A Grim Anniversary

It was hardly the moon landing - or even Woodstock. Were it not for Quentin Tarantino's troubling but fantastic film Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, the 50th anniversary of the infamous Manson-cult murders of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child,  and her house guests on August 8, 1969, might be passing with much less notice. As I noted in my own review of the film last week, it is a very good movie; but the picture it presents of that period about which Tarantino is so nostalgic may itself serve as an effective cure for such nostalgia. The film's surprise ending radically alters the actual history of that terrible night, but the real historical crime has come to be seen by many as a symbolic end to that era and to the more benevolent interpretation of the counter-cultural fantasies of the sixties.

The previous year's rock musical Hair had highlighted the "hippie" movement and reflected its contemporary cultural resonance. Its music was so good that its songs have survived and have continued to be popular long past the hippie movement's demise. (A friend of mine who saw Hair early in its first run reflected at the time that the show itself was anticipating the end of the hippie movement.) Great music and an explosion of color in place of previously uniformly drab outfits (especially for men) are among the more positive legacies of that brief interlude when it may have genuinely seemed a new era of peace and love was being inaugurated in place of a shallow conformist culture. On this date in 1969, that most glamorous harbinger of a new era of music, peace, love, and joy, Woodstock, was one week away. But that bubble was doomed to burst soon enough. It would surely have burst anyway, even without the Manson cult's crimes, but those terrible crimes shed a bright light on the dark underside of the sixties' "revolution." (In Tarantino's movie, even before the violent ending, his depiction of the squalor and sheer pointlessness of the hippie commune's life are already enough warning that that alternative to shallow conformity could not create anything of lasting value and could only end badly - as of course the sixties did.)

We have all been irrevocably formed by the sixties - both those of us who lived through it and those who have inherited the poisoned legacy we left them. This grim anniversary is yet another reminder of how as a society we have yet to come to terms completely with the confused legacy of the sixties and how shaped - and misshaped - we have been by that traumatic decade.

"Thoughts and Prayers"

When bad things happen, we tend to become surprisingly silent. Even normally loquacious politicians and pundits sometimes content themselves with offering that current commonplace "thoughts and prayers" Other politicians, pundits, and ordinary observers, more aroused to act against evil than stunned into silence by it, mock their colleagues' "thoughts and prayers" for the phony slogan it has become. In themselves, thinking and praying are good, of course. In fact, one might suggest that among our society's many personal and political problems is a radical insufficiency of both. But that cannot condone sloganeering "thoughts and prayers" in place of the thinking and praying that should really be going on all the time, much less in place of the personal and political action that needs to be taking the place of our widespread silence and inaction.

Whenever tragedy strikes, compassion is called for. But, especially when the tragedy is due to human evil, compassion calls out for action. One obvious action in response to our national orgy of mass shootings would be to foreclose the legal possession of weapons of mass destruction (i.e., guns) by private individuals. This, alas, is already familiar territory.

Saturday's terrorist attack in El Paso, like earlier acts of terrorism at a Black church and at a Jewish synagogue, also highlights an ugly, white supremacist dimension of our current political climate, which it is likewise morally obligatory for us to confront, personally and politically. 

Bearing arms in the service of one's society used to be acknowledged as one of the responsibilities of citizenship. The ancient Greeks, to whom we owe the earliest formative reflections on citizenship, relied on citizen armies to defend their cities (the remote ancestors of the "militias" to which our constitution's second amendment refers). At the same time, in those same Greek city-states those same citizen-soldiers went about unarmed. According to Thucydides, the Athenians were the first to exclude carrying personal weapons in the city.

By all means let us always think and pray. But one personal and political imperative of civilized life needs to be society-wide action against the continued individual private possession of weapons.

Rich for What?

“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”

An old story – a family conflict over inheritance, something we’ve all seen happen too many times. What better advertisement for Jesus’ famous advice to give everything away – now!

Perhaps that someone in the crowd who wanted Jesus to take his side in his family’s quarrel may well have had a good case. Who knows? That’s a concern for a lawyer – a role Jesus refused to play. “Friend,” Jesus replied, “who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”

Jesus looked beyond the immediate case at hand – to the bigger problem of what wealth (and our obsessive preoccupation with wealth) does to us. So Jesus warned: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” Even so, so much of our lives and how we have structured our society send the opposite message. Ours is what Pope Francis, in his agenda-setting encyclical Evangelii Gaudium, called an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills, while we for our part calmly accept [money’s] dominion over ourselves and our societies [Evangelii Gaudium, 53, 55].

The problem with that, as we all know of course, is that things actually are important. Having at least some things – sufficient food, some sort of shelter – having at least some things really is important, if we just want to survive. And having more things, while maybe not quite so necessary, certainly seems to make life a lot better – or at least a lot easier. Jesus didn’t deny that, but (like Qoheleth, the teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes) Jesus understood how limited – and limiting – wealth’s benefits can be. For time too is limited. When we’ve only a limited amount of time, the length of which we cannot know for certain, what we do with that time, how we choose to live, the objectives we pursue, the priorities we express in the way we choose to live, these become the important questions – questions that concern who we really are, regardless of what or how much we have.

Greed (which Saint Paul equated with idolatry) - and its equally corrupting cousin envy – can totally take over a person, leading to a seemingly obsessive but quite common need to compare oneself with others and a compulsive desire to acquire and acquire and acquire. There’s always that bigger house, or cooler car, or the latest model phone, or whatever! To quote Pope Francis again: The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us [Evangelii Gaudium, 54].

And yet it’s still always a race against time – a race one can only lose.

“You fool,” Jesus says, “the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?”

Life is like a race someone else always wins. Even the inheritors will lose the race in the end. Either it is all (as Qoheleth warned) maybe just one long meaningless vanity. Or it has some purpose beyond its apparent end. But, if so, what we get to take with us will not be what we have (or, rather, at that point, what we had), but rather who we are, who we have become by the way we have chosen to live.

As Christians, our lives are shaped by the reality of the risen Christ, who is already (Saint Paul tells us) seated at the right hand of God. Shaped by and focused on that reality, we can begin to look at our lives, already here and now, with a perspective that the greedy man in the parable obviously lacked – not just a resigned fatalistic acceptance of life’s limits, like what we heard from Qoheleth, but a freedom to face life frankly and live it fully, with all its challenges and disappointments, based not on what we have, but on who we can become in Christ.

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church Knoxville TN, August 4, 2018.

The Great Debates: Round 2 (Act 2)

As long as former Vice President Joe Biden remains the presumed front-runner (I say "presumed," because, of course, no one has actually voted yet, anywhere), last night's second-act debate was likely to overshadow last night's. Julian Castro had a good first debate but was then virtually forgotten in all the hype about Kamala Harris's going after Bidden. What would happen to Castro now that the luck of the draw had seated him at the adult table! Along with Biden, Castro, and Harris, last night's debaters were Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Bill deBlasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee, and Andrew Yang.

Going in, I expected the evening to be about Biden (and whether he could improve his performance over last time) and whether Harris and Booker and Castro could put a dent in his front-runner status - and, additionally, what, if anything, Bennet, DeBlasio, Gillibrand, Gabbard, Inslee, and Yang might add to the show (and whether anything they say may matter).

The second night was somewhat more raucous than the first. This was exacerbated by hecklers in the audience. All of which, of course, highlights the absurdity of having live audiences at these events. The presence of an audience just highlights the theatrical character of these performances, reinforcing the sense that this is really about entertainment.

Health care continues to be the single most high-profile issue that excites Democratic voters. So inevitably it came first in the debate. For the life of me, I can't understand why so many people seem so attached to private insurance. But many are. So the candidates have to work with that. The second night's debate seemed to reflect that in the more nuanced proposals being argued over. The problem, of course, is that it gets very complicated and confusing for many. The candidates would do better to keep hammering home that Trump has been trying to take away the great accomplishments of Obamacare, and that the long-term goal is to work toward a more universal outcome even than Obamacare accomplished.

The immigration debate also got mired in complexities - including a conflation of asylum seekers and other border-crossers. 

The debate was much more contentious in part because of the front-runner's presence on the stage and the resulting tendency to attack him directly.  Fair enough, but so often the attacks were focused on what Biden did or said in the past - the price one pays, I suppose, for having had a long career. Obviously, all the other candidates need to bring Biden down if they are to advance, but the chronic preoccupation with past positions, past votes, etc., while it may weaken Biden, does little to advance the contemporary conversation, which ultimately needs to be about what the party stands for and offers as an alternative to Trump and his party. Listening to the constant attacks on Biden's past record, I missed Marianne Williamson's interventions!

Also, as with the immigration issue, criticism of Biden became a surrogate for criticism of Obama. How much do the Democrats really want to repudiate the last Democratic President, who is still wildly popular? (They might do better to concentrate their ire on President Trump's policies instead of on Obama's.)

That said, Biden survived to fight another day. So did Cory Booker and Julian Castro. Of the more marginal candidates, I thought Michael Bennett had a good night and Tulsi Gabbard had a particularly strong moment when she confronted Kamala Harris on her record as a prosecutor.

The Great Debates: Round 2 (Act 1)

The great presidential debate circus resumed last night with Round 2, Act 1, featuring "top tier" candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and (depending on your criteria) Mayor Pete Buttigieg, "second tier" candidates" Senator Amy Klobuchar and ex-Congressman Beto O'Rourke, and "third tier" (sometimes known as vanity candidates) Governor Steve Bullock, ex-Congressman John Delaney, ex-Governor John Hickenlooper, Congressman Tim Ryan, and popular author Marianne Williamson. At least, that was how (combining conventional wisdom and my own personal perceptions) I had ranked the three groups prior to the debate. 

For some of those on the debate stage, this may have been their last chance to get enough notice to make a difference in the campaign, since the threshold for getting on stage for the September debates will be significantly higher. Undoubtedly there will still be a good number of candidates in September, but they will be less likely to include those that conventional wisdom, the media, the polls, and the donors have decided are not really to be taken seriously. That said, some of them still may have something to contribute to the national conversation. And, while Marianne Williamson's chances of making it to the Milwaukee convention are next to nil, her voice on the stage stood out with a certain moral force that was far from being an irrelevant distraction.

My first reaction to the debate, watching it in real time, was that it was more substantive and less disorderly than the last one, with all its interruptions and talking over each other. The moderators avoided the simplistic visual soundbite, "raise your hand," routine of the last debate, which was all to the good. And the moderators seemed to be more effective at calling time on the candidates. On the other hand, the chronic journalistic oversimplification of issues in terms of what are in effect Republican party talking-points was again on display with the constant questioning about raising taxes on the middle class in order to provide healthcare for all. In general the candidates rose to the challenge of addressing the substantive issues in spite of such distractions. Even so, the journalistic preoccupation with conflict as entertainment and with trying to forcing real-life complexities into campaign-ad soundbites is obviously deeply ingrained in our media's approach to our politics. 

Of all the issues, health care policy clearly seemed the most contentious. On the substance, there remains a clear divide between - for lack of better categories - the party's left and the party's center (represented on-stage largely by the more minor candidates but offstage by the absent figure of Joe Biden). Still, especially among the major candidates, there seemed more effective commonality than seemed to be the case last time.  

No one had some unique "breakout" moment, but the major candidates did well enough. Sanders and Warren both had very good nights despite the predictability of their answers. The more centrist candidates and the media seem determined to make "Medicare for All" sound scary, and Warren and Sanders did a credible job of rebutting that. In the end, Pete Buttigieg's "Medicare for All Who Want It" sounds like where the party probably ought to land on this issue. (They might sall have done better by emphasizing instead the Trump Administration's attempts to eliminate health care for millions.)All Democrats - and much of the electorate - do want some version of universal health care, but in the end this race is really not about competing health insurance plans. It is about leadership, about who can articulate a serious - and electorally viable - alternative to Trump and his political party, and about how "bold" or "safe" that approach should be.

Senator Klobuchar also had a relatively good night. So did Pete Buttigieg, who managed to avoid getting trapped exclusively in either corner, while highlighting his generational significance, reminding us repeatedly of his status as a veteran, and again being the only candidate to employ explicitly religious language.