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In between the move and worrying about my apartment and my job and the mind-aching stress of the last few days, I’ve been unable to consider adequately the death of Ted Kennedy. I don’t want to be flip about it, or about the media coverage of it, which I’ve largely missed. Kennedy was a conflicting figure, a contradiction who never quite reconciled his faith and his politics, and while no, I’m no liberal, I can’t dismiss him as an ideologue; he was, by all accounts, someone with an immensely deep and felt faith, which while not in itself a sign of personal orthodoxy, it does suggest him to be better than the lecherous, drunken fool I find so frequently lambasted.
Or, if nothing else, it should certainly serve as a reminder that we can be ourselves lecherous, drunken fools.
So no, I’m not here to condemn the man or his record on abortion. I’m not here to criticize or critique, but to take the moment of Senator Kennedy’s death and reflect on a few things.
The first is that is not, and never has been, easy to be Catholic in America. Beyond modern conceptions that the Church is in some way persecuted, we’ve always been something profoundly other. In a country that valued simple religion, we wore opulent robes. In a country that distrusted systems, we had a hierarchy. In a country that feared ritual, we were besot with it. Among Puritans, we have been seen as Bacchanals. Among the rich, we’ve been the poor and illiterate. Among natives, we’ve been immigrants. We’re illegals and we’re day laborers. We’ve been a constant reminder to the rest of the country that there is a world which they, in the new Arcadia, would rather leave behind. We denied America’s utopianism, and they’ve resented us for it ever since.
Kennedy has always been a politician in that tradition, and in that, it’s hard to deny him his place as a Catholic politician. I can’t speak to his personal convictions, to what end his moral sense cringed at his support for abortion, if he recanted in death or merely will have to make his case before the Lord himself. But he’s certainly someone who has known the place and served the role of the Catholic in American public life. This is not to say he deserves unflinching support or an uncritical eye; his unwavering support for abortion over the years is rightly derided and has led many to question his convictions. But I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the man and his faith. He never openly apostatized. He never denied the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the salvation of man. If he sinned, so do we all. If he failed to uphold a core truth in his public life, if his moral convictions were poorly formed in that area, if he allowed politics to overwhelm his faith there, he is to be pitied and prayed for, but no, not dismissed. Never dismissed.
Kennedy was, like all of us, a sinner, broken and weak. He was given to drink and other excesses, and his moral sense was in some areas profoundly flawed. But so is mine. I know how often I can justify flippancy and pure meanness to my friends, how often my convictions falter in the face of some obstacle. Perhaps Kennedy’s did as well. Or perhaps he’s just been stubborn, and moreso in his old age. Maybe it’s been pride. I can’t say. But Kennedy did do much good, and it’s better we try to evaluate him as the complex, confounding figure he was instead of pretending he was little better than a monster.
I am no opponent of health care reform in principle; I don’t know enough about our system — I’ve been fortunately unafflicted by serious illness or injury — to make heady pronouncements about its fitness or lack thereof, nor am I terribly aware of the particulars of Obama’s plan. It seems to me that the basic goal is to ensure everyone has access to care, which is in principle an idea compatible with the Gospel so I don’t oppose it. Whatever the outcome, I will continue to conduct myself in the same way: doing what I can to ensure others get the treatment they need, whether they need bus fare or the money for a biopsy. The Christian response should remain the same, and as such, I suspect the best approach should be a Christian indifference. I am not responsible for the state, and the state is not responsible for me.
That said, though, I think that, whatever the proposal, Obama is clearly overreaching. You cannot easily foist upon a populace something opposed to their culture, and any attempt to do so will be met with opposition, sometimes violent opposition. Cultural reform takes time and pressure, like Andy Dufresne and his rock hammer, but that very tortoise pace is its biggest detriment; believers in the Wilsonian tradition believe that human life is scientific, and as such can be scientifically organized. It’s simply a matter of implementing a plan, regardless of the underlying culture. Clearly, they presume, reasonable people will not object.
Unfortunately for Obama, however much the economic crisis has made it possible for the government to take greater action than they’d otherwise be able to take, this is still a country where distrust of the government is written in the deepest part of the national genome. It’s our foundational value, and has affected every movement at every moment since 1776. We do not, and we probably won’t ever, trust the government. Even when we accept their authority, we do so grudgingly, and hope and dream and chatter about eventually tossing the bums out and putting something reasonable in their place. The conservatives among us resent that government is even necessary, thinking it’s a detriment on the market and keeping out true freedom and prosperity. The liberals among us despise it as exploitative and violent, a part of an oppressive world system dominated by business. Both believe it needs severe internal reform. Both think it’s the problem.
So how is it that Obama thinks he can walk in and give the government extensive authority in American health care without suffering a violent backlash? Because he’s a Wilsonian, and believes we simply need to wind the clock up properly and set it loose, all atick-tock upon the world. If the system is broken, the system needs to be fixed, and so he scientifically analyzed and diagnosed and proposed radical surgery. The problem with that is that it’s a system staffed by and serving people who are distrustful of government power and influence and don’t necessarily want to see it dramatically expanded.
Politics being the art of the possible, Obama should have taken his time. He should have worked slowly, subtly, simply — propose a program here, a program there. Sure, it wouldn’t have worked as well. It would have taken longer, and would have forced the president to fight the same battles over and over again. It may well have cost him a second term. But the programs, once in place, would have become part of the rhythm of life, and that’s a powerful beat. It’s easy to get used to reality. And then, after a few years, whattaya know? We’d have had health care reform, and then it’d simply be a matter of passing a reorganization bill to rationalize the system into a smooth whole.
You see, you have to respect culture, and the American people have made an art of thumbing our noses at power. We love to see the high brought low, the mighty made weak. We’re a country that’s made a point of holding on to guns just in case we need to shoot the taxman. This is not a country that will ever take reform that comprehensive well. It needs to happen over time, and Obama needs to understand that. I’m not sure he does.
Well, I’m at my mom’s place in Newport News. I spent all day Saturday painfully vacating my previous residence, and found immense generosity among my friends in the process; I was surprised at the outpouring of regret at my departure. I’ve never, you see, had such good friends at these, and it strikes me that I am very lucky. I’m not perched on a gigantic Inflat-o-Mattress in my mom’s office, connected wirelessly to a ridiculously fast FIOS network, and generally enjoying my lack of responsibility. This is soon to change; tomorrow, I take to a gigantic pile of work I’ve been tackling, and hoping guest fatigue doesn’t set in; as much as my mom insists to the contrary, this isn’t my home, and I can’t wait to move into my new place and get my life a-goin’.
I was greeted, however, with a bit of a party for my departure when I arrived, ironically. It was generously attended by my sister and her boyfriend, my friend True, and my friend Jessie and her family alongside my parents and stepfather. It had been a long and difficult day, so it was very much a welcome shift: Subway catering roast beef sandwiches, surrounded by people I love, all of them wishing me well in the future. Jessie even made me a photo album depicting the last six years in Richmond, what feels, effectively, like my entire life. It’s been a good one, and I’ve been happy.
Now it remains to see what I can make for myself in the future.
I know a number of you have been worried about me, and justifiably so, after my last post. I shouldn’t have posted it, because in retrospect it’s quite melodramatic, more than the situation really justified, but that is very much how I felt. Suffice to say, I feel much better. I’ve actually had a couple of blog post ideas kicking around – one in particular talking about American culture and Obama’s health care plan — but I more or less decided to take a break from the blog for a few days to get my head back on straight.
The situation, as so many of you have asked, is this: I’ve had immense difficulty subletting my apartment, my girlfriend and I have had a fairly difficult breakup, and thus, I’ve been quite stressed. Stressed doesn’t even describe it; the past week has been one of the worst of my life. It’s been a roller coaster of people saying they wanted it and then dropping out left and right and left and right and it’s been all I can do just to keep myself calm, let alone keep my faith in order, and even harder still to think about news and culture and religion to produce the sort of material on Saint Superman that you guys deserve. So rather than post filler Youtube videos — my normal strategy — I’ve just sort of disengaged. I’m sorry I didn’t let you guys know or post any updates on the matter.
My stress level has dramatically decreased, but that’s been matched by the need to pack up my apartment; I’ve got a few excellent prospects to take my place, my rental agency has agreed to list the apartment in the event I can’t find a subletter before I leave on Saturday, and all in all, things have settled down to the point that I can studiously unsettle them in the way I need to — getting out of Richmond. It’s still not going to be easy, but it’s no longer this big oppressive force bearing down on me.
I hope to get back to blogging regularly by this upcoming Monday; I’ll be quite busy until then. Keep me in your prayers, friends; I need it.
I’m a basketcase today as it is. A complete and utter mess as my life and future collapse around me.
As I have mentioned before on this blog, the post-World War II, pre-Vatican II world that conservative American Catholics tend to idealize was not experienced as a golden time by Catholics who lived through it and were old enough to understand the terrors that had taken place between 1914 and 1945.
The bloodbath of World War II had overlapped with the October revolution in Russia which was ferociously athiestic. In fact, Pope Pius XI spoke of the “Terrible Triangle” – referring to persecution of Christians in the new Soviet Union and the civil wars in Mexico and Spain in which Catholics and the Church suffered horribly. Simultaneously, Hitler rose to Power in Germany. It all ended in another global catastrophe – World War II, the Holocaust, the bombing of HIroshima, and the beginning of the long anxiety of the nuclear era and the cold war.
Their literature, which I read a great deal of while preparing to teach the graduate course in the Theology of the Laity at Sacred Heart Seminary in June, is filled with anxiety and cataclysmic language. They talked as though all of life hung by a thread while we look back and think of them as inhabiting a serene, sunlit pastoral valley flowing with ecclesial milk and honey. i think we have to let the pre-Vatican II generation speak for itself in these matters. By comparison, we are the ones living in the sunlit valley.
Memory is really impermanent, ain’t it? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, how some people idealize the immediate pre-V2 church as some sort of pastoral wonderland of order, when in fact is was the Church in the chaos immediately following a half-century of bloodshed, when her people clung to her for dear life in a way we can only barely understand today.
More comics!
As a going-away present, my friend True got me a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Now, I’ve read it before; he’s had a copy for a couple of years now, and I took advantage of that not long before I saw the movie adaptation. For those unaware, Persepolis is the graphic novel autobiography of an Iranian girl who lived through the Islamic Revolution in 1979, telling her life-story as she veil descended over her hair, as the war with Iraq took the lives of her classmates, and her own self-imposed exile in Europe during her teen years.
Beautiful in a minimalist sort of way, Satrapi is both a talented artist and storyteller, and is remarkably disciplined in her use of story panels, rarely using panels of any great size, generally keeping herself restricted to variations on nine-panel or six-panel pages. That’s always very interesting to watch, as the trend in most modern comics is to larger and larger panels; my own book has generally employed a four-panel widescreen cinematic style. But in trying to be more like the movies, we’re less like the comics.
Satrapi’s book, now, is a comic, and takes advantage of the abilities of the medium. She’s not trying to make a movie — despite actually eventually making one — and so isn’t concerned with making her book dramatic like a movie. There are no wide shots. There are no interesting camera angles. The art is generally straightforward and occasionally silhouetted, she includes a few diagrams here and there, especially to denote the passage of time, and has in fact divided her book into, not so much chapters as numerous independent vignettes.
Satrapi’s book fascinates me for another reason, too: everybody in it seems to be a communist. Okay, I exaggerate, but communism looms very, very large in this book. One of Satrapi’s personal icons was her uncle Anoosh, who had served in the government of the Soviet-backed Azerbaijan People’s Government, lived and married in Russia, and served to idealize the idea of the people’s revolution for Satrapi. Her parents were leftist radicals if not full-on communists, and I suppose that was inevitable given the climate of the late Pahlavi period. But communism looms very large in this book, and that makes it a little alien to me. God was a looming, dominant figure of Satrapi’s youth, but seemed to fall with the Shah; by the end of the book, she’s a thoroughly secular young divorcee. No longer herself radicalized, she still seems to long for that sort of passion, for that sort of dedication; her grandfather was a communist. Her uncle was a communist. Her parents were protesters. Satrapi, though, was never able to be that sort of radical; the revolution came when she was ten, and her own formative years were spent in a drug-addled haze in Europe. The book seems to pine for a meaningful life she never seemed to able to construct for herself, not in the light of Anoosh.
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been a big fan of a webcomic called Hark! A Vagrant! Drawn by Canadian artist Kate Beaton, it is an obscenely literate, historically well-versed webcomic about, well, lots of things. Beaton riffs off military history, religious history, literature, and language in her concerted effort to make what has to be by a wide margin the nerdiest comic with the smallest potential audience. Sure, anybody can make a geek-out comic about comics, about video games, about all sorts of fanboyish issues; but let’s be honest, shall we? There’s lots of fanboys. We’re everywhere. You can tell us by our Thundercats t-shirts and our fanatical devotion to Hayao Miyazaki and Hideo Kojima. We all love Battlestar Galactica and we all watched Sliders. It’s really easy to please us: reference something we like in some other context. That’s really it.
But Kate Beaton? No, she didn’t go that route. Instead, she decided to go with a model that led her quite inevitably to such strips as “Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës,” in which the eponymous sisters fawn over hideous, brooding jerks, and “Billy Bishop’s Flying School,” in which the Canadian WWI flying ace gives prospective pilots the advice “Don’t lose.” She’s got a seven-page story about mermaids in there, and the occasional sixteenth-century swagger portrait, and plays off the similarities in name between Garfield the Cat and President James Garfield, in which the lasagna-loving fatso turns out to really be named Charles Guiteau.
So yeah. It’s literate, intelligent, and ridiculously obscure. I love it. And let’s not forget that she also gave us this (click to enlarge):
The Politico on corportate-sponsored culture.
The August recess may not have done much to clarify the health care debate, but it has shined a bright light on one of Washington, D.C.’s secrets:
The town is paved with Astroturf.
In the health care debate, well-financed conservative groups battle well-financed unions to get their members to the head of the line at the town halls of hapless members of Congress. The pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry push various talking points through giant megaphones. A public relations firm was busted creating Astroturf at its purest, writing fake letters from real groups in support of the oil industry’s agenda, while vaguely named new coalitions change their messages, and even their names, to match the latest White House messages.
“Astroturf” was coined in the 1980s to describe fake “grassroots” efforts. But now “grassroots” and “issue campaigns” are themselves just the names for product lines at dozens of major political consulting firms, among them the one senior White House advisor David Axelrod left behind in Chicago, as the Republican National Committee pointed out under the headline “Axel-Turf” earlier this month.
Interest groups across the spectrum have grown expert at locating, enraging, and turning out authentic Americans. And the operatives behind the crowds say there’s nothing wrong with a practice as old as American politics.
So, strictly speaking, Politico is discussing the practice of these well-funded organizations pushing and pursuing agendas under the guise of being real, popular, grassroots movements, but I think it all points to the same thing: we have a lot of difficulty escaping commercial influence in our cultural lives, be it artistic, political, whatever. Everything must be funded, and things have only gotten more expensive. So we find ourselves needing sponsors, and eventually, the sponsors themselves become the initiators, with their own interests. It’s not a universal problem, and it’s not always necessarily a problem to begin with, but there is precious little cultural expression out there that isn’t, to some extent, dictated or brought out by the needs or wants of some parent company. We all recall the days when boy bands walked the earth.
Buy Burma-shave!
