American Rust (Finale)

American Rust, Showtime TV's 9-episode adaptation of Philipp Meyer's 2009 novel of the same name, has come to its grim - and unsettled - conclusion. It is a murder mystery, which always from the outset aimed to be something more than that, especially since, as a murder mystery, it suffered from the fact that the likely killer was always fairly obvious, while the victim was utterly unsympathetic.  In some ways, the murder investigation was almost a distraction from the larger, more interesting portrayal of a troubled town in post-industrial decline and the as terribly troubled lives of its characters, who generally seem to manage to make their lives even worse to the extent possible. One reviewer (Zach Handlen) has written: "American Rust likely has a story worth telling, and a setting worth exploring, but this version fails to make much of a case for either." Having stuck with it faithfully for all nine episodes, I can see his point, but I still think the series has more going for it than such reviews are willing to concede.

Set in a dramatically decaying, terminally ill, "rust belt" town in a naturally beautiful, but heavily drug-dependent and socially stressed corner of Pennsylvania, American Rust poignantly illustrates the crises of post-industrial society, both social and cultural (as in widespread family dysfunction) and economic (as in unemployment and underemployment), a left-behind world of lost and unfulfilled lives.

As I observed back in September, American Rust will inevitably be compared to HBO's super-successful Mare of Easttown, which was also set in a similar post-industrial dystopia. This is indeed, as I said then, apparently the right time - socially and politically - for shows of this sort. Mare Sheehan's world, however, while also riddled with substance abuse and family dysfunction, somehow had more social stability, and so, while saddled with similar problems, somehow seemed less hopeless. 

In American Rust's Buell, as in Mare's Easttown, people's relationships, mutual support, and commitment to community managed to mitigate some of the constant trauma, which is why I think it is wrong to fault either series for highlighting such side stories. Even in the middle of a murder investigation (or an opioid epidemic), people remain more than just their problems, and how they cope and how they support one another remains an important part of their story. In this regard, however, the social support systems of family and community are even weaker in Buell than they were in Easttown. Notably, while communal religion remained a real presence in Mare's world - albeit maybe more in the sense of belonging than believing - in Buell religion is effectively absent, even if there are crucifixes in homes and everybody at least seems to have heard of Jesus. The contrast between Buell's empty, apparently abandoned church building and Easttown's well attended church is not insignificant.

The other major social institution at the heart of both stories is law enforcement and the justice system. While both Mare herself and her colleague Colin were at times imperfect law officers, they transcended their personal flaws and ultimately served the ends of justice, however tragic the consequence of pursuing justice all the way turned out to be for both of them. In American Rust's Buell, even the justice system is also a failure (not to mention the only other seemingly stable institution in that community, the local pharmacy). As for repentance, there have been some subtle signs along the way for two of the characters, especially in the later episodes. But in such an unforgiving environment, repentance means self annihilation in one case, and apparent but incomplete absolution in another.

In Mare, the final, shocking revelation of the killer's identity came as a final crushing blow. In American Rust there is no comparable surprise, just a cascade of continuing, numbingly tragic behaviors. So our response is more muted, as we contemplate the multitude of ways the various characters could have avoided some of the harmful outcomes their ill-considered and impulsive actions have led them to. For, along with the destructive socio-economic-cultural context in which they are largely trapped, the characters themselves are trapped in webs of their own spinning because of ill-considered past mistakes and failures to check their own emotional responses.

The characters are well drawn, their sorrows are stirring, but we leave them stuck in the tragedy they were both born into and have all contributed to, leaving them perhaps worse off than when we first found them.

Back to Standard Time

 

Tonight, thankfully, we will set our clocks back - back to Standard Time. Unlike pre-modern people, our modern lives are largely completely detached from the rhythms and cycles of nature and nowhere more obviously so than in our mechanism for keeping time. By definition, time zones are artificial, there being approximately an hour of "natural" time difference between the eastern and western ends of any given time zone. (And I have lived almost all my life near either the eastern or the western end of the time zone I inhabited.)

All that having been said, since obviously we cannot live our modern lives without standardized time (and, therefore, time zones), what is called "Standard Time," to which we will return tonight , remains the closest availably approximation to "natural" time and to the biological rhythms that are part of who we are as human beings.

Rightly or not, Benjamin Franklin is usually credited with coming up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time in 18th-century France. Daylight Saving Time was first widely adopted as a wartime measure during World War I. It reappeared again in World War II, when it was known as "war time." After that, it was adopted in some states and not in others. The system of summer Daylight Saving Time was codified in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Since then, the beginning and end of Daylight Saving Time have been expanded slightly at each end, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Of course, there has never been any clear or convincing evidence that Daylight Saving Time actually does anything to save energy. It is, however, a good symbolic substitute for enacting any concrete policy that might actually do so.

Some states (Hawaii and Arizona) have opted out of Daylight Saving Time and stay on Standard Time all year. The opposite option is not allowed by the law, but there are several states that would like the freedom to have Daylight Saving Time all year. Some individuals experience significant distress due to the semi-annual clock change and require time to readjust biologically and psychologically to the change in time. The frequent occurrence of Election Day just two days after the autumn clock change (except in years like this year when November begins on a Monday) has even been blamed for lower voter turnout!

Daylight Saving Time does not give us an extra hour of daylight, as it is sometimes described as doing. It just reallocates the daylight, giving us darker mornings and brighter evenings - fine for wealthy golfers but terrible for farmers and schoolchildren who have to wait for the bus in dangerously dark streets. Modern society has in so many ways de-linked us from nature and our natural biological rhythms. Daylight Saving Time just makes it worse, a further de-linking of our official, social, civilizational time from natural time.

Daylight Saving Time was invented in an era when humans hoped to leave the constraints of the natural world behind as much as possible. Since then, nature has begun to exact her revenge. The continuity of human civilization now requires renegotiating that relationship in a way which respects natural limits on human hubris. Recalibrating our clocks to be closer to natural time is one very modest and imperfect but still symbolic step in that direction.

 

Granted that the standardization of time is necessary for our modern way of life,  I have never seen any significant advantage to adding the unnecessary additional artificiality of Daylight Saving Time. I pray I may live to see the day when we are never again required to spring forward, thus obviating tonight's corrective of falling back.

Francis' Latter-Day "Ralliement"

Unsurprisingly, Pope Francis' reported comments to President Biden last week have further stirred the pot of politicized polarization. Without pretending to know any more that what everyone else knows about what was allegedly said and what may have been explicitly or implicitly intended, this episode - and the larger context of conflict of which it is a highly charged symbolic part - sent me back 130 years or so to the lasting legacy of the great 19th-century Church-State conflict between the Church and the Third French Republic. It sent me back, more specifically, to the attempt by Pope Leo XIII, perhaps the most politically consequential pope since the Middle Ages, to extricate the Church from an apparently all-or-nothing political impasse. I refer obviously to the papal policy known as the ralliement, most explicitly formulated by Leo XIII in his 1892 encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes.

Adrien Dansette, in his Religious History of Modern France (tr. John Dingle, Herder, 1961), observed that, while in 1890's France "most of the monarchists were Catholics and most of the Catholics were monarchists," there was a diversity of political positions depending on whether one "was simply a Catholic, both a Catholic and a monarchist, more Catholic than monarchist, or more monarchist than Catholic" (vol. 2, p. 75). For Dansette, Pope Leo's policy, in proposing a way out of the conflict between the Church and the French Republic, was also providing a way out of the conflict between the Church and contemporary (late 19th-century) society, "indicating for Catholics a via media between the two extremes of intransigence and liberalism," in the process calling into question "associations of ideas and feelings habitual among Catholics for several decades" (p. 100).

Is Pope Francis following the great Pope Leo in likewise challenging 21st-century American Catholics to revisit "associations of ideas and feelings" that have become habitual among many American Catholics in recent decades, especially since Roe v. Wade (1973) and the political strategies adopted by both sides ever since? 

In 1892, Pope Leo lamented that  the safeguarding of Catholic religious interests was being interpreted in terms of an "ambition of securing to the Church political domination over the State" (Au milieu des sollicitudes, 9). In our present political context, Catholic adherence to the liberal presuppositions of pluralist constitutional governance is once again in contention. 

At issue is not the private or public profession of sectarian religious beliefs (protected in the American constitutional order by the First Amendment) or even the freedom to practice sectarian religious beliefs publicly in society (a right also constitutionally protected, but limited jurisprudentially by other competing rights). Nor is it about whether it is legitimate, by ordinary means of political persuasion accessible to all, to attempt to promote sectarian religious beliefs about morality for implementation in generally applicable civil laws. The latter is certainly legitimate on liberal, pluralist principles. And it has been tried. Thus, for example, the 20th-century secular liberal philosopher and famous author of A Theory of Justice, John Rawls, recognized this possibility of religious advocacy in a way which meets what he called the criteria of "public reason." He explicitly cited Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's argument in The Consistent Ethic: What Sort of Framework? as such an argument, "clearly cast in some form of public reason." (On this, see Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," The University of Chicago Law Review, volume 64, number 3, Summer 1997, especially pp. 798-799.)

As right-wing pundit Rod Dreher has observed in a recent argument against contemporary Catholic Integralism, "Perhaps the best thing about liberalism is that it makes persuasion an ideal." Inevitably that means that not all will be persuaded! Accordingly, one must be willing, as Dreher is, to allow room for a right for some people to be wrong. And, at least since Vatican II, the Church herself at a magisterial level, has seemed to have made its peace with that aspect of our human condition.

Whatever his personal feelings about liberalism's philosophical inadequacies, Dreher remains unwilling to surrender it "in large part because we still live in a highly pluralistic and diverse society" and because "any non-liberal alternative would probably be tyrannical." In response to what he calls "the repugnant fantasy of Catholic integralism," he notes, "if you think that the United States of America - a majority Protestant nation that is rapidly de-Christianizing - is open to a revived throne-and-altar Catholicism, you're deluded." 

All those observations are - or ought to be - obvious. If the prospects for intransigent monarchist Catholic integralism in 1990s France were poor at best and warranted the response of a papal ralliement, how much more evident is the need for such a ralliement against intransigent, anti-liberal, anti-pluralist integralism in the United States today and a corresponding rediscovery of a politics of persuasion and mutual respect?

(Photo: Pope Francis and U.S. President Joe Biden, Catholic News Agency, October 29, 2021)

Magister Episcoporum

Pope Saint John XXIII's decision in January 1959, shortly after his election as pope, to convoke an ecumenical council came as a complete surprise to most people (including to me as a 10-year old Catholic school student who until then had hardly even heard of an ecumenical council). But John's action was rooted in his lifelong interest in history, especially the history of the Council of Trent and its implementation in northern Italy by the great Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-1584), who became Archbishop of Milan in 1564, and whose feast is commemorated in the Church's calendar today. 

As a young priest in the early years of the 20th century, Angelo Roncalli served as secretary to the Bishop of Bergamo, taught Church History in the diocesan seminary, and researched the records of the canonical visitation Borromeo had conducted in Bergamo in 1575 as part of the general religious renewal inspired by the Council of Trent, which after several fits and starts had finally finished in 1563. It was, Roncalli wrote, "a time of potent reawakening of energies which has no equal in any other period of church history." He particularly admired the preeminent part played by Saint Charles Borromeo in implementing Trent's reforms. Elected Pope at the end of October 1958, Roncalli was happy to schedule his coronation for November 4, Borromeo's feast day, and devoted three paragraphs of his coronation Mass homily to Saint Charles. Although Boromeo's body is buried (where one would expect) in the crypt of the Duomo in Milan, his heart is kept in a reliquary (photo from my time in Rome in 2012)) in the church of San Carlo al Corso in Rome (near the Spanish Steps), where Pope Saint John XXIII went to venerate it in 1962 in preparation for the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

Thanks to such towering 16th-century Churchmen as Saint Charles Borromeo, the Council of Trent's reforms had had an especially strong impact in Pope John's native region and so served for Pope John as a model what the Church needed in the mid-20th century.

(At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTmHIguIKBw one can access the 25 videos recording most of the John XXIII's November 4, 1958, Coronation Mass - minus the homily, however.)

This Off-Off-Year Election

 

Yesterday was Election Day. Here in New York City, we elected a new Mayor and City Council and approved various amendments to the New York State Constitution. Of course, as is usually the case in any one-party town, it is really the party primary that matters; and so, as expected, what we call the General Election just confirmed the expected outcome. To no one's surprise, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams sailed to an easy victory over a relatively ridiculous and insignificant Republican opposition.

Thanks to our over obsession with the presidency, we have long curiously referred to the "midterm" elections in even-numbered years - when the entire house, one-third of the Senate, and many state governors and state legislatures are on the ballot - as "off-year" elections. By that analogy, this year's elections can be called "off-off-year elections" (as in "off-off-Broadway"). Yet, however many times "off" they may be, their importance ought not to be discounted.

The back-and-forth character of American politics and the perennial paralysis that prevents prompt government action have historically turned these off- and off-off-year contests into opportunities for backlash against the party in power in Washington. I am old enough to remember, for example, the great Democratic landslide of 1964, followed by the Republican counter landslide in 1966. History does not predetermine, but it does illuminate recurrent patterns in American politics.

The race that got the most pre-election attention this year, of course, was the Virginia Gubernatorial race. Virginia, like New Jersey, makes a point of choosing its governors in the year after the presidential election. This frees those races from any presidential "coattail" effects but also gives them an outsize significance even beyond the borders of those states. 

And such was certainly the case this year with the decisive Republican victory in Virginia. Time and tranquility will inspire more profound analysis. My first, early-morning reflections suggest a few factors that should be highlighted.

First, on the Republican side, the candidate, Private Equity capitalist Glenn Youngkin, was more like a conventional Republican. He won the nomination. in a somewhat contrived "unassembled convention," rather than in a typical party primary. In a typical party primary, I suspect a more "Trump-like" figure would likely have won. But Youngkin, although he checked all the requisite Trump boxes, was not such a candidate and so was capable of winning back those - especially suburban women voters - who had been turned off by Trump in 2020, while still holding on to the enthusiastic Trump base. He highlights just how formidable such a conventional Republican candidate can be, but also how hard it would be to surface such candidates i ordinary Republican primaries.

On the Democratic side, Terry McAuliffe lost probably for several reasons. If voters are now always angry and all elections are now "change elections," perhaps a fresh face would have serve the Democrats better than a familiar former governor. In any case, he clearly failed to respond to the Republican candidate's effective emphasis on schools and education policy.  Of course, "critical race theory," as such, is not taught in elementary schools, but that vague label has come to reflect a more generalized cultural concern that McAuliffe failed to respond adequately to. This highlights a broader weakness at the heart of the contemporary Democratic party. It is evident that while Democrats often advocate for some very popular policies (e.g., health care, child tax-credits, etc.), voters increasingly vote on moral and cultural questions, which highlight the gap between the party's small (but very loud) white liberal, "woke,' progressive minority and the rest of the country. Thus, probably the turning point - certainly a turning point - in the campaign was when McAuliffe made his now famous, amazingly ridiculous comment that parents should not "be telling schools what they should teach."

It is also at least marginally possible that the very conspicuous failure of the Biden Administration and the Democrats in Congress to accomplish anything contributed to McAuliffe's defeat. Admittedly, that may have been inevitable, given the very small Democratic majority in Congress and the obstructionism of Senators Manchin and Sinema, but voters generally don't care about such things, especially when the party in power so extremely over-promise. All this highlights the general "backlash" pattern, exacerbated by the depressed Democratic enthusiasm (a perennial problem for a party overly obsessed with the presidency and with short-term symbolic victories rather than the long-term work of building party power at all levels of government).

It remains to be seen what other factors may have played a part, for example, increasing anxieties about inflation and generalized covid fatigue.  All in all, however, this may prove a salutary wake-up call for the Democrats as they head into the much more important midterm "off-year" election of 2022.