Political Hobbyism

Standing out in the spectrum of this year's Fourth-of-July themed commentary was Eitan Hersh's particularly pointed op-ed in last Sunday's NY Times Sunday Review, entitled "The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is the Participants." – a provocative title in this contemporary era when we are increasingly disposed to blame everything that’s wrong either on systems and institutions or on other people but never on ourselves.

Hersh contends that many Americans engage in what he unflatteringly labels political hobbyism: "Americans who live in relative comfort are emotionally invested in politics, especially after the election, but in a degraded form of politics that caters to the voyeurism of news junkies and the short attention spans of slacktivists. They are engaging in a phenomenon I call 'political hobbyism.' They desperately want to do something, but not something that is boring, demanding or slow."

Most of us can probably recognize of whom and of what he speaks. Hersh in any case offers sufficient examples. The ultimate problem, as he sees it, "is that hobbyism is replacing other forms of participation, like local organizing, supporting party organizations, neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion, even voting in midterm elections — the 2014 midterms had the lowest level of voter participation in over 70 years." 

And we all have seen where the tendency of so many - especially younger voters - not to vote has left us! Not voting, of course, has been a perennial problem in this country and keeps getting worse. It is all part of a larger phenomenon of increasing individual detachment from - and consequent lack of support for - institutions of all sorts. 

Hersh warns "that an unending string of activities intended for instant gratification does not amount to much in political power."  Politically concerned citizens should ask "whether their emotions and energy are contributing to a behind-the-scenes effort to build local support across the country or whether they are merely a hollow, self-gratifying manifestation of the new political hobbyism."

The American Dream at 241

Is the American Dream Really Dead? is the title of a recent article (in the US edition of The Guardian) by Carol Graham, author of Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton University Press, 2017). Her contention is that both the facts and our attitudes about what we used to call “the American Dream” have changed. The facts are familiar enough by now: "While 90% of the children born in 1940 ended up in higher ranks of the income distribution than their parents, only 40% of those born in 1980 have done so." But the attitudinal shift may be even more significant: "in 2016, only 38% of Americans thought their children would be better off than they are." Maybe even more amazing in terms of attitude: "Poor people in the US were 20 times less likely to believe hard work would get them ahead than were the poor in Latin America, even though the latter are significantly worse off in material terms." In short, her research leads her to "find strong evidence that the American dream is in tatters, at least."

Just as our popular culture has tended to trivialize our national holiday into little more than an occasion for hot dogs and fireworks, we likewise may tend at times to reduce "the American Dream" to its merely material and consumerist components. But for James Truslow Adams, who coined the now familiar term, it was "not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position” (The Epic of America, 1931).

When I was in elementary school, in addition to memorizing lots of poems and the answers to catechism questions, we also had to memorize the Preamble to the United States Constitution. My guess is that students do a lot less memorizing today - to their loss. And they probably don't memorize the Preamble any more - to their loss and to our entire society's loss.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. 

I have highlighted certain words in that once universally familiar text. Those words are all about us - not as isolated libertarian individuals forever fearful of each other and of society as enemies of our supposed freedom, but as a society (albeit imperfect) of authentically free persons united as a community in pursuit of the common good - a society that extends as well to future generations to whom we are also obligated as we are obligated in the present to one another.

Needless to say, that is about as opposite as one can get from the dominant ideology of our current ruling Party. No wonder our society seems so sadly fragmented on its 241st birthday!

Remembering My First Fliight

My first-ever airplane trip was on this date in 1970. It was a trans-Atlantic flight from New York's JFK airport to Luxembourg, with a stop-over in Iceland. I was a college student at the time, heading off to Europe for the summer in order to study German in Salzburg, Austria. And, like so many other financially limited travelers in those days I used Icelandic Airlines, which (as this 1973 ad from Icelandic's 5th Avenue window emphasized) then offered the lowest jet fares to Europe. Airfares were, of course, all wonderfully regulated in those days, but apparently the agreement allowing a US Air Base in Iceland also allowed Icelandic Airlines to fly to and from the US at its lower rates. (I am not sure what exactly Iceland's deal was with Luxembourg!)

Besides being inexpensive, flying was for the most part a much pleasanter experience then than now in almost every way. Of course, real meals were served on the plane - on real plates, with drinks in real glasses. In those days, unlike now, airport security had not yet become such a preoccupation. So your family and friends could accompany you all the way to the gate and wait with you as long as they chose, without ever having to go though metal detectors or any other such machines. While I obviously get the case for contemporary airport security, there is little else about the changes in the modern airport and airplane experience since then that seems like much of an improvement. 

Why remember 1970? My summer in Europe was a  great experience, but in many respects it was an otherwise grim year - most memorable for the spring of the infamous Cambodian "incursion," the shootings of students at Kent State, the construction-worker riots on Wall Street, etc. It is obviously not the case that everything was always better in the past! We have certainly had more tranquil years since then and have lived through a lot of progress in so many areas of life since 1970. Even so, remembering some of the nicer things from the past can remind us how much has also been lost, losses both tangible and intangible, and how those losses are symbolic of an ongoing unraveling, the fuller implications of which are only now becoming evident.

It is helpful to remember how much better at least some things in life were back then and what we have lost - the price we have paid as our greed and lust for individual convenience have contributed to a progressively inexorable degradation of the fundamental fabric of social and community life.

Strangers No Longer

Whoever receives you receives me. … And whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink – amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.

Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel [Matthew 10:37-42] reflected the high value in which hospitality and welcoming were held in his society, something also illustrated in our reading from the Book of Kings [2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a]. The Shunemite woman did more than just give Elisha a cup of cold water. She gave him dinner and furnished a room for him! In this, she foreshadowed the generous women in the Gospels, like Martha and Mary of Bethany, who offered hospitality to Jesus and his disciples, welcoming them into their home, and serving ever since as models for the Church and the high spiritual value the Church has placed on hospitality and welcoming down through the centuries right up to our own time.

Having himself as a child been a political refugee from Herod’s terror, Jesus knew from personal experience the stress of leaving one’s own homeland and facing an uncertain welcome in another land.

Inspired by Jesus’ own words in his parable about the Last Judgment, I was a stranger and your welcomed me, Saint Benedict’s Rule for monks famously prescribes that all guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as if they were Christ himself. Nor have hospitality and welcoming been confined to monasteries. When 17-year old Annie Moore crossed the threshold of the New World as the first immigrant to pass through the new Ellis Island immigration Facility on January 1, 1892, she was welcomed by, among others, Father Callahan of the Mission of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, who blessed her and gave her a silver coin, a symbolic expression of the historic role of the American Catholic community – itself throughout its history a community of immigrants – in providing hospitality and welcome  to generation after generation of new arrivals, in this land and nation of immigrants.

Annie Moore’s story – along with the stories of so many others, among them my own grandparents and the parents and grandparents of so many of us assembled here today – ought especially to impress themselves on our consciousness, both as Catholics and as Americans, as we prepare to celebrate another Independence Day holiday this week. For we have always been a Church of migrants and strangers, in this land and nation of immigrants. Immigrants have always been the face of our Church in this country – in our parishes and in our schools and in our other social ministries.

On Independence Day, we honor the great legacy left for us, often at great sacrifice, by generations of citizens past, immigrants to this new land but strangers no longer, with whom we remain linked in a great social compact, bounded by history to one another, both past and present, for the sake of the future. We celebrate our past history as a nation, our present life together, and our hope for our common future.

As citizens, we properly celebrate our national day as John Adams famously proposed: “by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

Nowadays, however, Independence Day is all too often reduced to just hot dogs and fireworks. But, as we assemble today, as we do every Sunday, to profess our faith as migrants passing through this world en route to our final homeland, this week’s national holiday ought to remind us of our country’s complicated history as a land and nation of immigrants: of our admirable civic and religious traditions of hospitality and welcome, worthy of comparison with the Shunemite woman and Elisha, but also of our many failures to live up to that challenge – failures in which we Catholics have been as complicit at times as others in our society. As the US Bishops reminded us several years ago, “today, as in the past, the treatment of the immigrant too often reflects failures of understanding and sinful patterns of chauvinism, prejudice, and discrimination that deny the unity of the human family, of which the one baptism is our enduring sign.” [Welcoming The Stranger Among Us: Unity In Diversity, NCCB/USCC, 2000]

More recently, Pope Francis has challenged us to oppose what he has called the “globalization of indifference” and deploring the “throwaway culture” - both so expressive of our way of life today, but so contrary to the biblical emphasis on hospitality and welcome. As the Holy Father said to the U.S. Congress just two years ago, “We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome.”

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Catholic immigrants to the United States were often scorned by those who had gotten here earlier – often on grounds very similar to those nowadays alleged against Muslim immigrants. But that only emboldened the founder of the Paulist Fathers, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, to highlight the overlap between the universal reach that has historically been this nation’s exceptional ambition and the inherent universality of the Church’s mission. That mission, he reminded his contemporaries, “embraces the whole human race in one brotherhood” [The Present and Future Prospects of the Catholic Faith in the United States of North America, 1857-1858]. Hecker saw both the Catholic Church and American society as “forming the various races of men and nationalities into a homogeneous people … giving a bright promise of a broader and higher development than has been heretofore accomplished” [The Church and the Age, 1887].

As a society, we will always inevitably fall short of our own inclusive ideals and heroic ambitions, as just as certainly we will - more likely than not - fall short of Jesus’ challenge of mutual hospitality to one another and to all we encounter. But by baptism into Christ, we are no longer permitted to be strangers to one another, for we have been brought beyond the ordinary human limitations of family, state, and society, and raised instead with Christ to live in newness of life, responding to one another and welcoming one another as we would never otherwise have known how to do or dared to have tried.

As Pope Francis challenged Congress: “if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us give opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”

Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 2, 2017

July

When pressed, I will concede that even summer has certain charms. As a child, although it was still my least favorite season, I looked forward to going to the beach with my cousins and Sunday picnics with the extended family. Later, in grad school, summer was a relaxed time - days spent in the library, but at a more leisurely pace with lots of social time. Even so, it was always miserably hot and humid. (In the Northern hemisphere, it is on average the warmest month.) The ancients appropriately called this time of year the "Dog Days" and associated them with the ailments that accompany the heat. Before being renamed the "Temperature Humidity Index," the daily weather report used to announce the day's "Discomfort Index," (especially appropriate back in those days when most of us lacked access to air-conditioning).

July, of course, comes at the year's mid-point, the 7th month of our 12-month solar year. In the original Roman calendar (attributed to Romulus himself and which began with March) it was counted as the 5th month, Qunitilis. Like September, October, November, and December, all echoes of that older numbering, Quinitllis at first kept its name in the Julian calendar. But, after Cesar's death (and presumptive deification), it was renamed in his honor, and 10 days of games were henceforth celebrated in Caesar's honor every July. (Caesar's birthday was July 13.)

In England, July 15 is Saint Swithin's Day. (Swithin was a 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester.) According to a superstitious tradition, whatever the weather does that day - sun or rain - the same will continue for 40 days more. Not a particularly pleasant prospect either way!

Much more pleasantly, in the United States July is National Hot Dog Month, presumably because of the ubiquity of hot dogs at summer picnics and outdoor barbecues - and, of course, the cultural association of hot dogs with the July 4 holiday. As the hottest month, it is also appropriately designated as National Ice Cream Month in the United States.

If we must necessarily suffer through July, I agree that hot dogs and ice cream can certainly help make the month much more endurable!

(Photo: July from the justly famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is generally considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination)