfect sendup of the less tolerable moments on NPR (an organization I love and give money to annually) and tells a salient truth of our culture--we are almost unable to critique anything produced by an aggrieved minority group. Much of what is praised in our culture is diversity for the sake of diversity. 

This is really easy to do in the arts because the experience of them and evaluation of their merit is so subjective. It would be hard for a physicist to be given the Nobel Prize for being gay or Latino (think of how condescending that would seem), but in the realm of arts being a member of a countercultural/minority group identity can certainly be an aid to recognition and praise. If the work is critiqued it is either because the critic just doesn't get it or the criticism was surely personal and motivated by hate. In other words, there is no way to critique stuff. 

I remember trying to read Toni Morrison's Beloved and only being able to make it through about 20 pages before I was mind-numbingly bored and refused to go on. And the thought flashed through my mind: are you only rejecting this book because it was written by a black woman? Shouldn't you give it a bit more time? The answer of course was much simpler: I just didn't enjoy it and didn't want to use my limited free time to read something I didn't enjoy. That was five years ago. Maybe I would like it better today. I loved Kerouac when I was 22; I read an excerpt from On the Road last year and wanted to go back in time and punch that smug sonofabitch in the face. Art is weird. At different times things have struck me as brilliant that I later come to look back on with embarrassment.

Perhaps 150 years from now cultural historians will hail Blanco's occasional verse as the sine qua non of early twenty-first century American letters. More than likely people will forget that it ever happened. However it is viewed, how ludicrous is it that any critique of it is viewed automatically as a critique of the author's sexuality and most likely veiled racial hatred towards the man of the day? When all criticism is personal, criticism is dead as an art form in its own right. Reasoned criticism or even mild dislike is met with pure emoting, and in our culture emotion trumps reason.

I suddenly realize that I have more thoughts on this subject but have already exceeded the proper bounds for the length of a blog post. More thoughts on our weird relationship toward criticism and the club-wielding use of identity politics to follow.

Bloodlines Review

The issue of race is easily one of the single most difficult things to talk about in our culture. Sadly, any wishful thinking that the election of a black president would wipe the slate clean for future generations has proved entirely wrong. As a country we are still mired in issues of race, from the pop culture debate surrounding Quentin Tarantino's latest revengeploitation film, Django Unchained, to last years killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent social media campaigns, to idiots at anti-Obama rallies with signs saying "Keep the White in the White House," to the impulse of some on the left to credit any dissent from Obama as bigotry, to the more recent idiotic statement of (former) ESPN talking head Rob Parker about quarterback Robert Griffin III's who qualifies as only "kinda black" for such grievous sins as being a Republican and engaged to a white woman. It is safe to say we have failed to move on.

And it is still a difficult topic to discuss. A lot of confusion stems from people, especially white people, being unsure of exactly how they can contribute to a conversation about race without said conversation being a) white people being told how bad they are, or b) being criticized for their participation in this conversation, no matter how careful and thoughtful they are. Last year I taught freshman in college how to write, and as we all know, integral to one's success in writing is the ability to fully understand white privilege. Or so the curriculum seems to think. I brought in an article to class one day about the Madden 2012 football video game which had just been released. The author of the article was (self) righteously indignant about the color scheme the Madden engineers had chosen for the customizable player option. If you are a quarterback, default is white; running back, you're black; lineman, white; and so on. How in this day, the author asked, could we be so backwards as to buy into all of these old stereotypes about white quarterbacks and speedy black athletes? One of my white students threw up his hands in despair and asked, "How do we win?" At the heart of his anguished plea was this question: what could the gamemakers have done that would not have elicited a negative response? Make all players black? That would be furthering the stereotype that blacks are only good at sports. Make them all white? Oh, boy. In other words, if you're looking for racism under every stone, you can easily stretch yourself to find it. And my students wanted to know how it was possible to navigate that landscape without someone taking a shot at you; wasn't it easier to just not try?

And into this mess comes John Piper and his book Bloodlines: Race, the Cross, and the Christian. Cognizant of the current situation regarding race, Piper is super aware of the reality that if you speak about race you will be criticized. For some you will go too far; for some not far enough. For some your recommendations will seem too extreme, for others too mild. To some you will sound apologetic for the racism of the past, to others you will sound too harsh on people who lived in different times. It is enough to make one throw one's hands up and quit. But, gladly, Piper didn't do that.

He begins by recounting his youth in South Carolina, where he imbibed the racial prejudices of the culture around him. For example, his childhood church voted in 1965 to not allow blacks to become members. His defiant mother proudly escorted an African American family the Pipers were friends with into the church when her daughter was married, but the culture around him was violently anti-black. South Carolina held out until the 90s before recognizing interracial marriages. So that was his situation and it took awhile for him to see how profoundly it affected the way he viewed races.

Piper's background is important because it sets the stage for what becomes the guiding thesis for his book: he was rebuked for his racism, repented, and taught to live another way by his acceptance of the Reformed theology of the Christian faith. The answer, then, for fighting racism is not some airy liberal do-goodism, the motivation for which is quite usually baseless, but acceptance of hard, yet liberating Christian truth. What white people need and what black people need isn't more conversation about grievances, important as it is to be aware of the very real grievances black Americans have historically and still currently suffer from white Americans, but to come to Jesus.

This is not exactly a surprising answer, given Piper's theological convictions, but it is a convincing answer. The Church is/has been/will be complicit in any number of shortcomings, and historically racism looms large. In many ways, most churches are still functionally segregated. Piper's response to this is that the racial situation of the church, past and present, is largely a failure of application and not doctrine. Lest this seem like a convenient copout--Christianity is great, except for all the Christians!--Piper backs it up with his customary deep exegesis. 

The exegesis is based on an explication of the five traditional doctrines of the Reformed faith, the infamous TULIP acronym. Piper goes chapter by chapter showing how adherence to these doctrines (formed as they are on the testimony of scripture) undoes the ability to view other races as inferior or somehow less beloved of God. What first attracted me to Reformed/Calvinist doctrine, apart from the fact that its expositors didn't seem afraid to confront the whole Bible, was the way that it leveled the playing field for all men. That T up there in the acronym stands for total depravity, which is not a great way of putting it, but essentially means that we are all equally dead in sin and therefore all equally unworthy of God's grace. Everything we have is unmerited favor. You can brag about unmerited favor, but you come off sounding pretty lousy, like the parodied Republican in this year's 30 Rock that complained about how unfair taxation on the rich was because he "earned my trust find by always being polite to grandfather."

In other words, Reformed theology systematically undercuts everything that we use to puff ourselves up: high birth, accomplishment, etc. Instead what we have is all due to and emanates from God's free grace. I cannot look down on anyone, because I in no way deserve or earned what I have been given. Racism is founded on the idea of superiority, that of one racial group over another. Christianity undermines the very idea of superiority, putting us all on the same level.

Christ came to break down the barriers we have erected through sin, both the barriers that keep us from God and those that keep us from one another. In Paul's great chapter on love, which Piper doesn't have space to treat here, he speaks about how he now sees in a glass dimly and that one day he shall behold face to face and know even as he is fully known. It by no means stretches the text to apply its future vision to other people as much as self-knowledge of knowledge of God. That is restoration, or true sight, to fully see one another in our God-bestowed glory.

Some no doubt will complain that Piper's solution is unnecessary. The idea is now ubiquitous in our culture that we can be good without God, that even requiring some spiritual motivation to love others and seek racial harmony shows weakness. All that I can say to that is those people have little idea how much they are leaning on the Christian ethical tradition to make the self-evident claims they want to make. There are precious few cultures in the world not based on a Christian worldview in which racial harmony, freedom of religion, or equality of the sexes are even broad cultural goals. We didn't arise out of the primordial muck loving one another and seeking justice.

Piper shows how wonderfully and completely the love for others inherent in Reformed theology applies across races. How integral to the vision of Jesus and the mission of his Church is racial harmony. This is another key point in the book: Christ's mission was to desegregate a heavily segregated world. He shows favor to Gentile and Samaritans and women. In the final words to his disciples he tells him that they will be his witnesses all over the world--to Jew and Gentile alike. In St John's apocalyptic vision in the book of Revelation he sees a stream of people from every tribe, tongue, nation, and people in procession to worship the glorified Christ. Christ's mission is for his followers to go the world; its fulfillment is that people from every ethnic group on this planet will one day praise his name.

In closing I will mention briefly why Piper named the book what he did, for I find it to be quite beautiful. Worldly bloodlines have caused a lot of harm in this world. People can be either too proud or too humiliated over their ancestors and their history. What Christ does is abolish our worldly bloodlines and establish a new bloodline: one that starts at the cross and flows freely in every person under the sun who bows at the name of Jesus, our Savior and Uniter. To God's unquenchable glory.